The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission: ‘Race’, historical compromise and transitional democracy

Abstract

The article examines the manner in which the imperatives of national unity and reconciliation in South Africa have been pursued at the expense of economic, social and psychological reparation to the majority of South Africans. Notably, the elision of land reform and socio-economic issues in the negotiation of a transition from apartheid to a non-racial democracy has resulted in the maintenance of an economic system promoting a “de-racialised insider and a persistently black outsider” (Bundy, 2000). The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), with its restrictive focus only on gross human rights violations from 1960 onwards, contributed towards this process by facilitating a sophisticated amnesia of the greater historical and structural violence of apartheid. Moreover, its use of a hybrid process of testimony based on eliciting personal and juridical “truth” to construct its official history, rendered the project of forging a collective memory and identity impossible. Rather, the racialized divides salient during apartheid were taken up, maintained and rewritten in other discourses which performed essentially the same function, that being to maintain a passivity towards addressing exploitative social and economic conditions. Finally, by choosing to focus on trauma narrative and testimony, the TRC utilized the disturbing surplus of unsymbolized trauma experience as the raw material from which to sculpt the official discourses it required to create the New South Africa. A Lacanian-based discourse analysis of survivors’ testimonies suggests that, at the subjective level, the telling of trauma at the TRC hearings may have constituted a second-order trauma.