The Ethics and Morality of Witnessing: On the Politics of Antjie Krog (Samuel’s) Country of My Skull

Abstract

IN August 1996, when I testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission - Human Rights Violations Committee (TRC HRVC), I could not have imagined how my testimony would become so widely disseminated, interpreted, edited, and translated into secondary and tertiary narrative accounts on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SA TRC). A case in point is Krag/Samuel' s Country of My Skull, which, among other things, makes use of my testimony before the TRC. This essay subjects her text as produced in Country of My Skull1 to closer analysis. My essay addresses Krog/Samuel's writing along with the comments of praise on the jackets of both the first and second editions. I have decided to use these comments in order to shed light on the ways in which a text such as this one has been mediated and circulated by institutions that hold great societal power. It is crucial to bear this power in mind, since the narrative settings for such productions are never innocent: in the past, present, and future, they exist within socio-cultural, political, economic, structural, and interpretative contexts. It is also in this sociality that testimony to violence and human rights violations finds its significance, purpose, and potency. The time of any stateinstantiated Truth Commission is thus always an exceptional time in legal and moral terms, a moment of political, social, and administrative exception, in meta-ethical terms counter-navigating several tenets of international human rights law (IHL), history, and experience.Krog/Samuel's narrative account and intellectual production highlights important issues left unaddressed in the post-context of the TRC. While maintaining the TRC as a constant background, my analysis directly speaks to Krog/Samuel, also an embedded individual, who produces this narrative account. It is my intention to show how the success of Krog's account exploits the failure on the part of the TRC to provide an ethical framework for the management of the testimonies and its archive of witness accounts. I argue that the ways in which these testimonies and witness accounts have been used for secondary narrative accounts, media productions, academic books, and articles should give South Africa's Department of Justice, currently the custodian of the official archive of the S A TRC , reason to interfere and protect in the interests of the TRC and the purpose for which it was founded.2 My analysis serves to highlight how the unequal ways in which the societal structures of narratorial power, domination, and violence cohere in the institutions, and the processes through which the public voice is disseminated have remained largely untransformed in present-day South Africa's political and historic journey after apartheid.The legal and political possibility for witness accounts in the form of testimony after the election in April 1994 provides the basis on which the record of the previous conflict might be officially documented and reordered within the administrative and juridical context of the new political system. The Constitutional Court Judge Albie Sachs makes a distinction between what he calls 'microscopic truth' and 'dialogic truth': the former is factual, verifiable, and can be documented and proved; the latter is social, the truth of experience established through interaction, discussion, and debate.3 It must be remembered here that while the SA TRC's report concerns itself largely with the former form of truth-making, it is the latter form of truth-making that continues to bedevil South Africa. Establishing dialogic truth is more than just an official or institutional reckoning with the social, administrative, legal, and extra-juridical silencing during the moment of oppression; it is the very basis upon which a divided people may or may not come to terms with a changed socio-legal present, to painstakingly build the ideal of a sustained future social peace after the political conflict has ended. …