href="#u77455681-03b9-57e5-b590-1fd52955d262">Chapter 4, “Imagining Reconciliation,” examines TRC participants’ visual and verbal arguments around the topos of reconciliation as they appear in Jillian Edelstein’s photographic essay, Truth and Lies: Stories from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (2001). As in the previous chapters, I begin with an analysis of the Commission’s complex, and at times contradictory, arguments about reconciliation, focusing particularly on its linking of reconciliation to democratic praxis. I then show how the individuals whose portraits and testimonies appear in Edelstein’s Truth and Lies complicate the TRC’s vision by differently “imagining” both the process of reconciliation and the nature of democratic relations in the new South Africa that the TRC sought to create (Asen 351). Drawing on Robert Asen’s understanding of the “collective imaginary” as a source of “topics of discussion” (351), and Barbie Zelizer’s argument that images invite speculation by “activat[ing] impulses about how the ‘world might be’ rather than how ‘it is’” (164), I suggest that Edelstein’s photographs function rhetorically by inviting speculation about the emergence of democratic norms and the possibilities for coexistence in the new South Africa. Truth and Lies thus showcases rhetoric’s function as an art of invention “capable of creating new versions of the real and the valuable” (Atwill 206). Finally, the conclusion considers the methodological implications of my study by further elaborating on the importance of reading across genres in politically contentious situations.
LOCALIZING TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE
The transnational circulation of people and ideas across cultural and geographic contexts has created new situations in which persuasion can occur. Rhetoric happens when rhetors take up arguments and tropes from this global flow to effect change or achieve identification in a particular location or situation. Rhetorical scholars have urged that attention be paid to rhetoric’s now “wider ecology” (Edbauer 9) and to the ways that the “global turn requires a comparative-historical frame and a broader understanding of culture, text, context, and the public sphere than what traditional rhetorical and ethnographic criticism provides” (Hesford 790). Despite these appeals, the field still tends to produce studies of purportedly bounded situations and locales, predominantly in the United States and Europe. For rhetorical scholars to understand late twentieth- and twenty-first-century events, we need to attend to the effects of the convergence of the global and the local that transnationalism makes possible. One way to grasp the rhetorical effects of the transnational “ecology” of rhetoric, particularly in sites beyond the field’s traditional areas of focus, is to study truth commissions.
While the form of the truth commission is now global—countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and North America have held truth commissions, and currently there are calls for a national truth commission on torture in the United States—that form becomes rhetorically significant when it is used to effect change in a particular place, time, and situation. Analyzing the interplay between the generic form of the truth commission and the specific purposes that are ascribed to it in a given place and time can deepen our understanding of rhetoric in the era of transnationalism. The TRC offers a fruitful site through which to consider the implications of this transnational ecology because it is a site where local, national, and global discourses converged and interacted with the explicit intention of creating South Africa’s new democracy. The participants in the TRC process spoke (or remained silent) as individuals with different sociocultural, political, and religious identifications, as South African citizens invested in the future of a particular nation-state, and as cosmopolitans versed in the global discourse of human rights.
This chapter analyzes the genesis of the South African TRC. One of the unique characteristics of the TRC—its acknowledgment of four different kinds of truth—emerged from the transnational exchange of ideas about how best to deal with a violent past. Scholars and practitioners of transitional justice have criticized the TRC’s “typology of truths” (Posel 155). I return to the specifics of their criticism later in this chapter. For now I want only to emphasize that the Commission’s complex approach to truth emerged not from academe, but from a tense and constraint-laden political context. That it was internally inconsistent and worked at times at cross-purposes is thus not surprising. From a rhetorical perspective, the coherence of the TRC’s approach to truth matters less than the lines of reasoning and possibilities of identification and persuasion that it made possible at a particular moment in time. After briefly reviewing the history of the negotiations that led to South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy, this chapter analyzes the contributions of participants at two Justice in Transition conferences that were held prior to the creation of the TRC in February and July of 1994.1 It then describes the TRC’s distinguishing features and the time line of its process to set the stage for the subsequent chapters’ analysis of the agonistic deliberation that the TRC’s varied, and at times contradictory, claims about truth and truth’s effects inspired during its public hearings and in their imaginative receptions.
Negotiating the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy
That the TRC was a response to the particularities of a negotiated transition, not the realization of an abstract theory of truth and reconciliation, helps explain the complexities and contradictions of its mandate and process. Erik Doxtader’s With Faith in the Works of Words provides a richly detailed history of the decade-long series of negotiations that lead to the end of apartheid. In the history that follows, I cover some of the same ground, but with a focus on the ways in which the TRC resulted not only from negotiations within South Africa but also from the insights gained from other nations’ experiments with “dealing with the past” and the influences of global human rights rhetoric. Like Claire Moon, I locate the TRC’s “genesis at the intersection between both global and local narratives” (18). While Moon synthesizes the scholarship of transitional justice to support this assertion, I examine actual South Africans’ uptake of international arguments about transitional justice through an analysis of the transcriptions of two Justice in Transition conferences. Attending to the specific concerns of these conference participants reveals the particular ways in which global arguments about truth, justice, and reconciliation take root and are transformed in a local context.
The challenge of assigning accountability—or granting amnesty—for abuses committed against and in defense of the system of apartheid vexed the earliest phases of the transition.2 It is important to note here that South Africa did not undergo a revolution (De Lange 20). By entering into negotiations with the apartheid government, the African National Congress (ANC) acknowledged the legal framework of apartheid despite its political position regarding the system’s illegitimacy. Tension arising from this acknowledgment permeated the transitional talks and continued throughout the TRC process (De Lange; Asmal, Asmal, and Roberts). The “talk about talks” that initiated the transition began in 1984, when representatives of the National Party (NP), which had held political power continuously since 1948 and was responsible for instituting apartheid, made contact with the still-imprisoned future president, Nelson Mandela. In February 1990, President F. W. De Klerk, a “reformer,” released Mandela, who had spent twenty-seven years in prison as a political prisoner; removed the ban on the ANC as well as other anti-apartheid political parties; and passed the Indemnity Act. The Indemnity Act of 1990 empowered the president to grant indemnity from prosecution if he was “of the opinion that it is necessary for the promotion of peaceful constitutional solutions in South Africa or the unimpeded and efficient administration of justice” (qtd. in Sarkin-Hughes 38). Popular perception was that this first Indemnity Act was targeted primarily at anti-apartheid activists who could not claim immunity (Ntoubandi 156). Negotiations between the NP and the various anti-apartheid parties continued in fits and starts during the two-phased Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) from December 1991 through May 1992. The Boipatong massacre on 17 June 1992 signaled the nadir of the efforts to negotiate; the Bisho massacre on 7 September of that
