Memorializing the Past

Everyday Life in South Africa After the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Heidi Grunebaum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351506106
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Liberté politique

This work is a meditation on the shaping of time and its impact on living with and understanding atrocity in South Africa in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It is an examination of the ways that the institutionalization of memory has managed perceptions of time and transition, of events and happenings, of sense and emotion, of violence and recovery, of the past and the new. Through this process a public language of memory has been carved into collective modes of meaning. It is a language that seems deprived of the hopes, dreams, and possibilities for the promise of a just and redemptive future it once nurtured.Truth commissions are profoundly implicated in the social politics of memorialization. Memory, as a conceptual, historical, and experiential discourse about the past, relates to the ways in which cruelty is integrated into societal understandings, which include cognitive and philosophic frameworks and constructions of social meaning. The politics of historical truth, of memory and of justice, play out in unintended ways. There is not only the ongoing struggle for survivors of state terror, but also the ways that the everyday shapings of silences, the emptiness of reconciliation and the fracturing of hope remain embedded in political life.

1

Temporalities of the “New Nation”: The TRC and the Discursive Power of Transition

Under the sign of “the transition,” evoking movement, change, dynamism, crisis, potentiality and transience, a passage, and a passing through, apartheid rule was defeated in South Africa. Now, into its second decade as a constitutional democracy and “free”-market economy it consolidates its still tenuous position as a model postcolony¹ in Africa as South African-based corporations launch into the “markets” of the rest of the continent.

After the politically negotiated “end” to these long centuries of colonial and apartheid wars of dispossession, plunder and resistance, “the past”—as a metaphoric place contiguous with a bounded temporality—has become the privileged horizon from which temporal tropes of “transition” in representations of the “new” South African nation-state have grown. Out of the lived spatio-temporal overlappings in the lives of its inhabitants and in the continuities of the form of its state temporal tropes of ruptures, endings, beginnings, befores and afters, refoundings and singularities (the “miracle”?), news and olds have staked out the conceptual and discursive terms that frame the ways the past is historically and socially imagined and the ways that the present is understood. These tropes inform the ways that historical time (figured in spatio-temporal terms as the “new” nation) has been made and marked as distinct, discrete and split-off from the lived experiences of ordinary people.

How do such conceptual and discursive terms, organize our sense of time? How do these produce particular understandings of personal memory and of history? How do these understandings integrate atrocity, structural violence and the psychosocial afterlife of massive and cumulative trauma? This chapter examines the ways in which the TRC in South Africa has generated—beyond its institutional life—a constellation of concepts and discourses that have drawn on temporal, spatial and moral tropes contouring admissible from inadmissible forms of social and historical meaning-making.² Of course, the power of reference is not the TRC’s alone. Its operating terms, however, have contributed in a very significant way towards occluding the structural, material and symbolic forms of everyday violence, socio-economic relations of exclusion, material poverty and privilege, and the structures of continuity in which they remain embedded. The TRC symbolically managed a broader social context of conflict of which it was also an historical outcome. Hence, the economies of reference generated by the TRC’s operating terms have organized legitimate from non-legitimate forms of collective meaning-making as a social response to historical suffering.

Although represented variously as a moral, theological, and psychological project of collective and individual healing, forgiveness and reconciliation, the TRC process has been a mechanism of political conflict-management installed as a project of nation-building.³ Since its inception, and beyond its lifespan as a state commission, it has become one of the most important institutional touchstones of the current South African social, political, cultural and public history landscape, stamping its imprimatur on South African public discourse through a set of identity, morality, theology and history-related concepts, keywords and of course, silences. Official and generic reconciliation discourses, for example, have contributed to establishing, framing and legitimating social forms of response and public modes of memorialization, remembrance and of bereavement in terms of moral notions of “propriety.”⁴

Truth Commissions in Global Time

The present is framed in the linear chronology of Gregorian calendar time. From the release of Nelson Mandela and political prisoners in February 1990, the political negotiations of the CODESA processes in the ensuing years culminating in the first democratic elections in South Africa in 1994, “events” have been carved out of many simultaneous happenings and marked in all of their complexity and contradictions. Such are the politics of time-marking and of time-making. We are told it has been a “miracle.” War, we are told, is now elsewhere; war as it was known and named. For South Africa, as for so many societies labeled now “transitional” or “emerging” or “developing” as opposed to “decolonizing” or “gaining independence,” insertion in the world economy has been determined by the shifts in global power formations that have given rise to what Aijaz Ahmad terms, the “imperialism of our time.”⁵ In these times of new sobriquets, of constitutional democracy and neoliberal macro-economics, the heterogeneity of time and its multiple, entangled, overlapping temporalities fracture the lived structures of human experience.

Reconciliation discourses and the institutions that house them subtend geo-political relationships of subordination inside of the dominant global economic order at a time in which South Africa has been focusing on juggling the demands of nation-building with macro-economic reconstruction. Passing through the long entangled moments of “transition” one is compelled to ask, “So, what’s new?” After 1989, in new global imperial discourses hailing the victory of the “free-market” over the so-called failure of “actually existing socialism,” the “new” in the context of political transitions is subtended by reconfigured ideological premises. These constitute a language of nation-building, good governance, human rights and macro-economic reconstruction that place “emerging” economies at the door (and mercy) of world markets as the quid pro quo for state access to multilateral institution loans and “aid” packages, debt-relief programs, transnational trade agreements and the promise of foreign direct investment. The emergence of institutions such as truth commissions and the rise of the field of conflict resolution and transitional justice to “deal” with the past converge historically with the late 1980s shifts in the global politics marked by the end of the Cold War. These are accompanied by institutional technologies that name, tame and assimilate geopolitical contexts identified as “transitional,” “developing,” “emerging” or “post-authoritarian.” As part of these shifts, a spectrum of social development and macro-economic policies have been promoted by multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, World Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund turn around contemporary notions of “development,” democracy and “good governance.” These now constitute part of the qualifying conditions for a country’s integration within the global economy. The proliferation of the latest doctrines of structural adjustment corresponds historically to the rise of truth commissions. These have institutionalized “reconciliation” as a globalized logos of nation-building, justice-dealing and peace consolidation. The ideological terms of discourses of reconciliation have thus provided the moral and political boundaries for what “counts” as historical truth in the aftermath of administrative violence.

The rhetorical fields that govern officially sanctioned modes and practices of social and political memorialization institutionalized by truth commissions are shaped and sustained by the macro-economic policies implemented by states in transition from authoritarianism to consensually acknowledged democratic government. In relation to a different geopolitical context, that of post-Pinochet Chile, Lessie Jo Frazier contends that,

current vocabulary relies on words like compromise, opportunity, advantage, and reconciliation. The current vocabulary shuns words like fight, right, liberty and most definitely, vengeance and damnation. In this context, the vocabulary of mourning, as a tool for soothing grief in order to supersede it, accommodates neoliberal discourse.⁶

When institutions such as truth commissions are invested with the authority to legitimate pre-inscribed “terms” of state violence and human suffering and the networks of human relations in which they are embedded, they create fields of visibility for what may be “seen” to be atrocity. They also delineate the conceptual, cognitive and ideological undergirding of visibilization, which determines a range of pre-defined responses (individual, collective, state, political) to atrocity.

As the TRC in South Africa has become one of the latest historical though dehistoricizing institutional export “models” in a recent genealogy of such commissions⁷ for staging national ritual performances of (partial) acknowledgement of mass brutality and administrative violence, it could be understood to function symbolically as a powerful social and moral trope and a rite of passage into the world economy. For the “emerging” or “developing” nation-state such state-instantiated institutional rites of passage that include reconciliation, some form of amnesty and social forgetting, on the one hand, and “truth” telling, forgiveness and some sort of remembering, on the other, have become increasingly part of the neoliberal model of transitions-to-democracy package-deals.⁸ This places very particular limits on the ways in which the “political” on the continent has come to be understood. Indeed, Achille Mbembe incisively notes that whilst,

[m]ired in the demands of what is immediately useful, enclosed in the narrow horizon of “good governance” and the neoliberal catechism about the market economy, torn by the current fads for “civil society,” “conflict resolution,” and alleged “transitions to democracy,” the discussion, as habitually engaged, is primarily concerned, not with comprehending the political in Africa or with producing knowledge in general, but with social engineering.⁹

Truth commissions and the South African TRC in particular consolidate the ideological underpinnings of the “new” by shoring up and narrowing down the discursive boundaries of collective meaning-making as nation-building. In the name of the subject as citizen, the present is remapped over the spatio-temporal archives of atrocity that is also everyday life. And it is everyday life which is the time and place of “the political in Africa” par excellence. Life goes on. Inside of the socio-economic nodes that intersect the zones of power, accumulation and speculation in the global economy, it goes on very quickly, remapping in its wake the history of colonial and apartheid engineering, histories of experience, experiences of resistance and memories of lost futures.

Marking Time before Narrative

Everyday life now is “uneventful.” As Michael Simpson states, “Now […] the world has decided, whatever the facts of the situation, […] there is no problem remaining in South Africa.”¹⁰ “Events” or “happenings”—unless they threaten the perceptions of what counts as political stability for transnational capital and international investors—have moved on.¹¹ When the multiple, asymmetrical and entangled temporalities of the invisible moments of the everyday coincide such encounters of spatio-temporal co-incidence are called synchronicities. Sometimes they are invisible, sometimes endowed with the temporal structure of “events,” of happenings: succession, linearity, retrospective causality. Events make time and mark time. Happenings thread the marked moments of an age through the invisible moments of our lives, and in their weaving, transform our sense of life lived. The small moments of our lives become measured against the referent of that which happened, or which is acknowledged as having happened. But what if what happened and what continuously happened have been registered in the collected and curated stories that are told, circulated, performed and displayed—from film, mass media, literature, visual arts, theatre, monuments, museums, official commemorations—as something (colonialism and apartheid, they are named) that happened, but which bears no resemblance, either in form, etiology, harm, extent or experience to what “really” happened? Did it really happen? The question that many survivors of state terror and legislated racial violence ask is compounded by challenges of representation. As many survivors and theorists of state-sponsored violence have argued, not only does violence threaten to destroy the connective tissue of sociality, it challenges the cognitive foundations of language, of our human capacity for communicative action.¹²

By the time the South African TRC was mandated by an act of Parliament into institutional existence, ¹³ generic discourses of reconciliation and nation-building were already marking the temporal breaks and discontinuities with South Africa’s past of plunder and atrocity. At the historical moment of a “new” and shifting global present, a “new” South African nation (in an old state form) was heralded. In its mediatized, mediated, and more-than-the-sum-of-its-institutional-parts phenomenon, the TRC has been singularly powerful in that it has inscribed and left behind a conceptual, ideological and cognitive map that has staked out a restrictive field of collective terms and responses to recent history. In doing this, it has produced a highly circumscribed sense of the present as comprising the inevitable and logical outcome of such a past. The very “publicness” of the TRC’s institutional proceedings translated into a real-time dissemination of its proceedings in the broadcast media. The TRC has been interpolated by and through a discursive and interpretative network of images, narratives and concepts of which it was simultaneously a product as well as a producer. These discursive networks have, in turn, installed and endorsed so many tropes that have contributed to founding and legitimizing a new “civil” lexicon. This has infused the political process of transition with a public vocabulary of nation-building, truth-telling, reconciliation and personal memory in which the emotional pain of “victims” and moral penance of “perpetrators” (or the absence thereof) has loomed large. During the institutional life of the TRC many other state commissions were to be established and many other public hearings and campaigns related to past atrocities were conducted.¹⁴ Yet more than any other single institutional signature of posterity it has been the TRC and conceptual terms emerging from it that have shaped a civic language in which narratives of personal memory have come to displace economic redress and those of collective memory to substitute for social justice.

Whilst examining the power of historical meaning-making, particularly during times of social change it is important to not reduce the materiality of everyday life to “discourse.” In this respect I heed Arif Dirlik’s caution to not,

conflate power and discourse, and to move the former into the reified realm of language and representation from its material expressions in everyday economic, social and political relationships, [and] for the necessity of a distinction between the two; not because I do not think that discourses are imbedded in and expressive of power relationships, but because the distinction restores the possibility of a dialectical understanding of the relationship.¹⁵

Indeed, it is precisely in attentiveness to this dynamic dialectical relationship between forms of discourse, the social meanings they promote and their material, historical and political contexts of production that one may find what has been left out and begin to ask why. For as institutionalized modes of meaning-making have staked out legitimate ways of “dealing with the past” they have simultaneously occl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Limits and Possibilities of Integrating Atrocity
• 1. Temporalities of the “New Nation”: The TRC and the Discursive Power of Transition
• 2. Disembodiments: Testimony, Narrative, and the Commoditization of Suffering
• 3. Kept in Place: Memorial Cartographies and the Spatial Politics of Containment
• 4. Burials and Removals: Historical Erasure and Everyday Life
• Afterwords
• Bibliography
• Index