The Impossible Machine: A Genealogy of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Introduction

/ 1 / Introduction I. Whatever else it has accomplished, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has succeeded in eluding the scholarship that has attempted to take it as an object of knowledge. Perhaps because of its unusual mix of public testimony, psychotherapy, political theology, and juridical procedure, which for some endowed it with an intrinsically elusive “hybrid” quality—­ or perhaps, as this book shall argue, for another set of reasons altogether—­ the TRC has baffled description to the same degree that it has invited fascination.“We are still groping for the language to adequately assess the significance of the TRC,” acknowledged Wilhelm Verwoerd in 2000.1 Wendy Orr, one of eighteen commissioners to serve on the TRC, noted a related phenomenon: “TRC members developed their own discourse and language.”2 Search for a language, invention of a language—­ signs,each,of a subtle dynamic that has not yet emerged as a central concern for scholarship on the TRC but that is nevertheless indispensable for our understanding of the thing itself. In 1998, the thrust and shape of this dynamic were captured perfectly by a political cartoon that appeared in the South African weekly the Mail & Guardian.3 Construing the TRC as a Rube Goldberg monstrosity, an ornate apparatus that somehow manages to inhale demons and exhale angels, the image also referred to something else: the difficulty of referring to the TRC itself. By coupling a busy cadre of pixies, goblins, elves, and genies who operate this transitional mechanism with a sign that confidently designates it (using an arrow for added emphasis) a “Truth Commission Thingummy,” Dr. Jack’s image condensed with brilliant concision the double disconnect that confronted scholars who found themselves intrigued by the TRC at 2 / The Impossible Machine that time. Encountering, on the one hand, a device whose inner mechanisms remained inscrutable, and, on the other, a name that did not exactly fit the thing it proposed to designate, early scholarship on the TRC tended to pose and answer questions of two general sorts: How on earth does this thing work? And what in the world should we call this thing? Since the first studies of the TRC began to appear over a decade ago, a single scholarly field has come to dominate the global debate over these questions.Transitional justice, a field that was born in the early 1990s, seeks to produce theories and practices that will help to restore the rule of law, to do justice to victims of state violence, and to bring to an end“cultures of impunity”in countries where young democracies are striving to emerge after years of rule by authoritarian regimes. For some readers, this field’s monopoly on the study of the TRC today will be self-­evident, even unquestionable. It is perfectly obvious, these readers will want to assume, that anyone who now desires to study the TRC will want not only first to immerse him-­or herself in existing transitional justice scholarship, but also thereafter to rely upon this field’s lexicon and basic concepts, its historical self-­ understanding and paradigmatic antitheses, its existing institutions and prevailing methodologies . Other readers perhaps will be less afflicted by certainty on this point. These readers will have noticed a sense of creeping doubt within transitional justice about the sufficiency and consistency of the field’s empirical and historical descriptions, on the one hand, and its ethical and therapeutic prescriptions, on the other.4 For these readers, there still may be something about the TRC that eludes transitional justice, and part of the reason to continue studying the TRC will be to enhance the field’s existing terms and concepts, to refine its histories and paradigms, and to circulate these improvements within its many institutions. Still other readers, meanwhile, will have even more serious misgivings about the field. These readers may have been persuaded by scholars who criticize transitional justice from the exterior—­ without subscribing to its discourse or entering into its horizon of self-­ understanding—­ in order to call the very premises of the field into question. For these scholars, the dominance of transitional justice—­ this “reconciliation industry” composed of “transitional justice entrepre­ neurs”5 —­ is worse than insufficient for understanding the TRC; it is downright obstructive. For these scholars, the language of transitional justice not only functions to stifle the emancipatory politics that the TRC was designed to serve; worse, it’s also a new name for the old colonial theory and practice Introduction / 3 of “trusteeship,” of...