Laundering racial capitalism in post-apartheid South Africa

SOUTH AFRICA AT TEN: READINGS ON POSTAPARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA Fred Hendricks. Fault-Lines in South African Democracy: Continuing Crises of Inequality and Injustice. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2003. Discussion Paper 22. 32 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Price not reported. Paper. Terry Bell, with Dumisa Buhle Ntsebeza. Unfinished Business: South Africa, Apartheid and Truth. London: Verso, 2003. 385 pp. Sources. Index. $26.00. Cloth. Sample Terreblanche. A History of Inequality in South Africa 1652-2002. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2002. 527 pp. Appendix. Sources. Index. $43.95. Paper. Allister Sparks. Beyond the Miracle: Inside the New South Africa. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers/Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 370 pp. Notes. Index. R.169.95/$32.50. Cloth. Hermann Gilliomee. The Afrikaners: Biography of A People. Charlottesville. University Press of Virginia, 2003. 560 pp. Bibliography. Index. $39.95. Paper. After the excitement and euphoria followed South Africa's transition to multiparty and multiracial democracy in the early 1990s, and following the transfer of from the larger-than-life Nelson Mandela to the down-to-earth Thabo Mbeki, the time has come for a sober and realistic assessment of the new South Africa at ten and to look at the other face of the miracle. This review includes a number of authors and works do precisely that. It is not often we come across a work reveals the complexities involved in South Africa's liberal democracy as vividly and concisely as Fred Hendricks's Fault-lines in South African Democracy. Based on a lecture Hendricks gave at the Nordic Africa Institute, the book focuses on two issues: the inequality and injustice inherited from the apartheid regime. His major concern is how historic compromises made during the negotiations for a new South Africa between the African National Congress and the National Party have affected the administration of justice. He argues in spite of the political transition, inequalities between Africans and whites have continued to grow. Racism is so embedded in South African society, he declares, that its reversal requires an all-encompassing state-directed approach (9). According to Hendricks, the emphasis of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on forgiving wrongdoers in order to legitimize the new state allowed class inequalities to continue. As a result, the new government has been unable to tackle the problem. Furthermore, its land reform efforts have been dismal, with only 1 percent of the land returned to the rightful owners. According to the rhetoric, reconciliation was supposed to develop from the truth; however, when the truth lies hidden under so many crimes for which the senior perpetrators are not prosecuted, it is difficult, Hendricks notes, to achieve lasting peace. He discusses the Committee, in which perpetrators were forgiven if they acted on the orders of a public organization, not for personal gain, and without any knowledge of the victims. Once perpetrators appeared in front of the TRC, they could not be prosecuted in a criminal court. As a result, Amnesty sends a message to future state criminals there is the chance they may be exonerated, especially if they remain in long enough to ensure they are not easily dislodged, or some compromise may be necessary to remove them from power (25). Such an attitude puts democracy in jeopardy. Hendricks concludes as long as the society is structured along a cleavage between poor and rich, the chances for reconciliation are very slim. What Hendricks calls fault-lines become unfinished business to Terry Bell and Dumisa Buhle Ntsebeza. Unfinished Business: South Africa, Apartheid and Truth draws on Ntsebeza's experience as a lawyer who represented apartheid's victims and subsequently participated in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. …

South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy has been the subject of intense scholarly interest. It started during the pre-1994 negotiations for a transitional settlement, intensified in the post-1994 era with the introduction of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and continued after the TRC completed its tenure. The result has been a myriad of publications that have enriched the field of transitional justice. Given the extensive scholarly coverage that South Africa's transition and the TRC in particular have received, one would assume that the subject has been exhausted. It is hard to imagine that any new books on the topic would provide additional insight into what many others have extensively addressed. Yet the reality is that transitional justice processes, particularly reconciliation and justice (or perceptions thereof), often unfold over an extended period of time. The ongoing nature of these processes in South Africa, widely referred to as the ‘unfinished...

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...

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. …

Truth and Reconciliation

The apartheid conflict extended to the South African protectorate of South-West Africa, now known as Namibia. Other neighbouring countries also suffered from what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) described as a 'reign of terror and destruction' in that South Africa either waged war on unwanted governments, supported rebel movements to overthrow such governments or periodically attacked the African National Congress (ANC) abroad. The heralded a period of transitional justice, demanding that the legacy of apartheid-human rights violations and crimes-would not be ignored. The TRC found that the state and its security agencies accounted for the majority of gross human rights violations. Considering the scale of human rights violations in the period of South Africa's history, which is relevant for TRC's inquiries, the number of amnesty applications is considered rather low. Without concomitant criminal trials, the number of amnesty applications for apartheid-state sponsored crimes would, thus, have been significantly lower.Keywords: African National Congress (ANC); apartheid conflict; criminal trials; human rights violations; transitional justice; truth and reconciliation commission (TRC)

Although apartheid was officially abolished in 1994, its long-lasting effects continue to shape South Africa’s society, economy, and political landscape in powerful ways. This paper examines the enduring legacy of apartheid by analyzing key issues such as economic inequality, unequal access to education, racial disparities in property ownership, and the ongoing discrimination that affects how different racial groups are treated in daily life. Despite efforts by the government and civil society to correct past injustices, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE), and land redistribution programs, the deep divisions created by apartheid remain. Many South Africans still live in poverty, with limited opportunities for upward mobility, and racial inequalities continue to affect job access, income levels, and quality of education. The author discusses recent protests like FeesMustFall and RhodesMustFall, about the unfair treatment people still experience in South Africa. These groups mainly consist of youths and disadvantaged sections who desire improved education, fair treatment by the government, and more equality among people. In the writer’s words, even though the apartheid laws have ended, the effects and problems are still present. In order to address this, South Africa must develop new policies and encourage all people to address the wrongs of the past. A fair and inclusive country can only be built when people work as a team and strive for equality.

This project began with a few simple questions. Is contemporary South Africa secular? What does it mean to be secular? What kind of secularism does it have? I asked them because religion has been so saturated by politics in South Africa's past, and politics so saturated by religion. The historical importance of religion and tradition to South African governance raises the question of whether and how it is possible for a new postapartheid state to found itself without their authority. Why did the churches give up so much of their political role in the transition? How can we think about tradition and the customary in relation to secularism? How can we not? Why do we have traditional leaders and customary law in a dispensation of democratic secular liberal constitutionalism? These are the questions that animate this book. The African National Congress (ANC), religious groups, press and political commentators all say that democratic South Africa is secular. But religion and things that look a lot like religion continue to be important and visible in South African politics and public life. Traditional leaders wield state power in rural areas, sangomas and praise singers are found at inaugurations and public rallies, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) employed overt theology. Statecraft includes a ‘Moral Regeneration Movement’ that calls on religious partners, and Jacob Zuma likens himself to Jesus. With the exception of the TRC, very little of this has been adequately researched or conceptualised. So what is to be made of the public and political presence of religion and tradition in postapartheid South Africa? And what is secularism if it is not the absence of religion? Charles Taylor (2007:15) said about the study of secularism: ‘It seems obvious before you start thinking about it, but as soon as you do, all sorts of problems arise.’ This is true. ‘What is secularism?’ has to be the biggest problem. The forms and attributes of political secularism have often been settled at times of political transition and state formation. There is a double meaning in the title of this book, The State of Secularism . On the one hand, secularism is a mode of state. The second meaning opens an evaluation of the state secularism is in today.

Reviewed by: South African Performance and Archives of Memory by Yvette Hutchison Gibson Alessandro Cima SOUTH AFRICAN PERFORMANCE AND ARCHIVES OF MEMORY. By Yvette Hutchison. Theatre: Theory–Practice–Performance series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013; pp. 256. Post-apartheid South Africans renegotiate their apartheid memories through performance and embodied repertoires (protest theatre, folksongs, dances, rituals), as well as through archives (testimonies, monuments, memorials, museum exhibits). This compelling argument underpins Yvette Hutchison’s South African Performance and Archives of Memory. Central to her thesis is nostalgia: physical and psychological exiles “returning to a country they have dreamed about, but do not necessarily recognise” (8). In order to support this idea, Hutchison cites Svetlana Boyim’s The Future of Nostalgia, which describes “a longing for home that no longer exists or has never existed . . . a sentiment of [End Page 639] loss and displacement . . . a romance with one’s own fantasy” (qtd. in Hutchison 8). According to Hutchison, this longing prompts the performative rewriting of dominant apartheid and post-apartheid discourses, such as “Afrikaner nationalism” (99), “the liberation struggle” (123), and “the rainbow nation” (133). Surveying the past twenty years of democracy in the country, she argues persuasively that South Africans foregrounded certain memories and discarded others. Her analysis proceeds methodologically through multidisciplinary readings of public events, such as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the South Africa–Mali Timbuktu Manuscript Project, and the 2010 World Cup—theatrical productions that supported or challenged the TRC, as well as memorial sites like Pretoria’s Voortrekker Monument and Freedom Park. The virtue of Hutchison’s approach in her first two chapters is that she evaluates the TRC’s “script” (24) by drawing together Diana Taylor’s archive and repertoire and Catherine Cole’s understanding of the TRC as a site-specific performance. Her first chapter, “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Reconfiguring of the Past: Remembering and Forgetting,” views the TRC as “rehearsals of an ideal state of the nation” (36). The second chapter, “Dramatising the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: The Role of Theatre Practitioners in Exploring the Past,” details how the commission required theatre artists to shift from bearing witness to using verbatim testimony (54). In both chapters, Hutchison rightly questions the means by which TRC commissioners chose certain narratives and excluded others. She notes the absence of nonverbal cues, such as sighs and silences, as well as the effect of these embodied repertoires on the archive’s formation. By staging these omitted stories alongside certain narratives from the TRC, theatre artists both critiqued and continued the commission’s mandate. Like Cole, Hutchison passionately advocates for opening the TRC archive (the majority of which remains inaccessible) and allowing such “backstage” (27) moments as unheard victims’ statements and unsuccessful amnesty applications to inform the official narrative. Hutchison’s polyvocal intervention develops in chapter 3, “Staging a Nation: The Voortrekker Monument and Freedom Park.” She contrasts the Voortrekker Monument, a symbol of Afrikaner nationalism, to the newly constructed Freedom Park on the opposite hill. The sites are connected both literally and metaphorically by a winding road. Although much has been written concerning these two sites, Hutchison’s innovative comparison parallels the 1910 Pageant of the Union of South Africa, which performed reconciliation between English and Dutch-speaking South Africans, and the TRC. Similarly, the 1938 Voortrekker Centenary restaged the famed “Great Trek,” bringing local repertoires of Afrikaner folksongs and dances into a national narrative of Afrikaner-ness. Hutchison holds this nostalgic “myth of a glorious past” as key to the Afrikaner nationalism that later undergirded apartheid (111). According to her, post-apartheid political actors drew on this nostalgia, emphasizing interdependency among South African identities and histories. She notes that Nelson Mandela compared his own liberation struggle to the Afrikaner resistance to English oppression; he imagined Freedom Park as a site of “symbolic reparations” (129). For Hutchison, the expansive Freedom Park site resists colonial and apartheid memorialization strategies by designating areas for remembrance, cleansing, healing, and decision-making. She acknowledges, however, the paradox of a space that invites all South Africans to consider their interconnectedness from a decidedly black South African perspective. Furthermore, the fractious debate over excluding South African Defence Force soldiers from the...

This article investigates South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a form of cultural articulation in dialogue with Farida Karodia's Other Secrets and Beverley Naidoo's Out of Bounds. I situate the TRC as an opening device that is inherently limited in terms of being only one (polemical) narrative of the past—literature is another. Narrative in post-Apartheid South Africa therefore forms a dialogue with both the silences of Apartheid and those of the TRC, by occupying seemingly contradictory positions simultaneously. The opening of narrative space and the eschewal of certain oppositions are central in terms of the theoretical shifts that the TRC has engendered—shifts that can be seen in contemporary post-Apartheid narratives such as Other Secrets and Out of Bounds. In crossing and erasing thresholds of meaning between public and private, insider and outsider, history and fiction, memory and story, silence and articulation, through a freeing of narrative form, Karodia and Naidoo are re-narrating the cultural boundaries of the nation.

This article seeks to explore the identity of the Khoisan as symbolic for reconciliation in South Africa. What contributions can the narrative of a marginalised people such as the Khoisan make to reconciling a divided nation such as South Africa? The Khoisan have been victims of continuous dispossession since the arrival of Bartholomew Diaz at the Cape in 1488. However, it was the taking of land in 1657 from the Khoisan for the free burgers that marked a significant period for the current discourse on land and for identity and reconciliation within post-apartheid South Africa. Notwithstanding the attempts by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to use narratives for healing, restoration, and continuing engagement with the meta-narratives of the past, my own use of narrative is open-ended with space for dialogue through interaction. The past or history does not have fixed boundaries, but rather blurred boundaries that function as spaces of transcendence. The narrative approach has four interactionist variables which are personhood, communication, power as reflected experience, and fluid community. I point out weaknesses of the use of narrative by the TRC as well as the interaction between experience and theory by practical theologians to construct an open-ended narrative of the Khoisan for reconciliation in South Africa. Â

While political conflicts in many countries have resulted in large-scale destruction and loss of life, South Africa has been successful in avoiding a violent conflict following the demise of apartheid. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has been seen as an important mechanism contributing to South Africa's successful management of its political challenges. Yet, the legacy of apartheid continues beyond the work of the TRC, and several social problems such as poverty, unemployment, crime, and substance abuse continue to affect many South African communities. Psychology is uniquely poised to assist in addressing these social problems and in contributing to the development of a community of peace. Academic psychology departments have responded by implementing an undergraduate programme aimed at training professional counsellors to respond to community needs in post-apartheid South Africa. This paper surveys the present political landscape in South Africa, examines the work of the TRC as a psychological change catalyst and peace building mechanism, and calls attention to the role of psychology in contributing to national development.

This article seeks to point out that, the inclusion of a theological term – that is ‘reconciliation’ (at the request of F.W. de Klerk on behalf of the National Party) to what was supposed to be the ‘Truth Commission’ (Boesak & DeYoung 2012; Stevens Franchi & Swart 2006) – was for the purpose of taming the work of this commission and using reconciliation to merely reach some political accommodation which did not address the critical questions of justice, equality, and dignity which are prominent in the biblical understanding of reconciliation (Boesak 2008; Boesak & DeYoung 2012:1; Lephakga 2015; Terreblanche 2002). However, it is important to point out that, the problem was not the theological word – that is ‘reconciliation’– but the understanding and interpretation of it in South Africa. This is because previously in South Africa the Bible was made a servant to ideology (Lephakga 2012, 2013; Moodie 1975; Serfontein 1982) and thus domesticated for the purposes of subjection and control (Boesak & DeYoung 2012). As such, this article contends that, the call for the inclusion of ‘reconciliation’ within the ‘truth commission’ was not to allow reconciliation to confront the country with the demands of the gospel but to blunt the process of radical change (Boesak & DeYoung 2012). Therefore, this article will point out that the shortcomings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) need to be understood against the following events which occurred between the period 1989 to 1995: (1) the fall of the Soviet Union (Cronin 1994:2–6); (2) the National Party’s (NP) and South African business sector’s interest in negotiations with the African National Congress (ANC) (Cronin 1994:2–6; Mkhondo 1993:3–43; Terreblanche 2002:51–124); (3) the elite compromise (Terreblanche 2002:51–124); and the sudden passing of the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, no 34 of 1995 (TRC, Vol. 1998). This paper will use the story of Zacchaeus to contend that the TRC should have allowed Zacchaeus (so to speak) to testify in order to hear from him what reconciliation means (Boesak & DeYoung 2012:64). This is because, on the one hand, this commission made an extraordinary move when it appointed a Christian priest (which is unusual in the history of these commissions – Boesak & DeYoung 2012; Lephakga 2015; Stevens et al. 2006; Terreblanche 2002), namely Desmond Tutu (Boesak 2008; Boesak & DeYoung 2012; Lephakga 2015; Stevens et al. 2006; Terreblanche 2002), as its chair and on the other hand, the chair – that is Desmond Tutu – made another extraordinary move when he Christianised the whole process of this commission when he opened most of the sessions with prayer, invoking the name of Jesus Christ (for forgiveness), and inviting the Holy Spirit to guide the proceedings of this commission (Boesak & DeYoung 2012; Lephakga 2015). However this commission invoked the name of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit for the purpose of forgiveness but ignored what Jesus Christ is asking in terms of justice which is clearly illustrated in the Story of Zacchaeus (Boesak & DeYoung 2012; Lephakga 2015). Therefore, this article will argue that if Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit were invited into the processes of this commission, then Zacchaeus too should have been allowed to testify – so to say.Keywords: Reconciliation; TRC; Negotiated Settlement; Soviet Union; National Party; African National Congress; Domestication; Elite Compromise; Impunity; Apartheid; Capitalism; Democracy

RETHINKING NARRATIVES OF REMOVAL AND RESISTANCE IN POSTAPARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA - Pamela Reynolds. War in Worcester: Youth and the Apartheid State. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. xii +239 pp. Photographs. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $100.00. Paper. - Volume 57 Issue 3

Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? By James L. Gibson. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004. Pp. 488. $47.50 cloth. Reviewed by John Hagan, Northwestern University and American Bar Foundation, and Sanja Kutnjak Ivkovic, Florida State University Gibson's ambitious goal is to assess the success of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) not only in reducing this nation's racial divide, but also in increasing South Africa's political tolerance, its support for human rights, and the legitimacy of its governing political institutions. He rises to this challenge by analyzing the results of a landmark 2000-2001 survey of nearly 4,000 South Africans. Gibson is cautious but not shy in delivering a bottom-line assessment. He finds that nearly one-half of the South African population entered the new millennium expressing some degree of Given the challenges of overcoming apartheid, the TRC, according to Gibson, has likely delivered as much as could be expected. The reader learns much across the chapters of this book: that reconciliation is a measurable construct, that interpretive is critical in creating a collective memory, that intense contact among members of conflicting subgroups can help achieve reconciliation, that the creation of a human rights culture-among the populace and the government-is both a backward- and forward-looking process, that intolerance is a social and not an individual-level characteristic, that amnesty can be a powerful source of perceived injustice, and that public institutions that serve as the backbone of a democracy must develop a substantial degree of legitimacy. Among the strengths of Gibson's accomplishment are the precision of his measurement approach and the cautiousness of his analytic judgments. For example, subdimensions of reconciliation are scaled in a manner that allows Gibson to estimate levels of reconciliation among national subgroups. When the analysis is taken to this level, he finds that reconciliation characterizes the attitudes of more than one-half of Whites (56%) and Colored people (59%) but only about one-third of Africans. When the variable of language is further introduced, over two-thirds of English-speaking Colored people (75%) and English-speaking Whites (64%) are found somewhat reconciled, compared to less than one-fifth (17%) of Sotho-speaking blacks. The latter nearly four-toone difference in reconciliation provides good reason for the cautious framing of Gibson's conclusions (p. 332). Gibson also develops measures of the he attributes to the TRC. Here he finds a surprising similarity in the acceptance of the TRC's depiction of apartheid across racial groups, and he attributes this to a complementary acknowledgment and moderation of views across these groups. He can further show that those who are more accepting of the TRC's version of the are more likely to be reconciled. He acknowledges that a more convincing demonstration of the causality involved in this relationship would require longitudinal data, which his survey does not provide. Nonetheless, Gibson's use of instrumental variables with his cross-sectional data supports that assumption that the causal flow is indeed from truth to reconciliation. He can then again break this analysis down by subgroups, leading to the finding that the effect is 0.23 among Africans and 0.53 among Whites. This more than two-to-one difference is added reason for guardedness in Gibson's optimism (p. 334). A particularly intriguing part of Gibson's contribution involves his assessment of the contact hypothesis as an explanatory mechanism for the level of reconciliation that is evident in postapartheid South Africa. Gibson provides important evidence that the segregation, indeed isolation, especially social-psychological isolation, of Africans from Whites is pervasive in South Africa. …