For nearly two years, between 1995 and 1997, South African television audiences were transfixed by 76 sessions of public testimony by the victims of the apartheid war. The human rights violations hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) opened in East London in the city hall. They set the tone for much of what followed.
After an overture of hymn, all stood with their heads bowed while Archbishop Desmond Tutu prayed and the names of those who had died or disappeared, who were the subject of the day’s hearings, were read out. A big white candle inscribed with a cross was lit. It symbolised the bringing of truth. Under the glare of television lamps, the commissioners crossed the floor to the rows of witnesses to welcome them before returning to sit behind a table covered with white linen to watch and listen.
The setting created by these preliminaries deliberately evoked Christian liturgy associated with the extension of sacrament, for the hearings were not just about bearing witness and giving evidence; for the commissioners their mission was to restore the body politic through truth, recognition and compassion.
For the next 24 months, together with television viewers, they would listen to hundreds of individual sagas of pain and suffering from victims and casualties from all sides of the conflict: the wife of a white man killed by Umkhonto guerrillas; the passerby shot by the police while on his way to the shops during a demonstration; the mother of an Inkatha Freedom Party gang leader who had been burned alive by African National Congress “comrades”; guerrillas still visibly affected by the torture they had received in police cells.
At the end of each statement, commissioners would ask the witnesses if they could forgive the perpetrators of the crimes they had experienced or seen. A few would say they could, but many remained silent. Telling their stories was their main purpose in coming to the commission, not forgiving their oppressors.
This public manifestation of the commission’s work probably made its most profound political impact. There is no question that the public violations hearings both helped to discredit the previous political order among white South Africans and offered an important kind of acknowledgement of the suffering and sacrifices that people had experienced in 30 years of violent conflict. Twenty-one thousand witnesses offered testimony, their stories supplying much of the evidence for the five-volume preliminary report, which the commission published in 1998 as the first substantial installment in a new South African public history.
Recording and recognising the stories of the casualties of liberation struggles was only one of the functions of the commission, though. The main purpose in its establishment was so that it should administer a programme of amnesty for all lawbreakers who had committed crimes in defence of or in opposition to the apartheid state. Complete disclosure would bring legal immunity for anybody who could persuade the TRC’s amnesty commission that their actions were politically motivated: torturers, guerrilla commanders, soldiers, vigilantes, saboteurs, anyone who had broken any South African law for political reasons.
In fact, the number who presented themselves at the amnesty hearings was comparatively modest, 7 000 or so, mainly from the ANC, for several orthodox trials of apartheid officials had already demonstrated that making a watertight case against people responsible for state terrorism was very difficult — too much of the evidence had been destroyed. The TRC amnestied about a third of those who applied, for generally it used quite stringent criteria for deciding if a crime was political.
The TRC’s operations attracted considerable criticism. The ANC reacted angrily to what it understood to be the commission’s suggestion that there could be any moral “equivalence” between its own human rights violations — including the use of torture in its own detention camps — and those of the South African government.
One consequence of the ANC’s anger may have been President Thabo Mbeki’s government’s apparent reluctance to pay the reparations recommended by the TRC to those it identified as human rights victims. The TRC’s treatment of FW de Klerk, whom it blamed for “third force” terrorism undertaken between 1990 and 1994, helped prompt the New National Party to leave the government of national unity in 1996.
Historians expressed reservations about the TRC’s depiction of black South Africans as passive recipients of oppression rather than as active agents in conflict. Anthropologists suggested that the TRC’s emphasis on forgiveness and restorative justice was at odds with more popular ethics of retribution and punishment. Public opinion verdicts on the TRC were quite favourable, though.
Most African respondents in a survey in 1996 agreed that “having the commission means that all people in South Africa will be able to live together more easily in future”, and most black South Africans questioned two years later, in 1998, believed the commission had been fair, as did a narrow majority of English-speaking whites. White Afrikaners did not.
Whether people told the truth or not, or whether or not they could feel themselves reconciled to their former tormentors, the TRC was a crucial agency in reconstructing the South African state’s moral authority, in remaking the body politic.
Tom Lodge is a professor of political studies at Wits University who has written extensively about the TRC