Reconstructing Apartheid, Redefining Racism

Abstract

This essay examines transcripts from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission alongside literary and cinematic representations of the hearings and reflects on the challenges of confronting institutionalized racism through contemporary human rights discourse and its attendant modes of life narratives. The first section analyses the oral testimony of Ms Nomatise Tsobileyo – who spoke before the TRC's Human Rights Violations Committee in 1996. The second section then considers excerpts from and traces of Ms Tsobileyo's testimony in Antjie Krog's internationally renowned memoir Country of My Skull, and in the film based on Krog's book, In My Country. I argue that when eliciting and responding to testimony, the TRC tended to separate out bodily violence inflicted by the apartheid police from the witness's account of dispossession caused by apartheid laws and practices. When internationally marketed literary and cinematic representations reframe TRC testimonies by emphasizing the horrors inflicted on black bodies on the one hand and the guilt experienced by white characters on the other, they contribute to the commodification of mourning by further isolating stories of spectacular violence from their basis in institutionalized racism. In My Country, in particular, illustrates how commodified life narratives circulating in a neoliberal world order privatize racism when they address it primarily in terms of bodily rights violations requiring the admission of white guilt and a process of interpersonal reconciliation. What is increasingly obscured through these successive attempts at reframing TRC testimony is the economic inequality created by systematic dispossession and impoverishment of the majority of South Africans, the effects of which outlive the formal end of apartheid rule.