Assessing South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Abstract

After the TRC and The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa are two significant contributions to the growing number of recently-published books about South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. They represent a refreshing counterbalance to the many excessively laudatory accounts about the TRC, some from former commissioners, including its chair Desmond Tutu whose book, No Future Without Forgiveness (1999), is probably the best known of these insider memoirs. After the TRC, edited by Wilmot James and Linda van de Vijver is based on a conference of the same name held in Cape Town in August 1999. Many of the papers presented there find their way into this volume with the addition of essays by Heribert Adam, Kanya Adam, Patricia Valdez, Mahmood Mamdani, Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, Ciraj Rassool, Leslie Witz, Gary Minkley, Linda van de Vijver, Jeffrey Lever, Colin Bundy, and Wilmot James. An edited book with submissions from a wide array of individuals legal experts, sociologists, historians, theologians, political scientists, and economists it questions the generally accepted view (at least outside of South Africa) of the TRC as wildly successful and offers instead a more critical, nuanced assessment.