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 same year served as an impetus to jump-start them. Later that September, the NP and ANC signed a Record of Understanding that laid the basis for the resumption of negotiations after the breakdown of CODESA. Though the Record of Understanding guaranteed the release of an additional five hundred ANC political prisoners, it did not include an amnesty provision for government forces or for members of the white right, who consequently pressured the government to expand the Indemnity Act of 1990. Their efforts led to the passage of the Further Indemnity Act in October 1992. This act allowed for a panel appointed by the president to grant pardons for past abuses in secret hearings and, not surprisingly, was heavily criticized by international observers (Ntoubandi 157). The National Executive Committee of the ANC rejected the legality of the Further Indemnity Act outright, insisting not only “that the truth must be known, that it must be complete, and that it must be officially proclaimed and publicly exposed,” but also that only a democratically elected government should determine the form such truth telling would take (in Boraine, Levy, and Scheffer 139). Later that year, the “sunset clause,” brokered by Communist Party leader Joe Slovo, addressed the ANC’s criticism of the Further Indemnity Act by determining that amnesty would be granted only in exchange for full disclosure. The sunset clause laid the groundwork for the Multi-Party Negotiating Forum (MPNF), which convened on 1 April 1993 to write the interim constitution and create transitional political structures that would facilitate the first democratic election.
The interim constitution, ratified on 18 November 1993, sidestepped the vexed issue of accountability for past abuses and the uncertain legal status of the prior indemnity acts. While it required that some form of amnesty be granted, it mandated that the parliament, soon to be democratically elected, would work out the thorny details. The “postamble” of the interim constitution reads:
In order to advance such reconciliation and reconstruction, amnesty shall be granted in respect of acts, omissions and offences associated with political objectives and committed in the course of the conflicts of the past. To this end, Parliament under this Constitution shall adopt a law determining a firm cut-off