would help open democracy’s commons and build collective interest from old divisions” (With Faith 257).3 The Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act charged the TRC not only with the historical task of depicting the “causes, nature, and extent” of the human rights violations that occurred during a particular time period, but also with gathering the “motives and perspectives” of victims and perpetrators through investigations and hearings. This situation of contingent truth seeking calls to mind the Sophistic emphasis on the role of human perception as the primary source of knowledge, on the significance of speaking before others, and, finally, on the necessity of group deliberation (Jarratt xviii). The architects of the Commission hoped that victims’ and perpetrators’ narratives and their “public acknowledgement” by the Commission would “restore the dignity of victims and afford perpetrators the opportunity to come to terms with their own past” as well as foster an “understanding of our divided pasts” (TRC, Report 1:49). Consciously or not, they operated on the rhetorical faith that the language elicited by the TRC would have material effects; it would transform not only the individual participants in the TRC process but also the South African society that bore witness to them. The TRC’s attempt to create a public for the new nation—one comprising individual citizens engaged in reasoning about the significance of South Africa’s recent past—reveals much about the relationship of language practices and the formation of publics.
From Apartheid to Democracy conceives of the South African TRC as a rhetorical event in three specific senses of the term “rhetorical,” none of which precludes the others. First, the TRC was premised on arguments about the dunamis (power, potential) of language as described above—rhetoric as constitutive. Second, the Commission’s architects, and subsequently the Commission itself, sought to persuade various publics of language’s transformative effects so as to stave off calls for other forms of dealing with the past and to facilitate South Africa’s (relatively) nonviolent transition—rhetoric as persuasion. Third, and most centrally for this project, the TRC sought to generate “public debate, public participation and criticism” (TRC, Report 1: 104)—rhetoric as argument. A rhetorical approach to the TRC yields an intriguing set of questions: How does a truth commission promote identification amid competing truth claims and arguments occurring at different points of stasis? In a civic setting that is premised on the sharing of personal stories, what relates and separates the rhetorics of the civic and the personal? How do the dynamics between the participants in a truth commission process, and the constraints produced by their ideological and sociohistorical contexts, construct this novel rhetorical situation? Which of the Commission’s arguments did different South African publics seek to contest, and how did these publics voice their counterarguments within the public hearings? Finally, how did this argumentation continue both beyond and outside of the Commission’s formal process in genres not typically perceived as rhetorical, such as the novel and the photographic essay?
From Apartheid to Democracy joins a lively scholarly conversation about the TRC. Some studies of the Commission use empirical methods, employing “rigorous and systematic social science methods” (Gibson 3) or “more comprehensive and scientific assessment” (Chapman and Van der Merwe viii), to determine whether the TRC was a success. As their titles imply, Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? (Gibson) and the edited collection Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Did the TRC Deliver? (Chapman and Van der Merwe) exemplify this vein of scholarship.4 These empirical studies do a certain kind of work, but a rhetorical mode of analysis is especially suitable for a rhetorical situation. From Apartheid to Democracy’s rhetorical approach answers the question of the TRC’s “success” by arguing that the Commission provoked contentious debate and thus contributed to the creation of an agonistic deliberative public sphere. Here I draw both on political theorist Leigh A. Payne’s claim that “contentious debate enhances democratic practices by provoking political participation, contestation, and competition” (3) and on rhetorician Patricia Roberts-Miller’s positive valuation of agonistic over irenic deliberation. In contrast to irenic deliberation, which strives toward consensus and thus has the tendency to stifle disagreement and critical perspectives, agonistic deliberation “raises interesting questions, brings up injustices, or draws attention to points of view that had been obscured” (Miller 12). In the absence of absolute knowledge of the good, just, or right—that is, in the world of contingent human affairs as opposed to that of certain a priori truths—agonistic deliberation creates the optimal conditions in which to think through issues and determine courses of action.5
While From Apartheid to Democracy argues that agonistic deliberation characterized the TRC process, the Commission itself had both irenic and agonistic aims. The very title of its establishing Act, “Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation,” suggests its irenic impetus (while also betraying its humility about the possibility of achieving that aim through the use of the word “promotion”). At the same time, the Commission encouraged “public participation and scrutiny . . . [to help] the nation to focus on values central to a healthy democracy: transparency, public debate, public participation and criticism” (TRC, Report 1: 104). As Claire Moon demonstrates, a tension existed “between the homogenizing discourse of national unity and reconciliation, on the one hand, and the pluralizing process of the TRC on the other” (8, emphasis in original). While Moon focuses on the Commission’s production of that “homogenizing discourse,” I show how its public process created openings and opportunities to subvert its irenic aims and deliberate agonistically: participants and respondents challenged the TRC’s assumptions, called attention to its omissions and blind spots, and insisted that it recognize perspectives on the past that emphasized difference, especially concerning race. Thus while the TRC might be deemed a failure because empirical surveys demonstrate that South Africans are not fully reconciled, or that they feel that the “truth” of the past still eludes them,6 it was generative in that its very failure to achieve these idealistic goals provoked valuable contestation in its public hearings and in their literary and photographic receptions long after its official process had concluded.
In its insistence that agonistic contestation characterized the TRC’s public hearings and continued in their imaginative reception, From Apartheid to Democracy parts company with scholars who argue that the Commission allowed only certain statements while precluding others. For example, philosopher Daniel Herwitz, echoing historians Deborah Posel and Colin Bundy, claims that “the terms of the commission constrained the possibility and appropriateness of victim (and perpetrator) testimony, so that were one unable to abide by them, one would have to bow out of the proceedings altogether” (40). Herwitz suggests that the Commission’s “epistemic regime” was so powerful that victims and perpetrators whose perspectives on the past did not align with its reconciliatory agenda would voluntarily exclude themselves from its process (41). Drawing on a rhetorician’s sensitivity to the productive and interpretive art of a range of argumentative modes and genres, I show how contestation, though not always explicit or verbal, characterized both the public hearings and the creative work that responded to them. From Apartheid to Democracy builds on the work of scholars who show how the TRC’s public process enabled participants to influence its direction and outcomes. While Sanders examines how the TRC “altered its course in response to the testimony that it led” (9), and Goodman and Cole analyze the emotional and community-building effects of the Commission’s performative dimensions, I focus on the hearings and their imaginative reception as forums of contentious debate that enriched and deepened the truth and reconciliation process that the TRC set in motion. This agonistic contestation did not subvert or thwart the Commission’s aim of constructing a bridge toward “a future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy, and peaceful co-existence,” but rather signaled movement in that direction (Republic of South Africa).
In addition to adding this fine-grained rhetorical analysis of the agonistic deliberation that the Commission provoked to interdisciplinary scholarship on the TRC, From Apartheid to Democracy contributes to the growing body of rhetorical scholarship on South Africa. Philippe Salazar, Thomas Moriarty, and Erik Doxtader have already made the case that the new South Africa should occupy a central place in the “imagined global
