The Ethical Murk of Using Testimony in Oral Historical Research in South Africa

Abstract

From 1995 to 2002, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) gathered a range of evidence—mainly in the form of oral testimony— about human rights violations committed during the last 34 years of apartheid rule. While the TRC is rarely viewed as an oral history project, I argue that these testimonies, or public interviews, “count” as oral history; seeing them through this lens enables a richer understanding of the TRC and oral historical practice. As a practitioner of oral history and an observer of TRC testimony, the last 15 years of my own anthropological and historical research in South Africa has shown that this approach illuminates crucial but often ignored ethical and epistemological questions about oral historical practice, particularly concerning the risks and consequences of probing into people’s pasts and publicizing their stories.2 These consequences can deleteriously affect not only the subjects of oral historical research, but also the stories themselves and the interpretations and meanings they inspire. To this end, the commission’s prominence in contemporary attempts to examine the apartheid past has made it an important frame of reference in a wide range of historical inquiry, for both everyday keepers and scholars of South African history.