staff survived
With its staff drawn from such diverse backgrounds, there was as much tension within the TRC as at the public hearings, writes Gaye Davis
The three-year life span of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has been marked by public sensation throughout the hearings. But behind the public drama of tortured facing the torturers and killers facing the families of those they had killed, private dramas were being played out within the commission itself, possibly more significant to the “new” South Africa.
By December 1995, the TRC’s 17 commissioners had been appointed – chosen from a shortlist culled from names suggested by political parties, churches and other organs of civil society. Although many had a human rights track record, the deciding factor in their selection was the constituency they represented. “There were names there I did not like,” Nelson Mandela said. “But in order to unite the nation I had to bring them in.” This stamped the commission as a political organisation, rather than the impartial machinery envisaged by the Act, and would have consequences.
A lawyer on the commission, Paul van Zyl, would later describe one of his most difficult tasks at the TRC as getting the commissioners moving in one direction: “There were whites and blacks, some sympathetic to the National Party, some who had been tortured, and so very often we got bogged down in tiny issues … it was a microcosm of what was happening in South Africa.”
Staff were drawn from similarly diverse backgrounds. Many were from a struggle tradition and were survivors of apartheid abuses themselves. They had their own expectations of what the commission would be and how it would function. Its strict hierarchy – some would say patriarchy- came as a shock.
One of the abiding ironies of the TRC is that while it was created from scratch in post-1994 South Africa, its structure would later be criticised by staff as replicating apartheid divides. There was an enormous gulf between commissioners and staff – statement-takers, briefers, interpreters, data processors, logistics officers and investigators.
Commissioners, earning the salaries paid to judges, flew first class, stayed in luxury accommodation and received a range of perks. Staff travelled economy and shared one-star hotel bedrooms. They felt they carried the bulk of the workload. Resentment was heightened when some commissioners were seen not to be carrying their share of the load.
Mahlubi Mabizela – better known as “chief” – joined the TRC as a researcher in April 1996. He was a survivor: as a youth and student activist, he had been hounded, detained and tortured by security police. Like many staff, he joined the TRC because he wanted to make a contribution to the country’s future. Like many, his idealism carried a dash of self-interest: the experience would further his career.
And, like many, he was unprepared for the emotions the TRC’s work would unleash in him: “You met all sorts of people who could break you. I underestimated the impact it would have on me. I had been through it. I thought, I’m a victim … but not like the person testifying. We had to deal with this on top of the strains and stresses of the work itself. There were no arrangements initially for counselling staff.”
Working under an oath of secrecy was an added burden. TRC media liaison officer Christelle Terreblanche, a white Afrikaans speaker, described its effect on her: “You worked with things you couldn’t share with anybody, not even your closest friend. It was stressful emotionally and the work was hard … but in the beginning it got sorted out by everyone having to dive in and get the show on the road. Everyone was busy, our hearts were in it. We would work a 16-hour day, then go out and party.”
When Mabizela joined the commission, ordinary South Africans had begun relating their suffering under apartheid in the first public hearings. This in itself was an extraordinary achievement. “We were rapped over the knuckles for not going through the State Tender Board for furniture and so on,” commissioner Mary Burton recalls. “But decisions like that meant the TRC was up and running very quickly.”
In the headlong rush to get things moving, however, potential problems were not anticipated. No policy of racial representivity governed early staff appointments, although one later evolved. “In the beginning it was easy for people to say they knew someone who had the skills and who could come in,” says Burton. “You tended to rely on people you knew could deliver, without realising you could find other people just as capable.”
Adds fellow commissioner Faizel Randera: “Jobs were advertised and management would give them to a white or Indian person and this would raise some people’s hackles … there were issues like parking, why it was available for some people and not others. Staff associations started forming in every TRC office across the country.”
At the interface between the TRC and the public were the statement-takers. “The statement-takers were the shock- absorbers of the commission,” says Mabizela. “They had to explain to people on the ground. Farm labourers saw the TRC’s coming as a sort of messiah. But the policy decision was that their suffering was not covered by the Act, it was not a gross violation. The statement-takers were the ones to have to say: `Sorry, we are not talking to you.’
“The people higher up, perhaps they were uncomfortable with the decision, but they weren’t face-to-face with people. There was the sense that decisions were being imposed on us … on top of the stress and trauma we were experiencing.”
Staff were shifted from one position to another to cope with fresh demands, sudden needs. But according to Mabizela, there was no human resources policy. Generally, the human resources department was perceived by staff to be so weak as to be non-existent (it was later disbanded). When contracts finally arrived, months late, they often referred to positions people no longer held. Education and skills levels differed remarkably within sections doing the same work, generating resentment and anger that would often manifest racially.
For many, the commission offered a way of dealing with stored-up anger rooted in the past. But there were no built- in mechanisms to allow for that to be managed constructively.
Says Terreblanche: “There was a wall of repressed emotions.We thought we were dealing with racism, but then when someone dropped a match into the brew you’d find your circuits were already overloaded – and there was nowhere to go to offload. Suddenly I’d be white and Afrikaans. It all exploded into race. Staff had to fight to get group therapy.”
Tensions blew up in October 1997 when a key commissioner, Dumisa Ntsebeza – head of the investigative unit head – was implicated in a 1993 Apla attack on Cape Town’s Heidelberg Tavern. His accuser, gardener Bennet Sibaya, later confessed he was forced to lie after being arrested for poaching.
The Afrikaans poet, Antjie Krog, gave a contemporary description of the dislocation and controversy the incident sparked within the commission in her book, Country of My Skull: “… the whites think Ntsebeza is involved, the blacks think he has been set up … And there is no space to argue in – it has become a matter of race. The little bit of healing, the trust, the unity … built up over two years, at great effort and with many sacrifices, have been wiped out …”
Commissioner Wendy Orr, deputy chair of the reparations and rehabilitation committee, says: “The politicians had covered all the legal bases in drafting the Act – but no one had considered the emotional consequences.” The reparations and rehabilitation committee was labelled the locus of racial tension in the TRC after reports in which unnamed black officials claimed they were being sidelined; that the TRC was being run by a coterie of white liberals.
Orr says the tensions reflected what was happening in the commission as a whole. “I don’t want to get into psychobabble but it was almost as if the TRC was making the committee the site of the problems so they could split us off … We became the repository for the commission’s tensions, but the problems weren’t only ours.”
The committee’s request for an outside facilitator’s mediation was refused “from the top”. “We were just expected to get on with each other. There was no space for conflict, disagreement, anger, hurt, pain – all of which were there and which sometimes came out in very destructive ways,” says Orr.
Another commissioner’s view was that TRC chair Desmond Tutu disliked conflict and was reluctant to acknowledge it: “The atmosphere was always one of `don’t raise the difficult issues’. Tutu was very proud of us being part of the rainbow nation, that we had managed to overcome our problems, that we could show we were part of a reconciled, new South Africa.”
Tutu was seen on the commission as the moral leader, the helmsman; his deputy, Alex Boraine, the nuts-and- bolts man, the one who made things happen. There were things Tutu could do and say that Boraine – the white liberal – could not. At critical moments, Tutu would step in, restate the task at hand and remind everyone the process was bigger and more important than the individuals involved.
While some commissioners were initially uncomfortable, even irritated, by the archbishop’s theological grounding, his reliance on prayer, he kept things on track by the sheer force of his personality.
“It’s hard to imagine the TRC happening at all without Tutu,” says Orr. “His moral leadership was enormously important – his integrity, his commitment to the process. There was nothing self-serving about it whatsoever. He would remind us of what we were there to do – and there were times we needed reminding.”
It has not been a perfect process. Many thousands of people did not get access to the TRC. Many of those who did have received letters saying they have been found not to be victims: their victimisation was not politically motivated, their statements were uncorroborated. People can appeal, but it is “the most heartbreaking work” Burton has ever done.
Burton has a list of names of people the TRC has asked for more information – a death certificate, a witness’s sworn statement.
People not found to be victims do not qualify for reparations. Nor is this potentially divisive issue yet settled: the president and Parliament must consider the TRC’s recommendations and they, not the TRC, must then implement them. This distinction will not easily be understood. People who qualified for urgent interim relief have died without receiving it, fuelling anger over government delays in issuing it – anger directed at the TRC. Many communities want the TRC to return and report back; it will not be doing so.
Amnesty hearings will continue to unravel past the next general election. If reparations are not dealt with soon, the notion that the TRC process has favoured perpetrator over victim will become entrenched.
There is a question-mark over the vigour with which the government will pursue prosecutions of those implicated in abuses who did not apply for amnesty, and whether there will be enough evidence to succeed in them. “It was to be expected that a lot of fish, including big fish, would go through,” says Ntsebeza. “You can’t expect in 18 months to investigate 34 years of history.”
Yet the TRC was a powerful instrument to deal with the past; it uncovered voluminous portions of it, dispelling decades of secrecy and suspicion. Voices long silenced were heard; bodies found and rightfully buried. White South Africans can no longer say “we didn’t know” – about the chemical and biological warfare programme, the bodies burned while policemen barbecued, the myriad brutalities carried out in the name of moral crusades against ideologies.
The TRC’s final report was bitterly contested within the TRC. It will be subjected to rigorous scrutiny and criticism, not to mention shrill objections from parties that turned their backs on the process, but that paradoxically expected it to be a panacea for the country’s ills.
Political fallout over the TRC is inevitable. It should not be laid at its door. The astounding thing about the TRC is that it achieved as much as it did, despite the conflicts and tensions that resonated within it, reflecting those playing out in South Africa as a whole. It worked in spite of itself – on a wing and a prayer. It has laid the foundation for reconciliation – “dug the trench”, as “chief” would say.
The full version of this article is published in the latest issue of Siyaya magazine, available from Idasa