Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa by Rita Kesselring

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa by Rita Kesselring Nicholas Rush Smith Rita Kesselring, Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. 272 pp. By now, much has been written about the politics of apartheid victimhood and particularly South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)—a multi-year series of public hearings into political crimes committed under apartheid. Scholars have written on such varied topics as the public performances of the TRC (Cole 2010) and the bureaucratic work going on behind the scenes (Buur 2002). Scholars have praised the TRC for allowing reconciliation without requiring punishment (Asmal, Asmal, and Roberts 1997) and, conversely, criticized it for forestalling justice by granting amnesty in exchange for confession (Sitze 2013). Scholars have studied the multiple forms of individual confession and storytelling performed during hearings (Posel 2008), while others have decried the focus on individuals as detracting from the collective nature of apartheid's injustices (Mamdani 2002). With such varied work having been done on the country's reckoning with apartheid's crimes through the TRC, what more is there to say? Quite a bit if one reads Rita Kesselring's excellent updating on the politics of apartheid victimhood, Bodies of Truth. One key difference between Kesselring's book and previous work on apartheid victimhood is the empirical focus. Where other work predominantly looks at the institution of the TRC, Kesselring looks at a social movement of apartheid victims that first emerged in response to the TRC process. The Khulumani Support Group, a grassroots (though increasingly professionalized) victim advocacy group, forms the main basis for this study. This lens allows Kesselring to open a novel space through which to understand the relationship between apartheid and victimization. [End Page 841] Where the TRC promoted a view of apartheid victimhood predicated on direct injury by the regime or one of the country's liberation movements, Kesselring shows, via engagement with Khulumani, how the focus on direct injury excludes other forms of victimhood, like the structural violence that apartheid's inequality produced for most of the country's population. The violence of this lingering inequality, Kesselring shows, can also have injurious effects on the body, as economic deprivation can force people into forms of labor that strain the limbs and harm the soul. Apartheid's injuries, therefore, are not only individual; they are also social. The question of the body and victimhood are not only questions for how to understand the after effects of apartheid, though. They shed general light on the globally increasing turn to law by victims of state violence seeking redress for past injuries. Where some scholars writing of this trend have argued that such lawfare may entrench victimization as one's primary subject position, Kesselring argues the opposite. For her, pursuing legal remedies does not produce subjection to a legal discourse. Rather, "it is the consequence of people's attempt to emancipate themselves from a discourse—under conditions in which the law is a more promising avenue than politics" (2). Nonetheless, legal remedies are only partial solutions to victimhood as "embodied experiences of harm are not (and cannot be) completely absorbed by legal discourse" (2). The mismatch between legal processes and the experience of bodily injury can create challenges for redressing the effects of collective injuries legally. However, it also offers opportunities for victims, like Khulumani members, to experiment with new forms of sociality and political claim making by lodging legal cases, launching protests, and relying on one another for emotional support. To make these arguments, Kesselring's first three empirical chapters look at the jurisprudence in South African and American courts that have taken up victimization since the end of apartheid and how legal procedure might work against the formation of collective, political notions of victimhood. The first of these chapters (Chapter 1) lays out the background of the Khulumani Support Group. Although it started as a small group of apartheid victims, today it claims roughly 104,000 members. The Khulumani membership, it should be noted, dwarfs the 21,000 people who applied for reparations from the TRC victims fund. Part of the difference...