The Culture of Dissenting Memory

Truth Commissions in the Global South

Véronique Tadjo

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429534362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria politica

This volume deals with the manifold ways in which histories are debated and indeed historicity and historiography themselves are interrogated via the narrative modes of the truth commissions. It traces the various medial responses (memoirs, fiction, poetry, film, art) which have emerged in the wake of the truth commissions.

The 1990s and the 2000s saw a spate of so-called truth commissions across the Global South. From the inaugural truth commissions in post-juntas 1980s Latin America, to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up by the incoming post-apartheid government in South Africa and the twinned gacaca courts and National Unity and Reconciliation Commission in Rwanda and that in indigenous Australia, various truth commissions have sought to lay bare human rights abuses. The chapters in this volume explore how truth commissions crystallized a long tradition of dissenting and resisting cultures of memorialization in the public sphere across the Global South and provided a significant template for contemporary attempts to work through episodes of violence and oppression across the region. Drawing on studies from Latin America, Africa, Asia and Australia, this book illuminates the modes in which societies remember and negotiate with traumatic pasts.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of human rights, popular culture and art, literature, media, politics and history.

1
Reassessing South African truth and reconciliation

John Kani’s Missing and performative demands for justice

Kerry Bystrom

Addressing his home country of South Africa from an extended exile in Sweden, the protagonist of John Kani’s drama Missing – Robert Khalipa, a high-profile struggle activist seemingly abandoned by his liberation movement, the African National Congress (ANC), once it becomes the governing party of a ‘free’ South Africa – bursts out in frustration:

OR [Tambo, the former leader of the ANC] promised us that the day would come when the enemy would be held accountable. The murder of our comrades, the torture of our people at Vlakplaas and John Vorster, deaths in detention, the rape of our mothers and sisters, for all these atrocities the enemy would be made to pay. What happened? We fought for freedom, we ended up with democracy. What the hell is democracy? We lost our blood, our comrades, for this democracy? Yes, we won the elections; can someone tell me who lost? The rich are still rich, the poor even poorer now then they have been before. When I want justice, when I want revenge, I am told about truth and reconciliation. I am told to forgive. I saw the people who tortured me, who killed my brothers. I want what I fought for. I want justice.

(2015, 17–18)

This speech telescopes the many disappointments that grew within South Africa between 1994, when over 40 years of institutionalized and violently extractive racism known as apartheid officially ended, and 2014, when Missing premiered.¹ It also succinctly indexes the remarkably changed fortunes of the country’s signature feature in the global transitional justice landscape: its Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).²

The TRC was conceived as part of ‘the bridge-building process designed to help lead the nation away from a deeply divided past to a future founded on the recognition of human rights and democracy’ (TRC Final Report, Vol. 1, 48).³ As will be discussed in more detail later, truth commissions in general had emerged in the 1980s as a popular alternative to criminal trials in the work of ‘dealing with past’ widely shared by post-authoritarian and post-communist states as they ‘transitioned’ into democracy at the end of the Cold War. South Africa’s version was given four crucial tasks meant to help the country successfully and ethically begin a new chapter of its history: to ‘analy[ze] and describe[e] the “causes, nature and extent” of gross violations of human rights that occurred between 1 March 1960 and 10 May 1994, including the identification of the individuals and organisations responsible for such violations’; to ‘mak[e] recommendations to the President on measures to prevent future violations of human rights’; to ‘restor[e] … the human and civil dignity of victims of gross human rights violations through testimony and recommendations to the President concerning reparations for victims’; and to ‘gran[t] amnesty to persons who made full disclosure of relevant facts relating to acts associated with a political objective’ (TRC Report, Vol. 1, 57). To accomplish these tasks, the TRC took the form of three separate committees: Human Rights Violations, Reparation and Rehabilitation, and Amnesty. The first took written and oral testimony from approximately 21,000 victims between 1996 and 1998. This information was given to the second committee in order to make recommendations for reparations to the government. The third committee received over 7,000 amnesty applications, and eventually granted 1,167 amnesties by the time its work concluded in 2001.⁴ When the TRC was established, it was the largest, most public and most powerful truth commission to date.⁵ It became known around the world for its emphasis on forgiveness and reconciliation, its commitment to truth-telling as a necessary aspect of such forgiveness and reconciliation (and which became its moral argument for amnesty),⁶ and its pioneering of the notion of restorative justice.⁷ As Robert I. Rotberg puts it in the well-known collection on truth commissions Truth v. Justice (2000), South Africa’s TRC became ‘the standard-setting model of the practice’ (4). Every truth commission coming in the wake of the South African experience has had to take it into account.⁸

The TRC’s guiding tropes as a transitional justice mechanism were truth and forgiveness or reconciliation; if (to quote two well-known slogans of the commission) ‘revealing is healing’ for individuals and the society as a whole, then ‘truth’ is ‘the road to reconciliation.’ In Missing, Robert Khalipa refers to these tropes. However, he does so in a negative and not a positive light: he wants justice and revenge, not truth and forgiveness. Perhaps even more notably, Robert’s lines in the speech with which this chapter opens – a speech delivered towards the beginning of the play, sparking Robert’s eventual return to South Africa and the remainder of the plot – are the only direct reference to truth and reconciliation in the play as a whole. This despite the fact that the setting for the drama is the year 2000, shortly after the Human Rights Violations Committee completed its work and in the middle of the Amnesty Commission hearings. While many people (especially within South Africa) were critical of the TRC from the beginning,⁹ the institution nevertheless retained a central place in national discourse at this time. Largely ignoring it in a piece set at the turn of the millennium is a statement in and of itself. ‘What happened,’ readers or spectators might ask, echoing Robert’s words, to the TRC? Yet Robert’s question of ‘what happened’ also (and more properly) speaks to South Africa’s transition to democracy as a whole – of which the TRC was only, and understood itself to be, a small part – and to the character of the democratic nation state that has since developed under ANC leadership. What happened such that justice of the kind dreamed of during the liberation struggle failed to come to pass when democracy was installed, and what does this mean about the value of democracy itself?

Building on the deep if not always recognized links between theatre and performance, political communities, notions of justice, and democratic transitions, this chapter investigates these questions through a close analysis of Kani’s play. I work outward from the stage to society by contextualizing the passage from Missing cited earlier first in Kani’s larger dramatic oeuvre, then in the field of South African politics and governance since 1994, and finally in the broader transnational policy discussion on transitional justice spanning the United States, Argentina, Chile, Germany, Poland, South Africa, and beyond as it emerged towards the end of the Cold War. As I do so, I map the shifting meanings and hierarchies of certain key terms – democracy, truth, reconciliation, and especially justice – from the late 1980s to today. My project is not normative but descriptive; in other words, this chapter tracks how the goals and language of political contest change over time, rather than arbitrating between them. What emerges from this mapping exercise is a dynamic in which the terms truth and reconciliation get bracketed from the heart of political discussion and the order and weight of the terms democracy and justice are flipped.

These changes are of critical importance not only to scholars from or of this country but also more widely, given the prominence of the South African TRC in global conversations about ‘dealing with the past.’ If what is charted in Missing and throughout this chapter is the moral eclipse of the TRC at least within South Africa, then it is also the case that in its place some South African activists have vividly articulated new understandings of – and lodged performative demands for – justice that may reshape the field of transitional justice or replace it altogether. Political discourse now registers both desires to return to and fulfil the ideals guiding the democratic transition in the mid-1990s and, ever more strongly, desires to tear up what are seen as damaging compromises and to start anew. These layered demands, seen in both Kani’s play and political performance more generally, suggest that the work of coming to terms with past atrocity or repression is a long-term project comprised of multiple turns and returns across generations. They also suggest that this project is best understood beyond narrow associations with any one transitional justice mechanism such as a truth commission and requires continuous engagement by multiple actors and institutions across the full spectrum of society.

***

The connection between theatre or performance and both legal trials (for instance, the Nuremberg or the Eichmann trials) and truth commissions has been explored by a number of recent critics (see Rae 2009; Becker et al. 2013; Cole 2010). In the most comprehensive study of this kind to focus on South Africa, Catherine M. Cole (2010) underscores the theatrical elements of the public TRC hearings, especially the Human Rights Violations Committee hearings, which she convincingly argues came to stand in for the commission as a whole (17). Without overplaying the metaphor of these public hearings as theatre, she notes the ‘compelling affinities’ between them:

Among these are emotional expressiveness and volatility; communication through the dense registers of embodiment; and moments of direct conflict between perpetrator and victim – conflict being one of the central features of the genre of drama. The hearings were also theatrical in the sense of being aural and visual. They were highly structured in terms of being rehearsed, cast and produced, but also open to the vagaries and surprises of improvisational interventions of key performers. In the manner of western proscenium theatre, the TRC had a bicameral spatial separation of actors and audience… [who] served as a kind of Greek chorus.

(13)

In her view, the TRC became the ‘literal and figurative stage for South Africa’s political transition’ (xvi). Not surprisingly in such a context, it was also in the genre of drama that some of the most compelling artistic engagements with the TRC were mounted, in works like Jane Taylor and the Handspring Puppet Company’s Ubu and the Truth Commission, or Truth in Translation and REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony (Mda 2009; Cole 2010).

Kani is particularly well positioned to take advantage of this intersection when engaging contemporary politics in South Africa. Often called the ‘grandfather of South African theatre,’ Kani has long been a major voice in South African cultural life. He first became known for his work in the 1970s with the Serpent Players, a multi-racial activist theatre group based in Port Elizabeth, as the co-devisor (with Athol Fugard and Winston Ntshona) of such canonical protest works as Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (1972) and The Island (1973). His international acclaim became such that after tours of London and New York he won a 1975 Tony Award. In the 1980s, he participated in famous South African productions of Othello and Miss Julie which involved kissing a white woman on stage, and prompted bomb threats, temporary detention, and even an assassination attempt (‘Africa 360’; Swarns 2002). In addition to suffering from violence directed at his person and his work as a result of his commitment to revealing the dehumanizing nature of apartheid, Kani also suffered losses in his family. His brother Xolile Kani was killed by Pretoria’s police (Swarns 2002). Throughout all of this, Kani remained convinced of art’s power, and committed to using it to create change in society. He notes in an interview with Lindy Mtongana: ‘Art is powerful. It can be. It can make change’ (‘Africa 360’).

In this same interview, Kani specifically locates the force of imaginative artworks in their ability to create a ‘mirror for society’ where people can recognize their own current situations (‘Africa 360’). He also reiterates that this is as true and as important in democracy as under apartheid.¹⁰ Returning to the common conception of anti-apartheid art in the 1980s South Africa as a form of ‘cultural work’ and a ‘weapon of the struggle,’ he explains that when South Africa became a democracy: ‘I took my cultural AK-47 and put it away. I didn’t throw it away, I put it away… . Protest theatre will rise again if I am unhappy as a citizen with where I am now’ (‘Africa 360’). And indeed in 2002, eight years after ‘freedom’ came to South Africa with the elections of 1994, Kani took out the heavy cultural artillery and wrote a new piece, holding up a ‘mirror’ to society. This play, entitled Nothing But the Truth, is set in 2000. It features Sipho Makhaya, an assistant librarian in Port Elizabeth; his daughter Thando, who works as a translator for the TRC amnesty hearings; his niece Mandisa, who has grown up in exile in London with his recently deceased brother Themba, an ANC activist; and Themba himself, who does not appear in person but whose ashes play a significant role in the final scene. When Mandisa appears with Themba’s ashes, she unexpectedly reveals a secret rift: Sipho holds a grudge against Themba because he holds him responsible (rightly, it seems) for the demise of his marriage after his wife had an affair with Themba, and (wrongly) for the death of Sipho’s son Luvuyo at a protest rally.

Shane Graham (2007) and Zakes Mda (2009) both argue that this play addresses the potential benefits and the failings of the TRC, which had just finished up amnesty hearings as Kani wrote. Building on Mda and Graham, I have previously shown how Nothing But the Truth supports and attempts to extend the underlying principles of this institution even as it – importantly – flags demands for retributive justice and redistribution that did not receive due consideration (Bystrom 2016).¹¹ Structurally, the play mimics the TRC’s processes of ‘revealing and healing,’ the notion that remembering past trauma (‘truth’) will effect a cathartic outpouring of emotion that begins to heal a victim and at the same time binds people together. Rituals of apology can further seal the bond of this newly reconciled community, as movingly portrayed when Sipho holds up the urn with his brother’s ashes and forgives him. The impression the audience is left with is that truth and reconciliation was not a misguided process but an incomplete one, in need of being extended to living rooms across the country where members of the black community can reconcile amongst themselves. At the same time, however, Sipho’s demand for legal or retributive justice for his son Luvuyo’s death remains stinging. Sipho insists that Luvuyo’s killers experience jail. He also points to the urgency of material redistribution. Kani closes the play with Sipho’s letter asking then-President Thabo Mbeki for funds for a local development project (a township library). His appeal that Mbeki not forget the masses who support him is both a call to action and a warning. ‘We need to accelerate the process of change,’ Kani noted in 2002. ‘Otherwise there will come a time when the millions of this country will feel they have not yet benefitted from this dispensation, and that would build the biggest opposition to our government’ (Swarns 2002).

Missing is only Kani’s second post-apartheid work. It appeared 12 years after Nothing But the Truth, in a new moment of South Africa’s unfolding democracy when we must presume another ‘mirror’ was urgently needed. Like Nothing But the Truth, this newer play is set in 2000, and this as well as the many similarities of theme and construction make it tempting to read Missing as either a coda to or a rewriting of Kani’s earlier meditation on reconciliation, retribution, and redistribution in the fre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• About the contributors
• Series editors’ preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Reassessing South African truth and reconciliation: John Kani’s Missing and performative demands for justice
• 2 The advancement of truth commissions on past affairs along with democratization in Korea: my experiences as a commissioner in three different truth commissions
• 3 Memories about truth: journalistic narratives, ‘true stories,’ and the clash of memories in Brazil’s National Truth Commission
• 4 Ubu and the Truth Commission: the multiple contexts of the TRC and Ubu
• 5 Black memories of the Brazilian military dictatorship: the repression of black dances during the 1970s and the State of Rio Truth Commission
• 6 ‘That’s the bad past we want to forget’: partial truths, reconciliation, and memory in Namibia’s post-apartheid democracy
• 7 Notice well: memory and reparation in Brazilian documentary movies about the dictatorship
• 8 Literature as witness: failure of a TRC following the mass rapes in Bosnia and Herzegovina
• 9 The practice of public apology: Australia says sorry to the Stolen Generations
• 10 The Gacaca Courts: collective versus personal memory and the trauma of the genocide in Rwanda
• Postface
• Index