Chairperson Desmond Tutu claims that it is consistent with the “African Weltanschauung” in which “harmony, friendliness, community are great goods. Social harmony for us [Africans] is the summum bonum—the greatest good” (31). Like Tutu, South African theologian Reverend Wesley Mabuza, director of the Institute for Contextual Theology, states that there is “a strong link between their religious understanding of reconciliation and their African cultural roots” (qtd. in Van der Merwe 2). Mabuza asserts that ubuntu stems from the “African mind”: “I need to say that this idea that there is secular on one side and religious on the other is a western approach. For us it is an ubuntu situation. Whether you are religious or not, what is the human thing to do in this situation? From the African mind I would have problems with this demarcation” (qtd. in Van der Merwe 2). Mark Sanders argues that ubuntu, defined as “an African ethos of reciprocity,” guided the HRVC hearings by positioning the Commission as a sympathetic substitute for those perpetrators who would not claim responsibility for the human rights violations about which victims testified (9). In so doing, he argues, the TRC “generalized perpetratorship and reparative agency” (9). Other scholars, however, tend to view claims about ubuntu’s indigeneity and pervasiveness among African peoples with a great deal of skepticism. Yianna Liatsos suggests that ubuntu was promoted and cultivated by the TRC commissioners to “affirm an organic affinity between ‘African ways’ and the Christian message of forgiveness and redemption that Tutu and the Act advocated for post-apartheid South Africa” (“Keeping Faith”). Drawing on his research in urban black South African communities that maintain strongly retributive and violent justice practices, Richard Wilson claims that “[ubuntu] became the Africanist wrapping used to sell a reconciliatory version of human rights talk to black South Africans” (13).
Whatever its origins, appeals to ubuntu did appear in the earliest phases of South Africa’s transition from apartheid and continued to appear well after the conclusion of the TRC process. The 1993 Interim Constitution and the preamble of the National Unity and Reconciliation Act both contain the following oft-cited statement about what the new South Africa would require: “There is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimization.” Ubuntu was a key feature of Chairperson Tutu’s rhetoric during the TRC public hearings, and, as mentioned previously, “Ubuntu: Promoting Restorative Justice” is the title of a section of the final Report. The Report goes so far as to suggest that “a spontaneous call has arisen among sections of the population for a return to ubuntu” (1: 127), a claim it supports by quoting the testimony of Susan van der Merwe, whose husband allegedly died at the hands of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC. In her testimony excerpted in the Report, Van der Merwe references ubuntu as the source of her belief that “every person’s life is too precious” (1: 128). The Report’s strategic excerpt supports the TRC’s claim about both the ubiquity and indigeneity of ubuntu in South Africa. It also underscores its nonracialism—Van der Merwe’s whiteness does not prevent her from affirming this “African” concept. The final Report also cites the statement of Cynthia Ngewu, whose son was among the “Gugulethu Seven” killed by the police in 1986: “We do not want to return the evil that perpetrators committed to the nation. We want to demonstrate humaneness towards them, so that they in turn may restore their own humanity” (5: 367). These presumably unsolicited statements of ubuntu provide support for the Report’s assertion that South Africans concurred with its understanding that there was a “need for ubuntu but not for victimization” (Republic of South Africa). The commissioners undoubtedly used ubuntu as a rhetorical resource to explain and justify “healing” truth and its relationship to the goal of reconciliation. But once the term ubuntu circulated, participants and critics of the TRC defined it in their own ways. For my purposes here, the authenticity or origins of ubuntu matter less than its function as a topos, or place of argument, for participants in and respondents to the TRC process.
The TRC’s truth typology produced a tangled knot more than a seamless weave. Criticism of what historian Deborah Posel calls the Commission’s “wobbly, poorly constructed conceptual grid” of truths abounds (155). Some argue that the TRC’s major dilemmas resulted from the fact that “the two processes—quasi-judicial fact-finding versus victim-centered storytelling—were fundamentally irreconcilable, and for a simple reason: different kinds of truth were at stake” (Simpson 238). Anthony Holiday argues similarly: “The former set of [forensic] facts served the interests of the TRC’s truth-gathering task, while the latter [psychological] set, once bared in public, would be grist to the mill of national reconciliation” (54). Still others argue that the TRC never intended for the truths to cohere. To wit, Daniel Herwitz proposes that the Commission’s typology was instrumental, “operat[ing] as a homily throughout the proceedings” so as to facilitate the movement from truth to reconciliation (16). More recently, Paul Gready, while generally laudatory of the TRC framework (56), has cautioned against the embrace of a “banal post-modern” conception of truth that does not “confront and refute” obviously untrue narratives and perspectives (73). Gready notes that “simply mapping contradictory truths potentially enriches difference,” and he chastises “writers and critics” who, consciously or not, provide “ammunition” for such an approach (71, 73). Gready writes primarily for scholars and practitioners of transitional justice and human rights. He seeks to draw general insights from the South African experience about the usefulness of truth commissions as a transitional justice mechanism.
My aim in the following chapters is not to judge the consistency or coherence of the TRC’s truth typology—the job of the philosopher or historian. Nor is it to evaluate the typology’s usefulness as a tool of reconciliation—the job of a scholar or practitioner of transitional justice. My interest instead lies in the ways in which the Commission’s engagement with different kinds of truth, as well as its claims about truth’s varied effects, generated contestation in the public hearings and spawned a range of imaginative receptions of the TRC process. A cultural rhetoric approach that reads across genres is able to capture this ecology of truth claims, as it occurs at the interstices of, and traverses, institutional, political, and cultural realms. The imaginative texts that I examine do not offer ambiguous postmodern conceptions of truth but rather make pointed arguments about the limitations, strengths, and unanticipated effects of the Commission’s process and arguments. Because the HRVC and AC emphasized different kinds of truth and made different arguments about the effects of those truths on TRC participants and South African society at large, I address their work in different chapters. The HRVC, whose work dominated the first year and a half of the TRC process, prioritized narrative truth and suggested that it would culminate in a healing truth for individuals and those who bore witness to their stories. To this claim, captured in the slogan “speaking is healing,” I now turn.
AMBIVALENT SPEECH, RESONANT SILENCES
Memories, like stories, can never be free.
—SARAH NUTTALL
I am not going back there. Pray to God that I am not asked to appear before the TRC again. Yes, going to the TRC was a victory. It was a victory in that I found the courage to confront my rape. It gave me a platform to share my grief. It made me talk. Hopefully, I will heal in time.
—THANDI SHEZI
The Commission’s work relied on giving words to experience. Yet, women’s “silence” can be recognised as meaningful. To do so requires carefully probing the cadences of silence, the gaps between fragile words, in order to hear what it is that women say.
—FIONA ROSS
Scholars and human rights activists agree that telling one’s story does not necessarily promote
