Jaspreet Kindra A COUNTRY UNMASKED: INSIDE SOUTH AFRICA’S TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION by Alex Boraine (Oxford University Press) No Future without Forgiveness by Desmond Tutu (Rider) After the TRC: Reflections on truth and reconciliation in South Africa edited by Wilmot James and Linda van der Vijver (David Philip/Ohio University Press) Antjie Krog’s book on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Country of My Skull, provided a searingly emotional picture of that painful process. The new books on the commission offer an opportunity to assess it more soberly. Media attention has already been caught by alleged criticisms by deputy commission chair Alex Boraine. One of them was his view of how commission chair Desmond Tutu handled himself at the hearings into Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s involvement in the activities of the Mandela United Football Club. Yet, reading the book, it is clear that whatever mild criticims of Tutu Boraine airs he is careful to contextualise and to attempt to explain in terms of Tutu’s beliefs and role as the commission’s moral guide.
In his book, which is a very first-person insider account of the TRC, Boraine notes negative perceptions of Tutu’s conduct at the commission. He says that Tutu’s hugging of Madikizela-Mandela during the hearing “and his declaration of love and admiration left the commission wide open to the charge of bias”. He also mentions that the contrast between this hearing and the trial of PW Botha “only added fuel to the flames of criticism”. After reading the Boraine book as well as the recently released paperback edition of Tutu’s version (both are interesting books but hardly sparkling reads), one feels the need to re-examine this criticism. While not doubting Tutu’s commitment to Christian values, it would have taken a demi-god to bring himself to hug Botha. In a chapter prior to the one that deals with the Madikizela-Mandela hearing, Boraine ironically notes how, “ignoring court protocol” and “giving Botha the benefit of the doubt”, Tutu made a personal plea to the former president to apologise. With Madikizela-Mandela, Tutu may have overstepped his brief, but to my mind, it was to achieve the same end. Boraine acknowledges this in an observation which has been overshadowed by the controversy: “I think he [Tutu] genuinely believed that he could elicit from Madikizela-Mandela some apology, some acceptance of responsibility, some accountability.”
Tutu, in his book, believes he managed to do that: “I think this was the very first time Mrs Madikizela-Mandela had apologised in public, and that was something for someone as proud as her … I did not have time to think about the consequences of a rebuff from Mrs Mandela. My impassioned plea could so easily have fallen flat on its face. Mercifully, she responded reasonably positively …” But Tutu, with his deep concern for healing the wounds of the past, seemed most conerned to promote reconciliation -“forgiveness” in the religious sense – while others may have been more concerned to extract confessions. From his account of his decision to refer to his long-standing relationship with the Mandelas, the dilemma that Tutu faced as he identified with some of those who appeared before them surfaces. Yet he fights this identification, even citing African National Congress criticism that those who fought against apartheid and those who implemented it had been placed on the same moral plane by the TRC. Boraine mentions the problem in his book now and then, but does not address it fully. It was, however, a real dilemma faced by other members of the commission. Among those who chose to be vocal about it were commissioners Hlengiwe Mkhize and Mapule Ramashala. They recently told this paper how debate on the issue was silenced by a “pacifist” Tutu, and it was clearly a persistent problem for members of the commission. How to make the necessary discriminations between the kinds of offences committed? Constitutional Court judge Albie Sachs comes up with some potential answers in the fascinating collection of essays and articles by the likes of Richard Goldstone, Mamphela Ramphele, Kaizer Nyatsumba, Mahmood Mamdani and Charles Villa-Vicencio, After the TRC. Tutu may have been most concerned with reconciliation, but others were focused on first extracting something as close as possible to the truth. Except that “truth” is not always a stable or mutually agreed concept. Sachs points out that one of the difficulties the TRC faced was that it was dealing with two kinds of truth – microscopic and dialogic at the same time. “Microscopic truth” is what is examined in a legal case, where one observes “a limited, prescribed field – you control the variables, you exclude everything else, and you make your observations in terms of the relationship between the variables”. “Dialogic truth”, a “kind of social truth”, takes the experiences and interpretations of events of the various participants into account. Mkhize and Ramashala’s criticism, one suspects, arises from the fact that they feel the commission should have pursued “dialogic” truth exclusively.
Himself a victim of a bomb blast engineered by apartheid agents, Sachs’s observations about the successes of the TRC process are insightful. Since the TRC, he says, he has added other categories of truth, among them “experiential truth”, which he draws from Mahatma Gandhi’s My Experiments with Truth. Gandhi, he observes, “started off with his life, his experience, the phenomenon of being himself in a particular place in particular circumstances. And out of these lived experiences, he generalised. In South Africa, experiential truth is absolutely powerful and massive and vivid and varied for a great many people.” And it is the emergence of this experiential truth arising out of “lived experiences”that the TRC enabled. Tackling the criticism that the TRC did little in terms of monetary reparation, Sachs argues that the restoration of the dignity to an individual, according him or her the right to speak, to be heard, to be acknowledged, is “worth beyond rubies”. Yet he feels that the question of reparation should not be addressed exclusively by the government but that each individual in the society should contribute a percentage of their salary towards the relief of those who suffered. By making the process a lot more participatory in this fashion, perhaps true reconciliation would be more forthcoming. And by making it real, this would perhaps end the local cynicism about the TRC process, alluded to by number of academics in After the TRC. One of them is Patricia Valdez, who headed a similar truth commission for victims of the autocratic regime in El Salvador, and draws comparisons with the South African TRC. She says that, from her South American experience, “reconciliation is not brought about by government decrees, that free elections do not instantaneously establish democratic institutions or ensure that they function efficiently”. She wisely observes that such bodies are really fighting for a “permanent culture of human rights”, which aim for legal, institutional and political efficiency extending beyond the period of transition.