Poetic and Performative Forgiveness in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Abstract

As an international observer, Michael Ignatieff concluded that one of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) major accomplishments was to destroy any preconception that apartheid fell because it was unsustainable, but “not really all that bad.”1 The TRC, says Ignatieff, showed a very different picture of apartheid: “Not a few bad apples, not a few bad cops like Gideon Nieuwoudt, but a system, a culture, a way of life that was organized around contempt and violence of human beings” (21). He admits that truth commissions in general do not work miracles, but that they at least “reduce the number of lies in circulation” (quoted in Nolan 146). There are those, says Ignatieff, who would argue the process was a waste of time, or worse, an “exercise in kitsch, in sentimentality, in theatre, in hollow pretense” (Ignatieff 20). Still, he claims that all who attended the hearings, “even the harshest critics … would concede that something happened” (20, my emphasis). Ignatieff does not venture to say what this something is and implies that it resists articulation.