History as Confession: The Case of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Deborah Posel

In the iconic history of human suffering, South Africa has a prominent place. Before 1994, the apartheid system was a global sign of the brutalization and degradation that accrued from a toxic politics of racialized difference and exclusion. After 1994, South Africa’s symbolic positioning shifted as the world hailed the “miracle” of the country’s orderly transition to democratic constitutionalism. The rather more troubled realpolitik of South Africa’s democratization aside, its mythic resonances in popular imaginations across the globe were celebratory, replete with hope. In a world mired in war and sometimes intractable violence, here was a historical narrative that told of the redemptive power of a human rights agenda animated by a spirit of “national reconciliation.” And in this story, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) loomed large, both as historical author and muse and as a figure of the reason and compassion that was written into the story of the country’s democratization.

South Africa’s TRC was the twenty-first in a sequence of truth commissions that emerged in the 1970s and rapidly gathered momentum amid waves of democratization and constitution making in the developing world. Truth commissions have set out to write and present public histories in ways that position the pursuit of truth center stage in a drama of efforts to broker peace and transcend past histories of brutal violence and painful division. Truth commissions, then, are particular techniques of “nation building” that are deployed largely outside the West, taking shape in the midst of a wider “politics of regret”1 that has gathered momentum in the aftermath of World War II. This essay considers how these shifting expectations of the public life and power of history have both enabled and constrained the genre of the truth commission. I am particularly interested in the questions of truth and its relationship to suffering and of what happens to the idea, power, and value of truth telling when history is harnessed to the avowedly normative, officializing project of the truth commission.

Truth commissions have been fashioned to grapple with the challenge of producing robust and authoritatively objective truth in the midst of contending subjectivities associated with competing perspectives on bitterly divided and contested pasts. Their attempts to resolve this dilemma have differed. South Africa’s TRC was the first to grapple with the problem of truth by installing a public confessional at the heart of the project. I consider the ethical and epistemological logic of this move and its consequences for the writing of public history. Truth commissions such as the TRC understand themselves to be engaged in a practice of history writing that is inseparable from a humanist project. Writing the truths of past suffering is seen as a way to produce a historical subject who is both ethically and psychologically redeemed, as both a “good” and a “whole” human being. And it is in the confessional that these links between the epistemological, normative, and psychological modalities of the past and present are constituted.

This essay begins with some brief reflections on the idea and genealogy of the genre of the truth commission. These are then extended and applied in a discussion of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the place of confession in it.

Truth Commissions: A Brief Genealogical Account

Following the first truth commission in Argentina in 1973, a further thirty-six truth commissions were established — fourteen in Latin America, thirteen in Africa, six in Asia, two in Europe, and one in the Middle East and Northern Africa. Predominantly a phenomenon of developing countries, truth commissions are typically a product of the transition from a violent and authoritarian regime to democratic rule, a transition represented and constituted in the name of a newfound embrace of human rights. These are polities that were previously bitterly and brutally divided and that have sought to refashion themselves as spaces of unity and democratic stability. Here the problem of history writing presented itself in a particular way: how to create the “imagined community” of the new democratic nation on the strength of an account of the past to which previously warring groupings — with disparate, even incommensurate, versions of events — would now consent. The idea of the truth commission derived from the conviction that truth could unify and reconcile by exposing the horrors that past oppressors had denied or hidden and by then passing resolute and robust judgment on what had gone wrong. The desired historical consensus would rest not only in an unflinching account of the past but also in an underlying ethical narrative of wrongdoing and the imperative of preventing its future recurrence. From this standpoint, truth telling would thus also perform a unifying and stabilizing commitment to the new order of human rights.

There is no single formula for all truth commissions, and there are some significant differences between them.2 With different political contexts and conditions, they may function openly or behind closed doors; they may be creations of a nation-state, NGO, or international body. The selection and number of commissioners has also varied, as has the scale and time frame of the undertaking. But the genre as a whole has some defining features. All are concerned with uncovering and verifying truths about the violations of human rights during a designated period in the past (in most cases, the recent past); all sit for a limited period of time, with the aims of presenting their findings in the form of an official written report and securing an official public acknowledgment of past violations and the need to prevent their repetition in the future. Typically, the commissioners constitute “a representative moral elite”3 — an important element in a strategy of building public trust in the commission’s work. Central to their efforts is the process of gathering testimonies from the victims of human rights violations (or those who speak on their behalf); indeed, truth commissions frame their proceedings within a discourse of victimhood and the silences that have attached to it. Individual stories are documented as the core of an official record of a troubled past. Recommendations for some form of reparation (symbolic or material) are usually made. And in most cases, there is also some recognition of, and commitment to, a project of national reconciliation, with truth telling as its instrument. Most truth commissions have thus sought simultaneously to commission and commemoratethe past.

Truth commissions are preeminently political interventions, often crafted as instruments of political compromise, in bids to stabilize fragile truces in long histories of brutal conflict. Yet this politics rests on a series of epistemological and ethical premises — and it is these that lie at the heart of this essay. How do we account for the emergence of this way of thinking about history, truth, and the project of reconciliation? To put this another way, what were the historical conditions of the possibility of the truth commission?

As I see it, this genealogy is informed by at least three historical trajectories: the politics of “negative commemoration”; postmodern assaults on truth; and the international human rights movement.

One striking feature of the politics of late modernity has been the mounting power of the past in tandem with the waning power of visionary futures.4 And the inclination to dwell on the past has often taken the form of a confessional encounter with a blighted history. Nancy Scheper-Hughes casts the late modern preoccupation with the past as a “romance with remorse . . . [that] has emerged as a master narrative of the late twentieth century”5 and that lies at the heart of contemporary meanings of public history. The early roots of this tendency lie in the enormity of the Holocaust and its irrevocable breach of modern teleologies of progress; in the post – World War II moment, the meaning of the past changed profoundly. As Hannah Arendt put it, writing in 1951, “We can no longer simply afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. . . . All efforts to escape the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of the future, are vain.”6 Older notions of reason in history gave way to a sense of the past as a site of suffering and ethical transgression — and, more recently, to litanies of trauma and denial.7 And the impulse to acknowledge, confront, and repair the damage of the past has intensified accordingly.

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Notes

1. Jeffrey Olick and Brenda Coughlin, “The Politics of Regret: Analytical Frames,” in Politics and the Past: On Repairing Historical Injustices, ed. John Torpey (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 37.
2. See, e.g., Truth Commissions: A Comparative Assessment, ed. Henry Steiner (Cambridge, Mass.: World Peace Foundation, 1997); Priscilla Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity (London: Routledge, 2001); Audrey Chapman and Patrick Ball, “The Truth of Truth Commissions: Comparative Lessons Drawn from Haiti, South Africa and Guatemala,” Human Rights Quarterly 23 (2001): 1 – 43. See also Internet bibliographies such as www.crinfo.org/action/ search-portal.jsp?.pid=3172&nid=2616 (accessed July 20, 2007), which is useful although not fully updated.
3. Michael Humphrey, “From Victim to Victimhood: Truth Commissions and Trials as Rituals of Political Transition and Individual Healing,” Australian Journal of Anthropology 14 (2003): 171 – 87.
4. Torpey, Politics and the Past, 1.
5. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Joining the Witch Hunt,” New Internationalist, April 1999, find articles.com/p/articles/mi_mOJQP/is_311/ai_30130554.
6. Hannah Arendt, preface to the first edition, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt, 1973), ix.
7. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone, eds., Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory (London: Routledge, 2003).