within a particular social imaginary.55 If “the invented account is at least as good as the accurate one,” the unruliness of TRC records need not be reframed as legal evidence in order to be read or respected.56 As Alessandro Portelli reminds us, the importance of oral testimony “may lie not in its adherence to fact, but rather in its departure from it, as imagination, symbolism, and desire emerge. Therefore, there is no ‘false’ oral source.”57 After all, the past is always being reconstructed and reframed according to the changing social and psychological needs of individuals and communities.58 At the intersection of human rights and history, these scholars challenge the premise that narratives produced from within the belly of conflict must be objective to be useful.
Civil society and legal practitioners have been slower to step away from the vision of TRC history as a corrective to propaganda, error, and erasure. Zalaquett’s legal positivism echoes Michael Ignatieff’s quip that truth commissions may, at least, reduce the number of lies that are able to circulate unchallenged in public.59 However attractive this vision of setting the historical record straight may be, in reality, TRCs around the world have been unable to banish the lies that power tells. The minimalist, facts-only approach ignores the reality that in the house where conflict lives, consensus is out of the question. No bare rendition of evidence, no profusion of tears, can convince some of us of histories that we cannot emotionally assimilate or psychologically bear. Even now there are those in South Africa who cannot accept the weight of the TRC testimony about the violence of apartheid. Still they insist “we didn’t know, we didn’t intend.”60 For these skeptics, individual testimony can be only partial, emotionally manipulative, calculated, exaggerated, or myopic. Oral history’s methodology directs us to the truths that emerge within this lack of consensus: we are urged to ask who is rejecting stories of apartheid suffering, on what grounds, and why? The stories offered in the NRC archive elide, skirt, and flit in the spaces between fact, memory, rumor, and lie. They contradict one another, sometimes directly and vehemently. Nevertheless, the archive’s narrative is still “true” as a mapping of the versions of the Ghanaian past deemed useful by citizens at a particular moment. Instead of seeking to adjudicate between conflicting petitions, approaching the NRC archive as the work of many authors pursuing diverse goals renders the disputes comprehensible and legible.
On February 12, 2004, J. J. Rawlings appeared at the Old Parliament House to testify before the NRC. The whole of Accra seemed to stand still. In the streets, pedestrians, hawkers, and shopkeepers clustered around their nearest television screen to watch the former president’s questioning by the commission. Undoubtedly, this was one of the NRC’s most dramatic days. The period of Rawlings’s rule covered by the NRC mandate (1979–1992) included heinous crimes of torture, assault, and murder. Twice, Ghanaian families came to the NRC begging for help to locate and exhume the remains of their relatives lost during these years. Rawlings, as a name and an icon, animated many of the NRC petitions; some petitioners wondered whether Rawlings himself was aware of all the atrocities that had taken place under his leadership.61 Others remembered begging Rawlings for clemency when some of his soldiers committed brutalities.62 Others told stories blaming the chairman for the era’s violence.
For all these reasons, the country waited on tenterhooks when Rawlings was called as a witness to the NRC’s investigation of the high-profile kidnapping and murder of three high court judges and an army officer in 1982. Rawlings’s role in this particular crime had already been the subject of speculation within the NRC.63 The former president strode into the Old Parliament House amid clapping, hooting, and raucous cheering. Justice Amua-Sakyi warned the crowd to “comport themselves” appropriately or risk being ejected from the proceedings. This was only the beginning. The commissioners’ encounter with Rawlings was stilted: an awkward dance including timid questions from the NRC about the whereabouts of videotape recordings and the bravado of the former president, who blustered and lectured his way toward admitting that he could neither produce nor locate the tapes in question. Abruptly, the commissioners dismissed Rawlings, saying that their questions were finished and they were satisfied with his responses. Amid cheers and laughter, Rawlings made his way out of the chambers, joined the crowds of supporters thronging around the Old Parliament House, and marched peacefully back to his central Accra residence.64
The limited exchange between Rawlings and the commissioners was anti-climactic, to say the least. As one reporter stated, “It took longer for him to come and go than to answer their questions.”65 The factual truth of his testimony was almost beside the point. In the détente between Rawlings and the NRC, the former president’s determination to control the story represented a sharp public rebuke to all who presumed that a national human-rights review could bend Rawlings to its will. In the words of one US State Department analyst, “The Commission’s focus on carefully structured proceedings may, this day, have missed the mark.”66 Hardly anyone who observed the February 12, 2004, hearings would conclude that the truth of Rawlings’s role in past political violence had been determined. Oral-history methodology, however, urges us to consider that silence, stilted speech, avoidance, and rumor often speak eloquently. There is a richer transcript of the détente between former president Rawlings and the commissioners at the NRC.
First, the palpable silences in this exchange speak volumes. The commissioners’ laser focus on the whereabouts of certain tapes is a determined evasion of the numerous other questions that could have been put to Rawlings about human rights abuse. Indeed, as described above, some NRC petitioners directly accused Rawlings and/or his wife, Nana Agyeman Konadu Rawlings, of culpability for heinous crimes. Numerous other petitions and testimonies insisted that the order created by Rawlings’s rule was toxic, a breeding ground for soldier violence. Despite citizen stories about the role of the Rawlings family, the commission focused exclusively on the whereabouts of tapes recording soldier confessions about a few high-profile acts of violence and rigorously avoided much of the controversy produced by decades of Rawlings’ rule. At moments, it appeared that the only one willing to approach the violence of the past was J. J. Rawlings himself. Sitting before the NRC, he hinted at the limitations of the NRC’s shallow questions.
NRC: Is there any other information at all on these video tapes, being referred to now, that you’d like to give to the Commission?
RAWLINGS: [Pause] Lots of them. But um …
NRC: Please go ahead.
RAWLINGS: No, if you have specific questions, I’ll deal with them.67
Similarly, when the NRC Chairperson, Justice Amua-Sakyi, abruptly dismissed the former president, Rawlings opened his eyes wide in surprise and quipped, “Oh, Sir, why? … Is that all?68 The insinuation was that the commissioners had not yet completed their work, that they had ended the interview too early and had not yet managed to confront Rawlings on anything of substance.
The silence of the commissioners when presented with the opportunity to publicly question Rawlings was deafening. In the NRC final report, the commissioners were bolder, going so far as to blame “the highest Executive authority in the land” for igniting the violence that suffused Ghanaian public life;69 however, at the public hearings, the commissioners deliberately treated Rawlings with kid gloves. Wise or not, this choice wordlessly revealed the ongoing power of Ghana’s former president as a volatile force in national politics.
From the moment he set foot in the Old Parliament House surrounded by jubilating crowds, the NRC’s dilemma was apparent. Ignoring Rawlings completely by never seeking his participation would have undermined the entire initiative; however, delving too deeply into Rawlings’s past was also risky. A rigorous engagement with Rawlings might confirm the skepticism of those who insisted that the NRC was a partisan enterprise or a threat to the country’s equilibrium. If the only purpose of the hearing was to ask a few questions about a tape, presumably, Rawlings could have submitted his responses in writing. However, a decision to never call the former president into hearings would also have damaged the NRC’s
