This pocket history of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is an easy, informative, and quick read. In its subtext, it is a book about the limitations of TRCs and the concept of Transitional Justice. In its text, it offers a factual account and reflections by one of South Africa’s veteran anti-apartheid activists, who manages to give a balanced view from an insider perspective. Mary Ingouville Burton was a Truth Commissioner and is a prominent anti-apartheid veteran.
After nearly two decades, one nuanced fact emerges starkly about TRCs, as rightfully stated by the author in her concluding chapter: TRCs cannot deliver reconciliation “even if they help to lay a foundation of widely acknowledged truth” (137). On the one hand, TRCs acknowledge a truth that victims already knew and/or suspected with regard to its detail, and they provide a degree of catharsis for those who have narrowly been defined as victims. On the other hand, truth in this context serves to disrupt blanket denial by perpetrators and beneficiaries, while offering them the gift of relationship-level reconciliation, to add to their compounded privilege in a global market democracy that continues to favor them structurally. So essentially, TRCs cannot deliver transhistorical justice unless mandated to do so by the state.
The first sentence in the introduction makes a review of the book on its own merits an almost impossible task. The author begins by stating, “It is not difficult to find reasons to criticise the TRC and its outcomes, but such criticism should be based on a clear understanding of what it was established to do, and the limitations of its mandate.” She then goes on to reveal her own “anger and disillusionment” with herself, with “all of us and the process itself,” and concludes that “we had failed to live up to the grand vision that had inspired us at the outset” (8–9). Yet, when she lists what those shortcomings were (8), she reveals that the “grand vision” itself fell short. The vision failed to recognize the intersection of racially skewed transhistorical and transnational inequality, and how this interaction frames a South Africa where the past remains present in multiple ways, despite regime change.
This seems to suggest that the most damning failures ascribed to the TRC can and should, beyond its limited mandate, be attributed to the macro-level political and economic decisions behind it, at a time when the market democracy was trying to find its feet. That is, the absence of a sustained focus on racism as a transnational and transhistorical structure of intersecting cultural, structural, psychological, and physical violence co-produced the specific and time-limited manifestations that the TRC was exclusively charged to focus on. This is precisely why criticisms of the TRC continue, as the structure of violence persists in victimizing descendants of colonized, oppressed, and enslaved people in ways that are invisibilized and denied. This is a discussion which requires several books specifically from the epistemic location of the oppressed. Currently, this space is dominated by beneficiaries of oppression. The fact that these authors are mainly honest and progressive long-time activists has a silencing effect when it come to a rigorous critique of the centrality of whiteness in scholarship on South Africa—a majority-black society plagued by the past which is still present but delineated by Transitional Justice boundaries.
Having set the parameters at the outset, the book then focuses on factual information from Chapter One to Seven, with regard to the context of state-level transition within which the TRC operated. Chapter Eight provides a deeper reflection that goes beyond the immediate “in the moment” challenges faced by the TRC and its staff, stopping short of an analysis that places the TRC within the enduring structure of violence.
Chapter One describes both the continuity of racial tensions and inequality and the nifty footwork that had to be done to adhere to the constitutional vision of “reconciliation” and the “reconstruction” of a “deeply divided society characterised by strife, conflict, untold suffering and injustice and a future founded on the recognition of human rights democracy and peaceful co-existence and development opportunities for all South Africans, irrespective of colour, race, class, belief or sex” (14).
Chapter Two deals with the “practical details of administration and procedures, staffing and remuneration,” as well as administration of an oath of confidentiality (23). The successful “media effect” in reaching all sections of the population is ascribed to an early agreement that the “commission should act in an open and transparent” (24) manner, which it largely achieved. This chapter also describes the TRC mandate and how it was operationalized in some detail.
Chapter Three, titled “Human Rights Violations and the public hearings,” describes the “dramatic” first day of hearings, when a packed hall was cleared by the police due to a bomb threat. The days thereafter dealt with deaths in detention, murder, and torture at the hands of the police. It was during this time that the iconic picture of Archbishop Desmond Tutu was taken, where he “laid his head down on his arms on the table in front of him and wept.” This was in response to an account of torture by Mr. Ernest Malgas, who was “detained many times and was imprisoned for 15 years.” At the time of the hearing he was “frail, elderly and confined to a wheelchair due to a stroke” (43). This exemplifies detailed descriptions of other hearings throughout the country.
Chapter Four discusses the controversial nature of amnesty, the long process of finding perpetrators, the difficulty of bringing them to book via prosecutions, and the number of acquittals in drawn out and expensive criminal cases. The decision to opt for amnesty as part of the TRC process is argued to have been “influenced by considerations of cost,… damage to the delicate balance of unity resulting from the negotiations, [and] the risk of violent right-wing retaliation” (62). This chapter outlines in detail the difficulties, tensions, and challenges with regard to amnesty applications/or the lack thereof, and reasons for what can implicitly be read as a general failure with regard to steps towards reconciliation. This is summed up by Burton’s statement: “If the Amnesty Committee had seen its task as part of the wider project of reconciliation and made more effort, for instance, to take into account the views of the victims; if those who had given the orders, planned the actions and rewarded the perpetrators had taken the opportunity to use the provision to reveal their roles and responsibilities; and if all of this had led to a vast improvement of the national understanding of the motives and histories of all involved, it might have altered the path of how the society evolved from there.”
Chapter Five, titled “Reparations,” provides a telling comment on the limitations of TRCs in general, and specifically the South African TRC. It states that the issue of reparations “revealed in intimately personal ways the suffering of thousands of people under apartheid, as well as the impossibility of making amends” (82).
Chapter Six deals with institutional and special hearings, detailing how the TRC sought to “deepen its understanding of how various sectors of society had functioned during the years of political conflict and even before” (96). The hearings covered political parties, security forces, and institutions and sectors such as business and labor, prisons, the health sector, the media, the legal community, and the faith community. The conclusion to this chapter shocks. It goes to the heart of the micro level focus of the TRC—that “reconciliation between former adversaries would be hard to achieve” if it were not for this “understanding.” This suggests that learning about the structure of violence revealed and continued by these institutions and sectors serves only to further favor beneficiaries who can now add “understanding and forgiveness” to their compounded and uninterrupted privilege. All of this shows that the very notion of Transitional Justice and mechanisms such as TRCs do not serve victims of colonialism, oppression, and slavery—but rather the perpetrators and those who benefit from a global structure that is not about to change, but only seeks to mitigate its excesses.
Chapter Seven deals with the winding down of some activities, which attracted mounting criticism, specifically that the amnesty hearings continued while the hearings on human rights violations were brought to a close (117). This chapter also deals with the TRC’s interactions with highly-placed individuals such as the former apartheid president P.W Botha, Winnie Madikizela Mandela, and Dr. Wouter Basson, who spearheaded the chemical and biological warfare project.
In Chapter Eight, the author questions whether Truth, Justice, and Reparations can bring reconciliation. She situates South Africa’s TRC in an international context and argues that it had much wider powers than those in countries such as El Salvador, Chile, and Argentina.
In conclusion, it can be argued that the TRC staff made a valiant attempt to bring past atrocities to light for those who were in denial—yet the commission still had little to no effect, as inequality still favors transhistorical beneficiaries and marginalizes the majority of its victims, who were already aware of these crimes anyway. There was, however, a degree of catharsis for those on whom the TRC focused its attention, and nobody will deny them that. But to assume from this that reconciliation will ensue is to turn a blind eye to transhistorical injustice and the need for historical reparations that would put victims on the same economic footing as perpetrators and beneficiaries. TRCs and similar mechanisms need an overhaul that takes into account first and foremost the standpoint of victims for whom there is no “post-conflict.” Currently it fails to do that, and thus the very notion of transitional justice and TRCs serves to promote denial about the continuity of invisible violence instead of delivering transhistorical justice as its proponents hoped it would. These mechanisms should be named for what they deliver, and not for what they promise.
