Steven Robins: CROSSFIRE
Claudia Braude recently criticised Antjie Krog’s much acclaimed book Country of My Skull, for endorsing a postmodern sensibility that celebrates the slippery and subjective character of truth claims (Friday, June 12 to 18).
The book, based on Krog’s personal experiences as an Afrikaans radio journalist covering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, raises important questions concerning historical truth.
Braude criticises Krog for seeming to question the very possibility of arriving at the truth of apartheid. Krog writes that she has difficulty even pronouncing the word ”truth”. How then will the truth commission’s final report deal with the troubling question of historical truth?
Braude’s wariness of slippery truths, historical revisionism and moral relativism is not entirely unfounded. It has a dangerous precedent in the German historian’s debate, or historiker streit, that raged in West Germany in the mid-1980s.
German revisionist historians such Ernst Nolte argued for an understanding of Nazi anxieties of Bolsheviks that purportedly led to Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution.
In South Africa we have heard similar versions of historical revisionism whereby former minister of law and order Adriaan Vlok has claimed that it was fear of communist terror and tyranny that motivated apartheid repression and counter- revolutionary strategies.
But without reliable historical narratives of apartheid, we will allow conservatives such as Vlok to deploy moral relativism and revisionism to obscure the brutal facts of apartheid’s nightmare of racial capitalism.
The commission hearings have complicated our understanding of the past, making it increasingly difficult for the commission to produce a neat and unambiguous account of the apartheid past.
However, in acknowledging the subjective, situational and elusive character of all truth claims, one could play into the hands of conservatives who are now claiming that the human rights violations of the liberation movements can be compared to those perpetrated by the apartheid state.
While providing an invaluable archive on apartheid human rights violations, the commission hearings have also complicated attempts to produce the kind of seamless heroic nationalist narrative of the kind produced in neighbouring Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe’s ruling party, Zanu-PF, indirectly controlled the production of official histories of the liberation struggle.
The Zimbabwean state incorporated influential academic historiographical accounts of the guerrilla war into a mythology of nation-building that privileged and celebrated the role of the Zanu-PF in the anti-colonial struggle.
In this account, the guerrilla violence was represented as heroic resistance in a sanitised form that elided references to the killings of alleged ”sell-outs”. It also foregrounded the Zanu-PF’s role and minimised the contribution of another party, Zapu, to the liberation struggle.
By contrast, in South Africa the media have given prominence to commission hearings that have opened up a highly visible public accounting of the complexities and ambiguities of ”the struggle”.
While the official narratives of South Africa’s liberation struggle continue to highlight its heroic character, the commission hearings have allowed a multiplicity of voices to be heard.
For instance, the commission has heard testimonies and evidence of not only the torture and killing of anti-apartheid activists by agents of the South African state, but also victims of African National Congress and Pan Africanist Congress terror attacks, incidents of torture in ANC camps, and the necklacings of alleged apartheid informers.
Although it was initiated by the ANC, the commission hearings have complicated heroic struggle narratives and allowed for a far less monologic account of the past than was initially anticipated. Testimonies of abuses came from South African citizens situated on all sides of the conflict.
In the next few months the commission will be finalising its official report based on almost two years of human rights violations and amnesty hearings.
The report is likely to generate considerable debate and controversy. Already we have heard the criticisms Professor Hermann Giliomee, who has expressed concern that the report will become an ANC-biased official history of South Africa’s past.
While the report will no doubt be written from the perspective of those sympathetic to the fight against apartheid, this in itself is not necessarily a problem. After decades of apartheid state propaganda, a strong argument can be made for the need of an official account of the past written from the perspective of anti-apartheid activists and intellectuals.
Although such an endeavour will inevitably be a partial and incomplete version of South Africa’s recent past, this does not mean that there will not be opportunities for alternative histories that fill in the gaps, silences and biases of the commission’s final report.
It will also be up to South African academics, journalists, film-makers, artists and writers to take up this challenge. The commission has provided us with considerable archival material with which we can begin the long and arduous process of working through the apartheid past.
Numerous journalists, academics, writers and political commentators have tried to make sense of the emotional rollercoaster that began with the first commission hearings in East London. The gruesome revelations of the state terror and political violence of the apartheid era shocked and numbed a nation struggling to come to terms with its traumatic past.
While commissioners and journalists speak of the difficulty of emotionally and psychologically dealing with the raw pain of victims’ testimonies of violence, conservative whites such as PW Botha continue to be in a state of denial. They derisively label the commission the ”crying game” and complain that it is biased in favour of the liberation movements.
They constantly refer to the human rights violations perpetrated by the liberation movements and refer to incidents of torture and killings in ANC camps in Angola, the Mandela United Football Club, the necklacings and so on.
While the commission report will address violations perpetrated by all parties, including the liberation movements, it remains to be seen how these violent incidents will be framed within the overarching narrative of the story of apartheid.
Meanwhile many South Africans are profoundly sceptical of the theological language of forgiveness and reconciliation espoused by commission chair Desmond Tutu and his deputy, Alec Borraine.
Despite these challenges, there is widespread recognition among South Africans that amnesty was perhaps an appropriate and politically necessary compromise, given the balance of forces at the Codesa constitutional negotiations, as well as the real threat of right-wing political mobilisation.
While this strategic perspective based on an understanding of the ”larger picture” may not ease the pain of the families of victims, it does perhaps explain why the ANC and its supporters have gone along with this powerful, yet flawed, process.
What is also obscured in this process is the connection between apartheid bureaucratic violence such as the forced removals from District Six and Sophiatown, and post- apartheid criminal and gang violence and poverty. By recognising these continuities of apartheid, it becomes possible to link the banality of apartheid bureaucratic terror to the everyday violence and poverty of the 1990s.
By focusing on apartheid killers and torturers such as Eugene de Kock and Ferdi Barnard, the commission and the media have deflected attention away from the fact that millions of whites voted the National Party into power every year since 1948.
This focus on extraordinary violations has also allowed whites to convince themselves that apartheid is dead and buried; this obscures the continuities of racialised poverty produced through decades of apartheid social engineering.
Critical commentators, such as Professor Mahmood Mamdani, have taken the commission to task for focusing exclusively on gross human rights violations to the exclusion of the more mundane and systemic bureaucratic violence of apartheid, for instance, pass laws, bantustan policies, group areas forced removals and racial discrimination in health, education, housing and sport.
This focus on ”extraordinary” violence has allowed white South Africans to escape moral and political responsibility for apartheid bureaucratic violence that they endorsed by voting for the NP. It has also allowed the systemic socio-economic legacies of apartheid to recede from public discourse.
John Pilger’s recent controversial television documentary Apartheid Did Not Die addressed these more structural traces of racial capitalism. Pilger provides compelling evidence of racialised poverty by contrasting the opulence of the historically white suburbs such as Sandton, Houghton and Constantia with the dire poverty of the black townships.
Pilger seems to suggest that as much as Tutu and the commission may try to bring about national reconciliation through the revelation of truth, without a fundamental process of social transformation, this is likely to be an unfulfilled and incomplete project.
Why then were government representatives so quick to dismiss and disparage Pilger’s seemingly self-evident documentary? Why was it caricatured as Loony Left polemic? Whereas critiques of racial capitalism were once accepted as truth within the liberation movements, they are now dismissed by the new ruling class as pure polemic and naive utopian socialist rhetoric. Clearly this particular truth of Pilger’s, namely that apartheid is far from dead and buried, does not fall within the brief of the commission
However, it does draw attention to one of its major shortcomings:its quest for reconciliation in the absence of redress of apartheid’s socio-economic legacies.
While the commission cannot deliver either ”the truth” or social transformation, it can nonetheless help to create an invaluable public archive about the apartheid past. Such an archive will be particularly useful when conservative revisionists and moral relativists start claiming that apartheid was not as bad as it is made out to be.
Dr Steven Robins is affiliated to the department of anthropology and sociology at the University of the Western Cape