The TRC, Democratic Ethos & the New Culture Critique in South Africa
p. 211-232
Résumé
On the basis of an analysis of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa’s concept of democracy, this essay argues that in order to balance the seeming tension between the new democratic ethos, which allows its citizens to voice dissent without the fear of being crushed, and the demand to foster cohesion/solidarity so as to stabilize the newly formed volatile body politic, the government opted for the TRC. The Commission was an institution which, during its tenure, functioned as the new prohibitive body concerning issues of truth and reconciliation that was, however, open to criticism, albeit in a very limited form. This limitation is best illustrated by the performative nature of the TRC–as seen through the Human Rights Violations hearings–which, through its invocation, has allowed certain acts and prohibited others; as well as by the insistence on a pragmatic approach to truth and the conflation of the varied concepts of reconciliation for mostly national interests. This performance tension–between Truth and truths, national and individual reconciliation, the personal and the public, goal and process, positivism and dialecticism–has, in turn, created a performative contradiction within the TRC’s own structural reason, thus necessitating different forms of critique in dealing with it. In other words, this essay argues that there is a need to extrapolate the Commission’s reasoning from its practices in order to be able to grant it its deserved place in the continuum of post-apartheid South African discourse on amnesty, democracy, justice, memory, truth, reconciliation and whatever else the TRC saw in its purview to engage.
Texte intégral
1On the basis of an analysis of the concept of democracy as championed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (henceforth the TRC or the Commission), this essay recognizes that in order to balance the tension between the new democratic ethos, which allows its citizens to voice dissent without the fear of being crushed, and the goal of fostering cohesion/solidarity so as to stabilize the newly formed volatile body politic, the government opted to create the TRC. The essay will argue that the Commission was a transitional institution which, during its tenure (1996-2001), functioned as the new constitutive body concerning issues of truth and reconciliation that was, however, open to criticism, albeit in a very limited form. This limitation is best illustrated by the performative nature of the TRC–as seen through the Human Rights Violations hearings–which has allowed certain acts and prohibited others; as well as by the insistence on a pragmatic approach to truth and the conflation of the varied concepts of reconciliation for mostly national interests. This performance tension–between Truth and truths, national and individual reconciliation, the personal and the public, goal and process, positivism and dialecticism–has, in turn, created a performative contradiction within the TRC’s own raison d’être, thus necessitating different forms of critique in dealing with it. In other words, this essay argues that there is a need to extrapolate the Commission’s reasoning from its practices in order to be able to assess its place in the continuum of post-apartheid South African discourse on amnesty, democracy, justice, memory, truth, reconciliation and whatever else it saw in its purview to engage.
2A few words on critique are necessary to set the context of my analysis of the TRC and the circumambient culture of critique that I argue it has engendered. My definition and application of critique in this essay is informed quite strongly by two early1 theorists of the Frankfurt School, viz., Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who in their various works have offered an extensive analytical critique and criticism of what they refer to as the culture industry.2 The term culture industry, coined by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, refers to the idea of cultural mass deception, a situation standing in need of a thoroughgoing critique. The underlying premise, therefore, is that the TRC can be classified as a form of culture industry in the specific outline defined by Adorno and Horkheimer, and thus, as a result, stands in need of critique. This is not to say that the Commission was acutely aware of and cynically engineered such deception. However, given the salient subtlety with which the culture industry insinuates itself, the TRC could be said to have acted in accordance with such a description.
3For the early theorists, critique purports to stand outside the ‘things’ that it criticizes, while simultaneously acknowledging that such a dissociated position is limited by the fact that critique itself uses the very same modes of production–to borrow from Marx– which it purports to criticize. Therefore, critique cannot be bound by a Manichaean-like binary approach to reality, however useful such an approach might be in first articulating the status quo vis-à-vis the utopian ideal. Nonetheless, this recognition does not mean that the critic is therefore rendered incapable, but rather that at each and every moment the critic has to hold on to the ideal against which to contrast empirical reality, not, however, in an identitarian way (symptomatic of bourgeois philosophy in general, where the real is touted as the ideal), but in a mimetic-reconciliatory way, which tries to preserve the aesthetic qualities of reason which question even reason itself. It is the unrelentingly critical approach of the Frankfurt School, combined with its very utopian moments that make it a most salient heuristic tool for investigating both the overt and covert dimensions of political institutions such as the Commission.
4 To further clarify what I mean, I will now turn to Adorno’s essay on critique. In an essay entitled simply ‘Critique, ’3 Adorno makes an explicit connection between democracy and the engendering of the culture of critique. He argues that, ‘critique is essential to democracy. Not only does democracy require the freedom to criticize and need critical impulses. Democracy is nothing less than defined by critique’ (Adorno 1998: 281). Adorno’s defence of this stance is premised on the system of checks and balances which democracy uses to reduce the gravitation towards despotism by the various power elements of a political system. Therefore, critique functions as an avenue of autonomous thought, as opposed to the constraints of authoritative heteronomy (Adorno 1998: 282).
5It is important to note that Adorno’s notion of democracy in his essay is argued in the context of a post-Hitler Germany where the relationship between democracy and nationalism was still being worked out. Thus I find this essay particularly relevant in a post-apartheid context. This is because in Germany, as Adorno argues, the multiplicity engendered by critique, whose outcome is democratic will-formation threatened the unity principle of the National Socialists. Therefore, since critique ‘violates the taboo of unity, which tends toward totalitarian organization’ (Adorno 1998: 283), the hostility accorded to it is very palpable; and if it is tolerated at all it is conditioned by the necessity to be ‘constructive, ’ (Adorno 1998: 287) which is in itself prohibitive. Extending this argument to the post-apartheid context, I am claiming that the TRC has fulfilled such a constructive necessity, and rendered it through the notion of performance–a point I will return to later.
6The Commission clearly understood part of its mandate to be the creation of a democratic culture, where democracy is understood, narrowly, to mean transparency. There are three distinct ways through which the TRC attempted to engender this culture of freedom of association, thought, and communication–what I identify as a culture of critique. First, the democratic process that the Commission followed; second, holding the survivors’ and perpetrators’ proceedings and hearings in public; third, the very extensive mandate which the Commission chose to adopt, thus implicating all sectors of South African society. The Commission identifies these factors in its Report as follows:
A distinctive feature of the Commission was its openness to public participation and scrutiny. This enabled it to reach out on a daily basis to large numbers of people inside and outside South Africa, and to confront them with vivid images on their television screens or on the front pages of their newspapers.... The media also helped generate public debate on central aspects of South Africa’s past and to raise the level of historical awareness. The issues that emerged as a consequence helped the nation focus on values central to a healthy democracy: transparency, public debate, public participation and criticism.4 (1998)
7It is interesting to note that the TRC, in its Report, places a great deal of emphasis on this transparent approach throughout the first volume in order to underscore its own contribution to the new democratic ethos in the New South Africa. For example, the Report identifies this same distinctive feature as an aspect of the Commission’s contribution to the promotion of national unity and reconciliation (TRC of South Africa Report Vol. 1: 108). The Commission also identifies this feature as one of the major traits that set it apart from other similar Commissions elsewhere (TRC of South Africa Report Vol. 1: 1), as Tutu argues in his foreword to the Report.
8Public participation, awareness, and acknowledgment are themes commonly found in democratic theories and referred to as ‘public discourse.’ For example, John Rawls argues that there are substantial requirements of public deliberation in democracies. His idea of ‘public reason’ asks that ‘citizens be able to explain their vote to one another in terms of reasonable balance of public political values.’5 Habermas further extends Rawls’ observation when he argues that public participation needs to be a constant because ‘public reason’ is always being produced and reproduced through communicative action. Habermas also extends this element of institutional deliberative democracy to the public sphere, which refers to a communication structure rooted in the lifeworld through the associational network of civil society. He explains that participants in the political and the social sphere need to assume that there is a common motive of cooperative search for ‘truth.’6 While there are numerous models of deliberative democracy, all refer to a discursive system where citizens share information, converse, debate, and deliberate public events, form opinions, and participate in political processes. To a certain degree the Commission identifies the element of public participation as significant. Consequently, Tutu, in the vein of Adorno, elaborates on the need for critique in South Africa, symbolized by public participation, by noting that others may critique the Commission’s perspective (TRC Vol. 1: 2), and indeed they must so as to add to and correct the Report, thus ultimately sharing in the process that will lead to national unity through reconciliation. To an important degree the TRC can be said to promote a positive public sphere.
9This is a point echoed by Njabulo Ndebele in his commentary on the TRC in which he writes ‘if there is any one thing the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission have done, it is to reveal the range of matters that lie at the centre of our interactive public space.’7 Since Ndebele sees democracy as the acceptance of a working position on issues where diverse opinions exist–‘the ability to shift into several identities in a multicultural society, ’ thus allowing us ‘the potential to locate ourselves within questions posed by others’ (Ndebele 2000: 148)–he posits a positive reading of the TRC’s role in the promotion of a culture of openness and critique. Adding to Ndebele’s argument, Tinyiko Maluleke argues that, ‘its shortcomings notwithstanding, the advent of the TRC has opened up some space for serious discussion of “truth” and “reconciliation” in South Africa.’8 However, unlike Ndebele, Maluleke is much more critical of the TRC and points to its contradictory role as I have suggested.
10By engaging in a transparent and publicly accessible process in choosing the commissioners who were to serve in the Commission, and holding public hearings that were accessible for the most part to a majority of South Africans through various media (mostly Radio), as well as producing a Report that would be accessible to the general public, the TRC transformed very abstract and lofty democratic ideals (for a suspicious nation) into tangible and materializable form. That is to say, the truth content of democracy, at least as it was envisioned vis-à-vis the apartheid state–transparency versus censorship–became the very form of democracy through the TRC, thus establishing legitimacy for embarking on the project of building the new nation. Without such legitimacy, there would have been no reason for the body politic to believe the good intents of the new government, especially given that the government was new to democracy, and also well acquainted with repressive forms of governance. To that end, the success of the TRC in this process was more a moral one than a legal one, since the Commission relied on its good intents to carry its message of reconciliation through democracy.
11 John de Gruchy affirms this point when he notes that, ‘democratic transformation can only be achieved in a society committed to the development of a moral culture, a society striving to uphold moral values and constantly seeking to achieve, elusive as it is, an ever broadening moral consensus.’9 This moral culture is very utilitarian in approach since it emphasizes the goodness of democracy for all. In other words, ‘the essential truth of the TRC was moral, rather than historical. The TRC... reaffirmed the tenets of moral universalism, and its powers to infuse a new democratic dispensation.’10 Although arguing this in the context of truth, Deborah Posel’s point clearly locates universal morality as the vindication of the TRC’s approach to democracy. In order for the new nation to succeed, respect for diversity and openness to heterogeneity had to form the moral foundation of South Africa. As Posel and Simpson further note, ‘closely linked to the politics of compromise that shaped the transition from apartheid to a constitutional democracy, “rainbowism” required the TRC to demonstrate its sensitivity to divergent viewpoints on the past, its capacity to recognise and affirm diversity, yet produce a moral framework and historical narrative that combined these differences into a harmonious larger whole.’11
12Unlike the TRC, however, Adorno posits no simple reconciliation between the autonomous impulse of thought and the heteronomous clutch of nationalism, as noted earlier. The TRC wanted to affirm both democratic will-formation simultaneously with a nationalist agenda of reconciliation and unity without accounting for such a process. For example, at a hearing in Bisho on 10 September 1996, Tutu, addressing an angry crowd in response to their behaviour towards Colonel Peter, is noted as saying:
I am going to give you a warning... I don’t know what you have come here for–but we came here because we have been given a job to do which is to hear every point of view. Whether we like that point of view or not, that is not the point. We have to hear everything so that we are able to describe as fully as we can what it was that happened... If your strong feelings affect how we listen here, we are going to ask you to take your feelings and leave with them... It is a democracy that we are trying to build up and many of us are believers, and believers say that it is possible for all kinds of people, all of us, to change and be different. That is why we are talking about reconciliation... I will then ask you–please I beg you–will you give everybody a fair chance and don’t let anybody feel under pressure.12
13Apart from underscoring a point raised earlier, that democracy is projected as a moral issue and one that promotes a culture of tolerance, Tutu’s admonition contradicts the very tenet he is defending.
14That is to say, how can the Bisho community be told not to voice their dissent while Colonel Peter can voice his different opinion, yet Tutu claim at the same time that everyone needs to be heard? This is not to ignore the practical implications of running a meeting and getting things done etc., but to point to a running theme in the TRC’s engagement with difference in general, namely, cooption. Of course this is one way of reading Tutu’s statement that leans more towards serving my argument. Nonetheless it raises important questions as to the value of democracy in the context where the process might imply a reconfiguration of the similar modes of oppression as precisely what is being fought against. Obviously I am not taking the words and actions of Tutu as representative of all the commissioners, but his reaction in this instance, I am arguing, is illustrative of the Commission’s stance in general.
15The TRC served as a bridge in the transformation from a culture of censorship to a culture of critique, a process that would have been more difficult otherwise. This feat notwithstanding, the TRC did, however, as a result of assuming the catalytic role, position itself as the new body judging what was open to critique and what wasn’t. Granted that this was, perhaps, an inevitable consequence for a body such as the TRC, especially given the task it was charged with, it is still instructive to examine how this prohibition manifests itself, and how, as a result, it generates further criticism, thus ensuring the thriving of critique. To this end I will examine the concepts of performance and performative contradiction as illustrative of this process engaged with by the Commission.
16In his article entitled ‘Truth and Reconciliation as Performance: Spectres of Eucharistic Redemption, ’ Ebrahim Moosa underscores the notion of performance that I am arguing grants the TRC its constrictive feature. Worthy to be quoted at length, Moosa notes the following about performance and the TRC:
More importantly, it [the TRC] played a cathartic role for most of the time in the life of the newborn nation. In this respect it must be viewed as an ‘event’ that prefigures other momentous events. Any event of this magnitude is actually a performance. A performance is when the actors have already configured the purpose of the play and there is hope that other participants and viewers will also understand its message.13
17 Moosa goes on to add that sacred history in particular provides us with many examples of narratives of performance (Moosa 2000: 114). However, the one employed by the TRC is the narrative of Eucharistic Redemption, whereby the confession of sins leads to forgiveness by God, thus exonerating the sinner. In a similar way, Moosa argues that the TRC inhabits the very same conciliatory space where the language of reason and the language of mystery occlude. As Moosa puts it: ‘The performance of the TRC event resonates as a redemption of the sins of apartheid’ (Moosa 2000: 119). Thus playing the role of ‘as if’–as if apartheid was really over; as if there really is reconciliation; as if there is really truth uncovered and acknowledged (Moosa 2000: 117).
18In other words, since the verdict was already known, the TRC simply re-dramatized the prefigured notions of forgiveness, justice, reconciliation, and truth. This is particularly poignant given the Christian-centred features of the TRC. Since the TRC was headed by two Christian ministers (Tutu and Boraine), and its logic of forgiveness, justice, reconciliation, and truth was framed by their perspectives, the Commission could not be anything but Christian-centred, despite Tutu’s acknowledgement of this anomaly even as he emphasized that this represented the view and wish of a large majority of South Africans.14 As Cochrane, de Gruchy and Martin argue, there is little doubt that the influence of faith communities, particularly Christianity, ‘constitutes an important dimension of the work of the TRC.’15 They support their claim with evidence that the topic of reconciliation had been central to the theological debate in South Africa, from the Kairos Document in 1985 to the TRC Faith Community Hearings in 1997 (Cochrane et al. 1999: 3-4). However, as de Gruchy notes elsewhere, ‘the extent to which Christian norms and values shaped the work of the TRC has not been unproblematic.’
19There is no lack of evidence demonstrating that there is an overwhelming presence of Christian language in South African post-apartheid rainbowism (nation-building) rhetoric in general. Used as a signifier and harbinger of hope, this rainbowism (nation-building) rhetoric has been used to subsume all South Africans under one umbrella as ‘one’ people or ‘one’ nation,16 all of a sudden bound together by some euphoric identity. Perhaps in hopes of propelling a peaceful transition from an apartheid government to a post-apartheid democracy, some academics in the field of Religious Studies in South African universities (David Chidester, James Cochrane, John de Gruchy, and Martin Prozesky, to name a few) have, along with the Commission, embraced this rainbowism rhetoric, and have produced theories and ideologies in support of this notion, albeit not without some elements of self-analytical critique.
20Thus, my engagement with Moosa’s reading is only to point out another way in which the Commission was not self-reflexive about its methodologies. The TRC already had in mind the kind of outcome it wanted to achieve, and it put in place certain processes that would help it achieve this aim. Despite all its talk about discovering the truth and establishing a forum for debating the question of the new national identity, the TRC put on a performance that it hoped its spectators would buy into and accept as inevitable for the sake of reconciliation. This is what I refer to as a performative contradiction. Maluleke notes the same contradiction with regards to the Commission’s appeal to the limitation of its success concerning reconciliation by arguing that it had a narrower mandate than that of achieving unity and reconciliation–it only had to contribute to it.
21Maluleke argues that, ‘what is denied is not the wider significance of the TRC but rather an open and critical debate about what that significance ought to be beyond the confines of its life and competencies. All the while, its hegemony and monopoly as the manufacturer of both reconciliation and reconciliation-discourse are being asserted’ (Maluleke 1999: 6). Posel puts the same critique in the form of a question regarding the Commission’s stance on historical truth. While the Commission asserts that the Report offers only a roadmap to the past and not the whole story, it, nonetheless, never renounces its version as the official version; thus Posel’s question: ‘how does an inherently selective writing of only part of the story about the past present itself with the authority and objectivity of truth required of an official state commission?’17 That this performative contradiction compromises the TRC’s epistemological framework is a small fraction of its consequences.
22Such a sleight of hand (nationalizing individual experiences of pain and suffering, for example) is contradictory to the democratic ethos of open communication and open debate about the issues that concern all South Africans as individuals with individual choice. In this sense the TRC stifles the social debate in the pretext of maintaining social peace (Maluleke 1999: 109). What the TRC did not count on however, was the fact that the processes of democratic communication that it relied on to justify its existence would be the very same processes that would allow those who wanted to see a different performance to voice such dissent. The Commission’s self-reflexivity therefore is more like an afterthought rather than the guiding principle through and through. That such is the case is obviated by both the inherent and acquired contradictions within the Commission’s Report, and between its goals and processes towards such goals.
23One of the best examples of this performative contradiction is to be found in Volume Five of the Commission’s Report. At the end of this report is a submission (TRC Vol. 5: 436-456) by one of the former commissioners, Wynand Malan, who decided to withdraw midway through the drafting and discussion of the Commission’s Report and to write instead a response to the process engaged in by his fellow commissioners. The minority position, as articulated by Malan, underscores the need for thoroughgoing analysis of data and public discussion of the findings of the Commission. In addition, Malan indicates that the Commission was too pressed for time and resources to engage in a more involved Report writing process, and he, as a result, felt that he could not fully endorse such a document. As Malan puts it, ‘My signature attached to this report is my identification with the idea and process envisaged in the Act. It is not to be read as an endorsement of the content’ (TRC Vol. 5: 439). Even if one grants that a host of Malan’s personal opinions and subjective views are irrelevant and inappropriate to the Report, as does the TRC in its response which follows right after Malan’s piece in the same volume, one has to grant that Malan was merely acting in the spirit of the Commission as the Commission’s report itself affirms: ‘The Commission has, however, been steadfast in its commitment to creating the opportunity for all shades of opinions and views to be fully expressed within the context of the Commission’s process as a vital part of its overall objectives’ (TRC Vol. 5: 457).
24Although the TRC is of the opinion that the views that Malan expresses and the manner in which he expresses them are both misguided, for the most part, the Commission was still willing to engage in a debate with his views to the extent that it included his minority view in its Report. The Commission’s intent through this gesture, I would argue, was two-fold. First, the commissioners wanted to demonstrate that they were not intimidated by critique, especially if it came from within. In actuality they encouraged such criticism and the debate it ensued. This in turn demonstrated the Commission’s commitment to the democratic ethos of transparency and freedom of expression, thus legitimating the Commission’s larger project of reconciling a divided rainbow nation. The second intent, although not as transparent, relates back to the Commission’s perfomative contradiction. By including the minority report and immediately following it with a response, the TRC sets itself as the defining bar against which all other opinions about the future of South Africa will have to be measured. That is to say, by making a clear distinction between those issues worthy to be pursued (reconciliatory) and those not so worthy of such a course (divisive), the TRC surreptitiously sets up boundaries around what is acceptable criticism and what is not.
25This is apparent elsewhere in the proceedings where, for example, those who expressed dissent regarding the granting of amnesty and lack of retributive justice felt unwelcome due to the overemphasis on forgiveness. As Wilson notes:
What was striking about the TRC hearings was the way in which Commissioners never missed an opportunity to praise victims who relinquished a desire for vengeance... The hearings were structured in such way that any expression of a desire for revenge by victims would seem out of place. Virtues of forgiveness and reconciliation were so loudly and roundly applauded that emotions of vengeance, hatred and bitterness were rendered unacceptable, an ugly intrusion on a peaceful, healing process.18
26Even though the TRC accepts the existence of such minority positions in principle, it does not take them seriously enough or even as threatening to the scripted performance in practice. Such a response to dissenting positions, I would argue, is because the TRC had so much faith in the success of the performance that a little stumble by one of the actors/actresses would not, for the most part, distract the flow of the performance too much. For the performance is familiar enough, especially to a Christian audience.
27 Tutu underscores this point in the foreword to the Report by noting that: ‘The world is waiting expectantly for this report because the world has marvelled at how we South Africans have gone about trying to deal with our past. Many are wondering whether they can learn from our experience’ (TRC Vol. 1: 14). To say that Tutu’s confidence is unwarranted would be to deny many of the facts that attest to his statement. For example, despite the fact that many South Africans don’t think the TRC was very successful in engendering reconciliation, they still think it was necessary and useful19 (like a bad performance of a good play, the TRC relied on the familiarity of its meta-narrative). This notwithstanding, however, it is only fair also to argue that much of the supposed success of the TRC has come with an expensive price-tag on the importance of individual experience for the sake of the nation. To put it cynically, while doing away with one repressive system, the TRC generated another culture of placing the nation over the individual, thus homogenizing the many voices into one national voice of forgiveness, justice, reconciliation, and truth.
28Arguing against such a narrative of success one can point to various examples of individuals who protested the cooption as I noted Wilson does. Unlike the TRC, however, those individuals, in line with Adorno’s argument put forth earlier, posit no simple reconciliation between the autonomous impulse of thought and the heteronomous clutch of nationalism. As I have argued already, the TRC wanted to affirm both democratic will-formation simultaneously with a nationalist agenda of reconciliation and unity without accounting for how the equation of the two agendas was feasible or even necessary. The Bisho hearing referred to earlier is one such example.
29Due, however, to the structural democratic process that the TRC followed, it could not sustain a culture of repression and silence for too long, especially given its openness to the idea of democracy. To have overtly come down hard on the dissenters would have been blatantly contradictory. Hence the approach that the TRC took can best be described as repressive tolerance. I am not suggesting that the post-apartheid state, as represented by the TRC, is just as repressive in its new garb, but that the TRC engages in a performative contradiction that is illustrative of the effectiveness of the newfound democracy at the same time that it is not fully aware of such a contradiction. Such awareness is only possible through a scathingly immanent and dialectical critique, of which the TRC does not do enough. As counterfactual and countercultural as it was in the global context, the TRC was still bound by the repressive and prohibitive culture from which it was painstakingly extracting itself. Its performative contradiction vulgarizes the radical nature of its performance, however radical the performance is in the global context.
30To conclude, the TRC simultaneously put in place a formalized process of critique through pursuing a democratic approach to dealing with the questions of forgiveness, justice, reconciliation, and truth after apartheid, and undermined that very same process through its performative approach, thus engaging in what I have identified as a performative contradiction. However inadvertent this contradictory moment, I have argued that it has provided a way for democracy to continue this gesture of critique. In this regard, the performative nature of the TRC restricted it from engaging in this deeper critique because it was too caught up in its own message and the execution of the message’s attendant rituals. It is up to the country’s citizens, therefore, as both participants in and critics of the socio-historical post-apartheid and post-TRC era, to take up the cause of critique lest the nation forgets the price of freedom paid with the blood of the many. This call to critical arms is actually an extension of the concept of protest itself, because though its form might have changed in the post-TRC era, its spirit as over against the demon of oppression cannot rest lest, once again, inconsistently applied ideals of freedom and reconciliation become reified and sublated in the form touted by the TRC.
31Perhaps the TRC could have balanced the demands of the present with the objectives of the future better by spending more time praising the new laws and illustrating the benefits of adhering to these laws. Moreover, the TRC could have better differentiated its more inclusive interpretations of truth and reconciliation from other exclusionary interpretations. Irrespective of the method, it is vital that South Africans eventually select civil rights patriotism as the central element of their overarching identity. The Commission fell short because it manipulated the public into unreasonably accepting its comprehensive doctrine that violated norms of tolerance by refusing to truly countenance the validity of competing worldviews of justice such as revenge or judicially instituted punishment.
32The extent to which the TRC’s conflatory model has been devastating, beyond just the examples provided in this essay, can also be symbolically seen in a few issues that have plagued South Africa since the TRC submitted its final Report in 1998 (for example: the politics of exclusion through xenophobia; the paranoid politics of Thabo Mbeki; the reparations debate; and the lack of reconciliation today to name a few). To say that all these problems are directly structurally related to the TRC would be a hard argument to make. However, given the extent to which the TRC has formed the discursive paradigm surrounding these issues, one cannot exonerate it either. Of course at this juncture I can be accused of having reduced the religious categories of forgiveness, justice, truth, and reconciliation that motivated the Commission to the hegemony of a religious establishment, and therefore, been oblivious to their power of making the TRC project successful. However, I think my argument has shown itself to be more complicated than that.
33As I have shown throughout, what seems to have made possible the success of the TRC is also what has raised questions surrounding its commitment to democracy. What we are left with then are questions such as: what was the cost? What are the left-over unresolved implications? How are literature, and other dimensions of South African culture, dealing with the TRC’s ‘solution’? How are the rights of individuals to be vindicated against the massive hegemonic reconciliation engineered by the TRC? These are overwhelming questions; and ones that deserve further and more nuanced analysis. One can however only do so much in addressing them as I have tried to do in this essay. The best I could do thus far was to trace the legacy of the TRC and how it contributes today to these questions in order to then think about how they might begin to be addressed differently for the sake of everyone not just the believers in the TRC’s project. The TRC was certainly of the same mind, and tried to demonstrates this very formalized means of democratization through engendering a culture of freedom of association, thought, and communication in both its proceedings structure and report, albeit limitedly as I have argued.
34In the final analysis, my hope is that I was able to demonstrate, in the vein of the Frankfurt School, how a dialectically and immanently engaged Commission might have looked like, what it might have achieved instead, and how despite its failures the TRC was a good idea that needed better conceptualization and implementation. In critiquing the Commission my aim was not to discredit it as an unworthy institution; rather, I had hoped to show how the Commission’s constitutive elements prevented it from recognizing its lofty goals of finding truth and, on the basis of that truth, reconciling a divided nation. In other words, as I have pointed out throughout this essay, there is an emancipatory quality of the TRC that cannot be ignored, namely, its attempt to work through the past; however, because of the Commission’s reliance on another totalizing narrative in addressing the hegemony of apartheid, it failed to recognize its own complicity in the reinscription of a harmonizing ideology. This is not to say that the TRC was just apartheid in a new garb, but it is a recognition that it will take a long time for post-apartheid South Africa to peel itself away from the culture of repression that engenders the fear of the Other so totalistically.
Bibliographie
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Works Cited
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Notes de bas de page
1 I specify early because there is a way in which even though thinkers such as Apel, Habermas, and Honneth locate themselves in the Frankfurt School tradition, they also concern themselves with different approaches to the earlier thinkers. The earlier thinkers were concerned mostly with the project of the demise of Enlightenment rationality and its regression to barbarism in capitalist-driven modernity. My emphasis therefore is on thinkers of this earlier strain of critical theory such as Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Marcuse.
2 In Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Translated by John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), Adorno and Horkheimer define this concept as follows: ‘Culture as a common denominator already contains in embryo that schematization and process of cataloguing and classification which bring culture within the sphere of administration. And it is precisely the industrialized, the consequent, subsumption which entirely accords with this notion of culture. By subordinating in the same way and to the same end all areas of intellectual creation, ... this subsumption mockingly satisfies the concept of a unified culture which the philosophers of personality contrasted with mass culture’ (131). Some other literature that deals with this concept includes: Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory, translated by C. Lenhardt and edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (London; Boston: Routledge & K. Paul, 1984); Arato, Andrew, and Eike Gebhardt, eds. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978); Horkheimer, Max, Critical theory: Selected Essays. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell et al. (New York: Seabury Press, 1972); Horkheimer, Max., and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Translated by John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972); Jay, Martin, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973); Marcuse, Herbert, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory. Translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).
3 Adorno, Theodor, ‘Critique, ’ Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, Translated by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
4 TRC of South Africa Report Vol. 1 (Cape Town: Juta, 1998): 104.
5 Rawls qtd. in Kim, Joohan, ‘Communication, Reason, and Deliberative Democracy, ’ Journal of Communication Spring 1999: 138.
6 Habermas qtd. in Flynn, Jeffrey, ‘Communicative Power in Habermas’s Theory of Democracy, ’ European Journal of Political Theory 3.4 (2004): 436.
7 Ndebele, Njabulo, ‘Of Lions and Rabbits: Thoughts on Democracy and Reconciliation, ’ After the TRC: Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, Wilmot James and Linda van de Vijver, eds. (Cape Town: David Philip, 2000): 149.
8 Maluleke, Tinyiko, ’The Truth and Reconciliation Discourse: A Black Theological Evaluation, ’ Facing the Truth: South African Faith Communities and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, James Cochrane, John de Gruchy, and Stephen Martin, eds. (Cape Town: David Philip, 1999): 103.
9 De Gruchy, John, ‘The TRC and the Building of a Moral Culture, ’ After the TRC: Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, Wilmot James and Linda van de Vijver, eds. (Cape Town: David Philip, 2000): 167.
10 Posel, Deborah, ‘Truth? The View from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, ’ Keywords: Truth, Nadia Tazi, ed. (New York: Other Press, 2004): 23.
11 Posel, Deborah and Graeme Simpson, eds. ’The Power of Truth: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Context, ’ Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2002): 9.
12 www.doj.gov.za/trc/hrvtrans/bisho1/day2.htm; Also in TRC Vol. 5, 411- 412, where the Commission puts the hearing date as 9 September instead of 10 September as identified in the archives.
13 Moosa, Ebrahim, ‘Truth and Reconciliation as Performance: Spectres of Eucharistic Redemption, ’ Looking Back Reaching Forward: Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Charles Villa-Vicencio and Wilhelm Verwoerd, eds. (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2000): 114.
14 Tutu, Desmond, No Future Without Forgiveness (London: Rider, 1999).
15 Cochrane, James, John de Gruchy and Stephen Martin, eds. ‘Faith, Struggle and Reconciliation, ’ Facing the Truth: South African Faith Communities and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Cape Town: David Philip, 1999): 3.
16 Maharaj, Gitanjali, Between Unity and Diversity: Essays on Nation-building in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Claremont: David Philip, 1999).
17 Posel, Deborah, ‘The TRC Report: What Kind of History? What Kind of Truth?’ Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, eds. Deborah Posel and Graeme Simpson (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2002): 148.
18 Wilson, Richard, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-apartheid State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 119-120.
19 See Gibson, James L., ‘Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation?, ’ Politikon 31, no. 2 (2004): 129-155.
Auteur
-
Siphiwe Ignatius Dube
University of Toronto
Is PhD Candidate (ABD) at the Centre for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada. He is currently in the dissertation editing/writing stage, expected to graduate in the Summer of 2007. His primary area of research is Religion and Literature, with a focus on post-colonial African literature and Frankfurt School Critical Theory. His cognate areas of competence include Method and Theory in Religion, Feminist Theory, and Post-colonial Theory broadly. He is also a member in good standing of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion (CSSR), and the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR).
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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