Book Review: Spectres of Reparation in South Africa: Re-encountering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Spectres of Reparation in South Africa: Re-encountering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission By Barnard-NaudéJaco. London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2024. 244pp. $43.99 (paperback). ISBN: 9781032268651

Book Review| January 01 2007 The Elusive Pursuit of Truth and Justice: A Review Essay; History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa; Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa; Shattered Voices: Language, Violence, and the Work of Truth Commissions; Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth Commission in South Africa.; Truth Commissions and Courts: The Tension between Criminal Justice and the Search for Truth; The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-apartheid State Annie E. Coombes, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa. New York: Three Rivers, 2000.Teresa Godwin Phelps, Shattered Voices: Language, Violence, and the Work of Truth Commissions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.Deborah Posel and Graeme Simpson, eds., Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2002.Fiona C. Ross, Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth Commission in South Africa. London: Pluto, 2003.William A. Schabas and Shane Darcy, eds., Truth Commissions and Courts: The Tension between Criminal Justice and the Search for Truth. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic, 2004.Richard A. Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-apartheid State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Mary Nolan Mary Nolan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (2007) 2007 (97): 143–154. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2006-020 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mary Nolan; The Elusive Pursuit of Truth and Justice: A Review Essay; History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa; Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa; Shattered Voices: Language, Violence, and the Work of Truth Commissions; Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth Commission in South Africa.; Truth Commissions and Courts: The Tension between Criminal Justice and the Search for Truth; The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-apartheid State. Radical History Review 1 January 2007; 2007 (97): 143–154. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2006-020 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsRadical History Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. MARHO: The Radical Historians' Organization, Inc.2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: (RE)VIEWS You do not currently have access to this content.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes My thanks to several hosts for occasions between 2001 and 2003 when I presented papers on the TRC and gender: at the University of Adelaide Department of English and the Adelaide Research Centre for the Humanities and Social Sciences; the University of Leeds Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History; the University of Chicago African History Seminar Series; and the University of Tulsa Departments of English and of Gender Studies. My grateful acknowledgement also to the National Research Foundation and the University of Cape Town Travel Grants Committee for facilitating the visit to the University of Leeds. Ubuntu is defined as ‘humanity, goodness; … Human-heartedness; compassion; the qualities embodying the values and virtues of essential humanity, or of Africanness’, see A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles (Oxford University Press, in association with the Dictionary Unit for South African English) Oxford, 1996. See also John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (Heinemann) London, 1969, p. 108; Mark Sanders, Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (Duke University Press) Durham, NC and London, 2002, p. 124; Mark Sanders, ‘Reading Lessons’, Diacritics, vol. 29, no. 3, 1999, pp. 3–30. I use here the formulation translated from the Xhosa by Noni Jabavu, The Ochre People (1963) (Ravan Press) Johannesburg, 1982, p. 69. See also Ellen Kuzwayo, Sit Down and Listen: Stories from South Africa (The Women's Press) London, 1990, p. 122, for the saying in six indigenous South African languages; and Ellen Kuzwayo, ‘“My Life is My Neighbours”’, Monitor: the Journal of the Human Rights Trust, special issue on Human Rights in South Africa, 1988, p. 133. See Nomfundo Walaza, quoted in Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull (Random House) Johannesburg, 1998, p. 213; and Kuzwayo's Sit Down and Listen, pp. 121, 122. Sanders, Complicities, p. 119. In 1991, then Bishop, later Archbishop, Desmond Tutu said: ‘It seems to me that we in the black community have lost our sense of ubuntu—our humanness, caring, hospitality, our sense of connectedness, our sense that my humanity is bound up in your humanity.’ Sunday Times, 26 May 1991, p. 2. Krog (the importance of whose autobiographical account of being a reporter on the TRC cannot be underestimated) also speaks of Tutu's Africanisation of the concept of reconciliation as a practical ethics, not as ‘far removed from the world’ as the Western Christian concept of forgiveness may sometimes seem. For Tutu, says Krog, ‘hatred and revenge [ … ] dehumanise not only yourself, but your community’, Country of My Skull, p. 143. In his Xhosa novel Ityala Lamawele (1914), Krune Mqhayi shows the mother of the homestead opening the homestead to people in need and teaching the young girls that ‘womanhood means looking after and caring for even those unknown strangers’; quoted in his own translation by Peter Mtuze in his ‘A Feminist Critique of the Image of Woman in the Prose Works of Selected Xhosa Writers (1909–1980)’, PhD, University of Cape Town, 1990, p. 31. In the same novel, men who lack ubuntu are considered not sufficiently morally elevated to be marriageable: girls choose between male twins, one of whom shows ‘concern for the welfare of the people of this homestead; is generous to its daughters and to strangers and looks after its livestock’, while the other twin ‘roams about and attends dancing sprees all over the country’, p. 30. Cynthia Ngewu, one of the Guguletu Seven, said: ‘This thing called reconciliation … if I am understanding it correctly … if it means this perpetrator, this man who has killed Christopher Piet [her son], if it means he becomes human again, this man, so that I, so that all of us, get our humanity back … then I agree, then I support it all’, ellipses in original, quoted in Krog, Country of My Skull, p. 142. It is also worth remarking that as a cleric Tutu performed, let's say, as a man in a frock. Note also that Krog's chapter ‘Truth is a Woman’ refers to the special consideration women give to others, ‘this story of the power of women to care, endlessly’, Country of My Skull, p. 245. See Sanders, ‘Ambiguities of Mourning: Law, Custom, Literature and Women before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, Law Text Culture, vol. 4, no. 2, 1988, pp. 105–51. Sanders, Complicities, p. 125. Thomas Mofolo's Sotho novel Chaka (1931), for instance, portrays women exhorting men to battle and forewarning against cowardice: ‘True men are gone, we remain with strange beings, / We remain with men-like beings who are not men!’, Daniel Kunene (trans.) (Heinemann Educational Books), London, 1981, p. 19. Moreover, a female doctor medicates Chaka so as to turn him into ‘a fierce person’, p. 14. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Choreographies’ in Peggy Kamuf (ed.), A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (Oxford University Press) New York and Oxford, 1991, pp. 441–56, where he speaks of the feminine as an escape from phallogocentrism, whereas ‘woman’ inhabits a gendered economy. Fiona Ross, ‘Existing in Secret Places: Woman's Testimony in the First Five Weeks of Public Hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, seminar paper, Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town. See also Beth Goldblatt and Sheila Meintjes, ‘South African Women Demand the Truth’ in Meredeth Turshen and Clotilde Twagiramariya (eds), What Women Do in Wartime: Gender and Conflict in Africa (Zed Books) London and New York, 1998, pp. 27–61; Ilse Olckers, ‘Gender-neutral Truth?: a Reality Shamefully Distorted’, Agenda, no. 31, 1996, pp. 61–7; Fiona C. Ross, Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (Pluto Press) London, 2003; Sanders, ‘Ambiguities of Mourning’; Sanders, Complicities, pp. 197–211; Annalet van Schalkwyk, ‘A Gendered Truth: Women's Testimonies at the TRC and Reconciliation’, Missionalia, vol. 27, no. 2 (1999), pp. 165–88; Lyn Graybill, Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Miracle or Model? (Lynne Rienner) Boulder and London, 2002, pp. 97–112. Goldblatt and Meintjes, ‘South African Women’, p. 29. Their submission was presented as ‘Gender and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: a Submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, May 1996, <www.truth.org.za/submit/gender.htm>. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, 7 vols (Juta) Cape Town, 1998–2003, vol. 4, p. 283: ‘Don't forget to tell us what happened to you yourself if you were the victim of a gross human rights abuse.’ Ross, Bearing Witness, pp. 93, 42, 46–7, 25, et passim. Ross, Bearing Witness, p. 50; Graybill, Truth and Reconciliation, pp. 105–6. Sanders, Complicities, p. 200. Olive Schreiner, Dreams (1890) (Wildwood House) London, 1982, p. 49. Goldblatt and Meintjes, ‘South African Women’, pp. 48–52. For other reasons see Graybill, Truth and Reconciliation, pp. 103–6; Krog, Country of My Skull, pp. 238–40; and Ross, Bearing Witness, passim. The relation between the ‘individual’ and the ‘systematic’ in Mtintso's argument is precisely what is at stake in my own thinking: only by bringing the former into the latter, as occurs through following the philosophical moves of ubuntu, can a gendered social analysis occur. Maxeke, quoted in Ellen Kuzwayo, Call Me Woman (The Women's Press) London, 1985, p. 103. Kuzwayo, Call Me Woman, p. 103. The paragraph that follows has its basis in several paragraphs from an earlier essay, ‘M'a-Ngoana o tsoare thipa ka bohaleng (the child's mother grabs the sharp end of the knife): Women as Mothers, Women as Writers’ in Martin Trump (ed.), Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture of the 1970s and 1980s (Ravan Press) Johannesburg, 1990, pp. 230–3. Emma Mashinini, Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life: a South African Autobiography (The Women's Press) London, 1989, pp. 91–5. Mashinini feels lacking in her relation with those around her in Denmark (white medical personnel, and male torture victims from other countries who have been so ‘derailed’ in prison that they could not get along with their families, p. 91), measures herself through her relations with her family as well as with the community back home, whose rejection of her would be like dying ‘twice over’ (p. 94), and takes pride in her inability to follow her Danish doctor's advice, ‘Live for yourself’ (p. 95). Key moments in Mashinini's Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life are as follows: her husband's acceptance of her political activity (p. 26) and the unusualness of her equality with male activists (p. 33); her embrace of white activists (pp. 80, 105, for example) and her disgust with the treacherous black journalist (p. 92); her love of ‘beautiful things’, such as crystal glass and her BMW (p. 98), and, throughout the book, the easy and unapologetic movement between her maternal life and her work as a trade union leader. Sanders, ‘Reading Lessons’, p. 11, citing Stanley Friesen, Missionary Responses to Tribal Religions at Edinburgh, 1910 (Peter Lang) New York, 1996, 124ff. See Margaret Daymond, Dorothy Driver, Sheila Meintjes, Leloba Molema, Chiedza Musengezi, Margie Orford and Nobantu Rasebotsa (eds), Women Writing Africa: the Southern Region (Feminist Press/University of Witwatersrand Press) New York/Johannesburg, 2003, pp. 1–82. On the one hand, conforming to the Black Consciousness (BC) demand that black women not threaten black solidarity but also—presumably—dissociating herself from the feminist-individualist terms associated with a white South African feminism, Christine Qunta proclaimed: ‘I take the view that we are Africans before we are women’, Tribute, August 1990, p. 44. On the other hand, motherhood slips smoothly into the realm of the communal in the manifesto of the BC Black Women's Federation, formed in 1975, which speaks of black women's efforts ‘to present a united front’ and ‘to redirect the status of motherhood towards the fulfilment of the Black people's social, cultural, economic and political aspirations’. Asha Rambally (ed.), Black Review 1975–1976 (Black Community Programmes) Durban, 1977, p. 109. Ross, Bearing Witness, pp. 25, 64–5, passim. Jacques Derrida, ‘On Forgiveness’ in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (trans.) (Routledge) London and New York, 2001, p. 60. A few men did nonetheless present their stories at the Women's Hearings, and are excluded from the TRC Report. In Country of My Skull, Antjie Krog takes care to include the testimonies of men who suffered genital torture (one, for example, speaks of the ensuing sexual impotence, p. 183), and she provocatively opens her chapter detailing the sexual abuses against women (chapter 16, ‘Truth is a Woman’) with the testimony of Alwinus Mhlatsi, who presents himself in the vulnerable position associated with women, pp. 233–5. Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, vol. 1, p. 53. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Routledge) London and New York, 1994, pp. 65, 43. Ubuntu is a (non-examinable) school subject in high schools in Kwa-Zulu Natal. Dubbed the ‘Inkatha’ subject, it teaches Zulu nationalism, and is a subject ‘devoted to the values and philosophies of the organisation’. M. Kentridge, Unofficial War (1990), p. 104, qtd Dictionary of South African English. The word is prevalent in tokenist business organisations and facile talk about economic equality. Derrida refers to hospitality as an opening up to the absolute stranger, the stranger being the one ‘who puts me in question’; see Sanders, ‘Ambiguities’, p. 34. Derrida also speaks in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness of the madness of forgiveness as a forgiving of the unforgivable, and of the difference between forgiveness and the ordinary ‘economic’ transactions of reconciliation, pp. 32, 49, for example. Yet both seem necessary, in his thinking, as some sort of guide or check to the other. Using this logic, and recalling also Derrida's statements in ‘Choreographies’ about the undecidability of sexual difference, in a process of reconciliation properly informed by ubuntu the alterity of masculinity and femininity to each other would thus be held in constant tension with any exchange of experience, exchange of understanding. See Lisa S. Price, ‘Finding the Man in the Soldier-rapist: Some Reflections on Comprehension and Accountability’, Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 24, no. 2, 2001, pp. 221–7. Sanders, Complicities; Carolyn Burdett, Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism: Evolution, Gender, Empire (Palgrave Macmillan) London, 2001; and Graham Pechey, ‘Olive Schreiner, the Short Story and Grand History’, Critical Survey, vol. 11, no. 2, 1999, pp. 4–17.

Considering the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the criticisms levelled against it, and the literary response it has evoked in terms of a struggle over definitions of trauma and recovery can help the debate over the perceived monocultural bias of trauma theory in its ‘classical’, mid-1990s formulation and the fraught relationship between such tendencies and the commitment to social justice on which the field prides itself. Insofar as the TRC mapped Euro-American concepts of trauma and recovery onto an apartheid-colonial situation, it was subject to the same problems and limitations faced by trauma theory—problems and limitations which post-apartheid literature has not been slow to confront. Sindiwe Magona’s truth-and-reconciliation novel Mother to Mother, for example, can be seen to supplement the work of the TRC by critically revisiting its limits, exclusions, and elisions—and thus also to suggest a possible way for ‘traditional’ trauma theory to reinvent and renew itself.

Truth and Reconciliation

Deborah Posel and Graeme Simpson, eds. Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2002. Notes. Index. 256 pp. No price reported. Paper. Lyn S. Graybill. Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Miracle or Model? Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2002. 231 pp. Chronology. Glossary. Acronyms. Bibliography. Index. $49.95. Cloth. $19.95. Paper. Since coming into existence in 1995, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has given rise to a large number of publications. Consequently, it has become more and more difficult to say anything new about it. Understandably, then, these two publications do not really provide much new information. In any case, Commissioning the Past is based on papers given at a 1999 conference aimed at evaluating the TRC; the ideas expressed at this conference might have been innovative at that time, but they are not anymore. Nevertheless, although occasionally repetitive, the essays in this collection do offer a fresh approach to the TRC, first because the authors look at the commission from the point of view of individuals, and second because they clearly emphasize the personal aspects of the process as well. The book consists of eleven chapters by a variety of authors. After a critical introduction about the aspect of the commission, part 1 contains three essays that give insider accounts of the TRC. All three are fairly negative about the problems encountered in its daily activities. There was a conflict between the historical analysis approach of the TRC Research Department and the positivist approach of the lawyers; the time pressure for the researchers was too tight and the TRC report failed to cover the atrocities committed outside South Africa or in the rural areas; the decisions made by the Amnesty Committee were often inconsistent and contradictory and even the in-depth investigations of the Investigation Unit did not dig deep enough; the stories of the victims were standardized and reframed in too positivist a way; and there was not enough cooperation between the different committees. The authors of these pieces are very harsh in their criticism, but they agree that, in spite of everything, the TRC was a great achievement with many positive features. The second part of the book is devoted to the stories of three victims. The authors of these chapters quote at length from the victims' testimonies and discuss the expectations and perceptions of the victims about the TRC process. The victims in question are rather disappointed about the TRC because it brought neither the truth nor the justice they had desired. In part 3 of the collection, four outsider assessments are presented. The first three are rather negative, claiming that the TRC did not really explain apartheid, that it did not pay attention to the social aspects of the past conflict, and that it was not effective on a personal and local level. The book ends, however, with a positive contribution about the TRC process. Emphasizing the advantages of restorative justice, the author argues that a truth commission is a good way of dealing with the past in a period of transition. All of the chapters in this book are individual reflections on the TRC process, mostly by people who were directly involved. Thus, although the collection does not offer a lot of new insights into the TRC, the concrete case studies and testimonies from TRC participants do reframe existing knowledge in a more personal and less theoretical way. If most of the articles are critical, the reader nonetheless comes to the end of the book admiring the TRC process, even while acknowledging its shortcomings. Lyn Graybill does not give us substantial new information about the TRC either. Instead, she provides a comprehensive overview of the available knowledge about the commission. …

INTRODUCTION In the 21st century, it is commonly accepted that states have a legal and normative obligation to provide the truth about histories of violence and repression; truth commissions are Often suggested as a means of fulfilling this obligation. Truth commissions came to prominence as a result of their use as part of transitions from military rule to democracy in Latin America and from apartheid to inclusive democracy in South Africa. The global attention paid to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), in particular, popularised this form of transitional justice. The truth commission model gained favour at least in part because it appealed to a variety of audiences. For perpetrators and those who feared that criminal accountability would be destabilising, truth commissions were less threatening. For many victims and activists, by contrast, truth commissions represented some measure of justice. As such, truth commissions seemed to provide a useful compromise, addressing past abuses in some fashion during attempted democratic transitions. In fact, in the wake of the South African TRC, truth commissions came to be seen by many as valuable in their own right, in that they could provide a valuable contribution to social and psychological repair, as well as the (re)construction of more democratic political institutions after political transitions. As the truth commission model gained greater visibility and more adherents, it has also been increasingly utilised in a variety of other contexts. First, truth commissions have been employed in war-to-peace transitions. Even further, the model has sometimes been applied to contexts where little to no real political change has occurred at all. This chapter distinguishes three non-transitional contexts in which truth commissions have been employed with growing frequency. First, truth commissions are sometimes created by governments after they have decisively defeated an armed threat. Second, firmly entrenched authoritarian regimes have sometimes created truth commissions to achieve policy goals. Finally, truth commissions have sometimes been set up in wellestablished democracies in order to address historical wrongs that occurred in previous generations. One may quibble about whether these different types of investigative commissions belong in the same category. However, Often in policy and academic debates, these types of investigations are lumped together for the purposes of theory building and hypothesis testing.

Currently winding down its work of hearing testimony to human rights abuses of the apartheid era, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is an ambitious undertaking. A counterpart to the Reconstruction and Development Programme, a long-term scheme for the creation of housing, infrastructure and jobs, the Truth Commission is part of a vast effort at nation-building in post-apartheid South Africa. By asking South Africans to remember, the Truth Commission seeks to come to terms, not only with the crimes of the apartheid era, but with a 350-year history of white domination. In the words of Justice Richard Goldstone, former UN Chief Prosecutor for War Crimes Tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, (One of the most important advantages of the TRC [is] that it w[ill] write the past forever into South Africa's history' (Pretoria News August 18 1997). The Truth Commission aims at what no program of reconstruction and development could achieve by material means alone. In the minds of its proponents, it aims at nothing less than the 'deans[ing], and 'moral and cultural reconstruction' of a society (Chikane 1995: 99, Sachs 1995: 106). It has as its goal the 'healing of a nation' socially and psychically sundered into fragments by apartheid (see Boraine and Levy 1995).

In a conversation near the end of Country of My Skull, the Afrikaans poet Antjie Krog's book on South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Krog's interlocutor, an academic who has been reading to her from a book of twentieth-century German verse, explains to her that "[a]fter the Second World War it was said in Germany: it is barbaric to write a poem after Auschwitz." Without linking the dictum to Theodor Adorno, who is well known as its author, the academic relates to her how Paul Celan, having found his poem "Fugue of Death" "too lyrical" and "too beautiful," asked that it be left out of future editions of anthologies which had included it (237/312). This was, it is supposed, his response to Adorno's polemical proscription. 2 For Krog, as a poet, the [End Page 13] conversation provokes the question of whether it is not barbaric to write poems after apartheid: "That is why I say maybe writers in South Africa should shut up for a while. That one has no right to appropriate a story paid for with a lifetime of pain and destruction. Words come more easily for writers, perhaps. So let the domain rather belong to those who literally paid blood for every faltering word they utter before the Truth Commission" (237-38/312). Krog's interlocutor meets her proposition with the question: "Are you saying this because you yourself can't find a form for dealing with your past?" This, he tells her, was the failure of German writers after World War II. "No," she replies, "I often write pieces down from memory, and when I check the original tape it is always, but always much better than my own effort" (238/312). Their conversation traverses the terrain between an impulse to leave the domain of words and utterance to those who testified before the Truth Commission, and the possibility of finding form, as a writer, specifically as a poet, for a collective memory in which she herself is implicated. Then it departs in another direction. When the poet doubts her ability to lend form to the testimony she recalls, yet wishes to let the domain of telling belong to the witnesses, whose efforts always outdo hers, she must find a way, other than memorial reconstruction, of being host to their words. As formulated by Krog, the question of poetry, or literature, after apartheid concerns less an excess of lyricism or beauty, from which its creator stands back, than a writer's facilitation of the utterance of others. If the question of literature after apartheid is a question of advocacy, of its dynamics and its ethics, then the Commission shares a set of concerns and conditions of possibility with literary works. In interpreting its public hearings as occasions for advocacy, the Commission reveals that the structures of identification and substitution, on which it relies when it solicits the testimony of victims, are as integral to its own operations as they are to a literary work. Krog's book makes itself host to testimony in ways which allow us to understand how this is the case, and how even lyric poetry, in a sense ignored by the Adornian proscription, is able to display this joint partaking.

The Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (GTRC)—the first truth and reconciliation commission ever funded and seated in the United States—was formed in 2000 in response to a Ku Klux Klan shooting of labor activists that occurred in 1979 in Greensboro, North Carolina. Despite overwhelming video and photographic evidence of the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party firing weapons into a crowd and killing five people, no one was ever held criminally liable for the deaths of the activists. In 1999 local community organizers began advocating for a truth and reconciliation process modeled after truth commissions in South Africa and Peru. In a broadly conceived qualitative approach that utilizes open-ended interviews and archival research, this project explores the truth process in Greensboro, focusing on the ways in which community members address legacies and memories of violence through reconciliation and grassroots politics. The research exposes the connections between the memory of violence and territoriality to wider academic scrutiny, examines the legacies of violence and race in North America, and contributes to larger discussions surrounding the impact that violence and race have in North American communities.

Acknowledgments vii I. Commissions and the Provision of Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation by Robert I. Rotbtrg 3 II. The Moral Foundations of Commissions by Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson 22 III. Restoring Decency to Barbaric Societies by Rajeev Bhargava 45 IV Moral Ambition Within and Beyond Political Constraints: Reflections on Restorative Justice by Elizabeth Kiss 68 V Commissions, Transitional Justice, and Civil Society by David A Crockcr 99 VI. The Moral Foundations of the South African TRC: as Acknowledgment and Justice as Recognition by Andre du Toit 122 VII. and Reconciliation in South Africa: The Third Way by Alex Boraine 141 VIII. The Uses of Commissions: Lessons for the World by Dumisa B. Ntsebexa 158 IX. Amnesty, Truth, and Reconciliation: Reflections on the South African Amnesty Process by Ronald C. Slye 170 X. Amnesty's Justice by Kent Greenawalt 189 XI. Trials, Commissions, and Investigating Committees: The Elusive Search for Norms of Due Process by Sanford Levinson 211 XII. The Hope for Healing: What Can Commissions Do? by Martha Minow 235 XIII. Doing History, Doing Justice: The Narrative of the Historian and of the Commission by Charles S. Mater 261 XIV Constructing a Report: Writing Up the Truth by Charles Villa-Yicencio and Wilhelm Yerwoerd 279 The Contributors 295 Index 299

Novel Truths:Literature and Truth Commissions Paul Gready (bio) Popular culture—film, theatre, music, and literature—often leads the way in helping a society face uncomfortable truths. —Elizabeth Cole and Judy Barsalou, United or Divide? This article has two objectives. Firstly, it documents the author's personal journey, initially to a place of disillusionment with a relativist stance adopted by many within the cultural studies and literary fraternity towards the truth-telling of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), notably around the time of the publication of the first five volumes of its report in 1998. The journey, however, culminated in a re-engagement with the way in which individual novelists employed this logic in their work to explore "uncomfortable truths." Secondly, the article identifies the ways in which what I call "novel truths" have duplicated the TRC's dominant discourse of "speaking truth to reconciliation," but also unpacked the silences and "unfinished business" of apartheid and the TRC. By "novel truths" I mean the unique truth practices and repertoire available to the novel as a genre, as distinct from other genres such as the human rights report. In South Africa, speaking truth to reconciliation was grounded in the provision of an officially-sanctioned testimonial space, predominantly for victims of human rights violations. This space was both framed in a discourse of forgiveness, catharsis and healing, and linked to a broader nation-building project framed in terms of reconciliation. In this endeavor, human rights ultimately facilitated the speaking of truth to reconciliation. This is unusual territory for human rights which is more accustomed to speaking truth to power, and an adversarial relationship with the state rather than one more akin to partnership. The article argues that South African novels have [End Page 156] engaged with the speaking truth to reconciliation paradigm, but have also shone a light on issues such as the enduring appeal of revenge and retribution, the prevalence of informing and betrayal on both sides of the political divide, the complicity of white beneficiaries in apartheid's crimes, and the complexity of certain black identities (e.g., those designated "colored" who "played white"). The South African TRC is one, high profile member of an expanding global family of truth commissions. It is possible to distil the core characteristics of these institutions down to 1) a focus on the past; 2) their origins at the point of transition away from war or authoritarian rule; 3) the investigation of patterns of abuses and specific violations committed over a period of time, rather than a single event; 4) a focus on violations of human rights, and sometimes of humanitarian norms as well; 5) a temporary, short-term life span, usually culminating in the production of a report with recommendations; 6) official status, as commissions are sanctioned, authorized, or empowered by the state (and sometimes by armed opposition groups, in the context of a peace accord); and 7) a victim-centered approach.1 Truth commissions have traditionally been seen as representing a middle path, where prosecutions may be precluded because of a negotiated settlement, tense power balance and amnesty provision, for example, but doing nothing is deemed unacceptable. More broadly, the rallying call of transitional justice is "never again," and it seeks to engage with a past of authoritarian rule or conflict in such a way as to ensure non-repetition. Its main interventions are trials and truth commissions. Kathryn Sikkink and Carrie Booth Walling have recently made the case for a "justice cascade," with Argentina as a driving force, arguing that accountability for past human rights abuses is spreading through the increased use of mechanisms such as trials and truth commissions. Their estimate suggests that by mid-2004, 35 truth commissions had been established world-wide, and that momentum is building around this particular trend in political globalization.2 Although several high profile commissions preceded the South African TRC, notably in Latin America (Argentina, Chile, El Salvador), and others have followed in its wake (Guatemala, East Timor, Sierra Leone), the South African experience is central to this expansionary narrative, for reasons which are outlined below. Many commentators now do not see trials and truth commissions as mutually exclusive alternatives...

Violence against sexual and gender minorities in periods of conflict and social unrest has received increased attention by the international media. While much has been written on anti-queer violence and oppression of sexual and gender minorities around the world, there has been very little written in regard to addressing historical and current acts of violence in transitional justice literature. In light of ongoing violence, what would the incorporation of sexual and gender minority experiences in transitional justice mechanisms, such as truth and reconciliation commissions, mean for sexual and gender minorities? Can truth commissions be a viable structure for addressing historical and continuing anti-queer violence and discrimination? In trying to construct a truthful account of anti-queer violence and the subjugation of sexual and gender minorities, how would a national truth commission address the diversity of locations, times, and fluid sexual and gender subject positions and narratives? I seek to address these questions by examining the challenges that truth commissions face in including the experiences of sexual and gender minorities. First I will review how previous truth and reconciliation commissions have addressed heterosexism, homophobia, and anti-queer violence. From there I will explore the underlying heteronormativity inherently found in truth and reconciliation commissions and ways in which truth commissions would benefit from incorporating queer theory and queer legal theory. Lastly, I will outline key steps that need to be taken for future truth commissions to better incorporate sexual and gender minorities in order to open up truth commissions to non-heteronormative and queer identities, histories, and experiences.

INTRODUCTION One of the most theoretically neglected and empirically under-researched, yet potentially one of the most important, legacies of truth commissions are their recommendations. As discussed elsewhere in this volume, truth commissions have become a significant means of confronting human rights abuses committed by the military, state agents, paramilitaries or opposition forces during repressive regimes or periods of armed conflict. The prime function of a truth commission is to investigate and document human rights violations, and to make its findings public through a report. Another central function of truth commissions is to make recommendations to the government with two main aims: to address violations of the past and to prevent such violations from reoccurring in the future. There are between 50 and 70 truth commissions in existence worldwide – depending on the criteria one uses to define the universe of truth commissions. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is arguably the world's best known, and the one that has received the most scholarly attention. However, the model of a truth commission was developed and perfected in Latin America. As of 2018, this region has had 13 official (that is, state-endorsed) truth commissions in 11 different countries that have completed their work since the early 1980s. Adding the two official commissions that never published a report and various non-official truth commissions, there have been a total of more than 20 truth commission efforts in Latin America. Widely known commissions include Argentina's National Commission on the Disappeared (CONADEP), Chile's National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation (Rettig Commission), and Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Lesser known truth commissions include those of Ecuador, Haiti, Panama and Paraguay. A latecomer on the truth commission scene in Latin America is Brazil – which published its final report almost three decades after the country's transition from military dictatorship to democracy in 1985, in response to a presidential initiative. Truth commissions have recently also been established in Colombia and Bolivia, suggesting that this form of documenting human rights violations is far from passe in the region.

Given that truth commissions are heavily intertwined with the social politics of societal memory and the historical perception of events, the imagery surrounding these hearings therefore plays a role worth examining throughout this memorialization process. This essay investigates how imagery from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings has experienced an afterlife in the subsequent decades, and how this afterlife may differ from the images’ original values and purpose. This body of work examines the extended life of these images beyond that of straightforward media representation of the event—looking at how these archival elements have been reappropriated and incorporated into fine-art bodies of work by artists and documentarians working in photography, such as Sue Williamson, Jo Ratcliffe, Berni Searle, Penny Siopis, and others, in order to respond to the TRC by participating in and driving conversations surrounding the commission’s ambiguities, contradictions, and inadequacies. Through a semiotic analysis of the imagery itself, and analysis of the contextual placement and dissemination of the imagery in both its original and subsequent usages, this research therefore seeks to holistically understand the role of visual media in South Africa’s era of transitional justice and reckoning.

Since the late twentieth century, nations shifting from a repressive regime to a liberal democracy have turned to transitional justice mechanisms, such as truth commissions, to help bridge this gap. With Truth in Translation, a 2006 musical about South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a case study, this essay explores the benefits and drawbacks of theatre about transitional justice. American director Michael Lessac devised Truth in Translation with a South African cast, and premiered the musical in Rwanda before traveling to the Balkans and Northern Ireland to facilitate forgiveness and dialogue between people on opposite sides of conflict. The musical dramatizes the lives of eight language interpreters as they direct the flow of information at the commission and soak up the painful memories of South Africa's past. In developing Truth in Translation, the cast became actor/interpreters, liminal figures who improvised scenes and characters by combining interpreter interviews with their own apartheid experiences. These actor/interpreters performed the difficult act of interpreting as a metaphor for reconciliation and forgiveness. Lessac's company, Global Arts Corps, has since used the musical as the prototype for two other transnational performance projects, one in Northern Ireland and the other in Cambodia. Rather than providing a roadmap to forgiveness or post-conflict transnational dialogue, the essay argues that Truth in Translation's true contribution lies in staging the myriad difficulties and ambiguities of transitional justice for its international audiences of survivors and perpetrators.