The Truth Commission and Post-Apartheid Literature in South Africa

Abstract

rom the beginning, it was clear that South Africa's and Rec- onciliation Commission (TRC) would be different from the cold, bureaucratic, and mostly in camera proceedings of similar bodies in Chile and other nations in transition from authoritarian regimes. Rather than issuing blanket indemnity the agents of state terror, as in Chile, amnesty in South Africa was granted on an individual basis those who gave disclosure of politically motivated crimes. Thus amnesty was used as a tool excavating the truth about the past. Moreover, South Africa's Commission attempted balance the perpetrator-oriented nature of the amnesty proceedings with a Human Rights Violation (HRV) Commission that heard stories from survivors and families of the victims of apartheid-era political violence. The victim hear- ings were decidedly nonjudicial, involving no cross-examination of testi- mony, and were intended provide a safe space some victims of human violations have their accounts of the past made part of the offi cial record. Indeed, two of the principal goals of the TRC were establishing as complete a picture as possible of the causes, nature and extent of the gross violations of human rights committed within a thirty-four-year period from 1960 1994 (Justice in Transition 5-6), and compiling a report of the Commission's fi ndings and conclusions. Wilhelm Verwoerd argues that the TRC was largely successful in its efforts to expose as much truth as possible about those (human rights) violations that tend be cloaked in denials and would otherwise, in all likelihood, have remained obscured from the public eye. Through the public testimonies of so many victims and the more or less full disclosures by those responsible gross violations of human at amnesty hearings, the powerful 'conspiracy of silence,' the temptation forget (. . .) has been seriously challenged (160). The TRC was designed at least lay the groundwork reconciliation between the agents and supporters of the former white minority regime and the opponents of apartheid. As the banner hanging at every hearing proclaimed, is the Road Reconciliation. This formulation was perhaps overly optimistic, as the task of determining the Truth about the past based on thousands of confl icting testimonies is a hopelessly muddled enterprise that nevertheless requires the commissioners make absolute determinations of guilt and responsibility. Sometimes the rhetoric of the Commission minimizes this uncomfortable demand by emphasizing the need present multiple perspectives and versions. In his foreword the Final Report, example, former Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Chair- person of the Commission, refers the past as a jigsaw puzzle of which the TRC is only a piece, and alludes a search for the clues that lead, endlessly, a truth that will, in the very nature of things, never be fully revealed (TRC Final Report 4).