South African performance and archives of memory

Yvette Hutchison

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781784993665
• eBook ISBN: 9781526103246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores how South Africa is negotiating its past in and through various modes of performance in contemporary theatre, public events and memorial spaces. It analyses the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a live event, as an archive, and in various theatrical engagements with it, asking throughout how the TRC has affected the definition of identity and memory in contemporary South Africa, including disavowed memories. Hutchison then considers how the SA-Mali Timbuktu Manuscript Project and the 2010 South African World Cup opening ceremony attempted to restage the nation in their own ways. She investigates how the Voortrekker Monument and Freedom Park embody issues related to memory in contemporary South Africa. She also analyses current renegotiations of popular repertoires, particularly songs and dances related to the Struggle, revivals of classic European and South African protest plays, new history plays and specific racial and ethnic histories and identities.

1

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s reconfiguring of the past: remembering and forgetting

We are charged to unearth the truth about our dark past, to lay the ghosts of that past so that they will not return to haunt us. And [so] that we will thereby contribute to the healing of a traumatised and wounded people – for all of us in South Africa are wounded people – and in this manner to promote national unity and reconciliation. (Desmond Tutu)¹

Because of this very fullness, the hypothetical fullness, of this archive, what will have been granted is not memory, is not a true memory. It will be forgetting. That is, the archive – the good one – produces memory, but produces forgetting at the same time. And when we write, when we archive, when we trace, when we leave a trace behind us … the trace is at the same time the memory, the archive, and the erasure, the repression, the forgetting of what it is supposed to keep safe. That’s why, for all these reasons, the work of the archivist is not simply a work of memory. It’s a work of mourning. (Derrida, 2002: 54)

This chapter begins with the moment of rupture: with the release of Mandela in 1990 and the negotiations for full democracy in South Africa to be achieved by 1994, followed by a period of transition, characterised publicly to a large extent by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which sat from 1994–98. It will look at the role the TRC has played, both as live event and as an archive produced from oral testimonies, in the construction of a ‘new’ South Africa. In analysing the archive, I explore its function, how it has been performed and constructed, the various influences on these processes, and the effect it has had on the memories of apartheid for contemporary South Africa.

This exploration devotes close attention to specific issues raised by Derrida in his engagement with the TRC: issues of context, both of the live event and of the resultant archive, and how context has affected the interpretation of key concepts like justice, reconciliation, forgiveness and culpability as South Africa negotiates emergent value systems. The interpreters and the media played key roles in the TRC, both as event and as archive. I want to evaluate especially the extent to which they affected the creation of a single, coherent narrative of the ‘rainbow nation’ (McEachern, 2002).

The chapter will then compare the TRC archive, as summarised in the Final Report, to individual memories, and look at what the TRC means for South Africa almost two decades later.

‘Backstage’ conceptualisations of the TRC

Kentridge’s description of the TRC as ‘exemplary civic theatre, a public hearing of private griefs which are absorbed into the body politic as a part of the deeper understanding of how the society arrived at its present position’ (1998: ix) begs the question of how our understanding of this public event is affected if we read it though the lens of a theatrical event. This would involve considering who wrote the script, how the production was conceptualised in terms of context, approach to the production, performance and intended audience; and how this in turn influenced the development of the final narrative.

In 1995 the Minister of Justice, Mr Dullah Omar, explained the genesis of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as being ‘based on the final clause of the Interim Constitution’. The Government of National Unity used the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, No. 34 of 1995 to ‘help deal with what happened under apartheid. The conflict during this period resulted in violence and human rights abuses from all sides. No section of society escaped these abuses’.²

Although South Africa had successfully negotiated the handover to a fully democratic government, the country was uneasy, divided, without a coherent or consensual sense of the past. This needed to be redressed, insofar as the articulation of a shared past is central to the conceptualising of an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1991) and the formulation of a nation (McLeod, 2000). Alex Boraine reflects that ‘the ANC and civil society stressed that the past could not be ignored and that accountability was a prerequisite for human rights culture. To ignore the past is to perpetuate victimhood’ (2000: 6). However, the form that accountability would take was uncertain, as criminal trials culminating in punishment were seen by many to be ‘impossible or even dangerous for the country’,³ and ‘blanket amnesty … was unacceptable’ (ibid., 7). Significantly, although the TRC was ‘not a direct product of the negotiation process, it was deeply influenced by the process’, so that it was finally decided that the TRC ‘would hold in tension truth-telling, limited amnesty, and reparation’ (ibid.), through the three committees: the Amnesty Committee (AC), the Reparation and Rehabilitation (R&RC) Committee, and the Human Rights Violations Committee (HRVC).

The script envisaged for the TRC is evident from its mandate, which was to promote national unity and reconciliation in a spirit of understanding which transcends the conflicts and divisions of the past by:

• establishing as complete a picture as possible of the causes, nature and extent of gross violations of human rights which were committed during the period from 1 March 1960 to the cut-off date [later set at 1994] including the antecedents, circumstances, factors and context of such violations, as well as the perspectives of the victims and the motives and perspectives of the persons responsible for committing such violations, by conducting investigations and holding hearings;

• facilitating the granting of amnesty to persons who make full disclosure of all the relevant facts relating to acts associated with a political objective and which comply with the requirements of the Act (Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act);

• establishing and making known the fate or whereabouts of victims and restoring the human and civil dignity of such victims by granting them an opportunity to relate their own accounts of the violations of which they are the victims, and recommending reparation measures in respect of them;

• compiling a report providing as comprehensive an account as possible of the activities and findings of the Commission and containing recommendations of measures to prevent the future violations of human rights. (Justice in Transition)⁴

A TRC pamphlet explained that the function of the Commission was to

• give a complete picture of the gross violations of human rights which took place and which came from the conflicts of the past;

• restore victims their human and civil dignity by letting them tell their stories and recommending how they can be assisted;

• consider granting amnesty to those ‘perpetrators’ who carried out the abuses for political reasons, and who give full details of their actions to the commission. (TRC Pamphlets, 1995)⁵

These aims formed the basic outline for the TRC script which was to break silences of the past by offering amnesty to perpetrators for full disclosure of previously disavowed perpetrations of human rights violations, invite individuals to speak of their own experiences, and thus establish a sense of the past that could be shared by the widest range of people in South Africa. The staging of the TRC as a public event was ideologically important as it attempted to restore public confidence in the legal system in South Africa, where previous inquests had resulted in the official denial of experiences of human rights abuses. The difference in the focus in the pamphlets and the formal Act, particularly in foregrounding victims’ narratives in the former, compared with the broader aims of reconciliation and fact-finding in the latter, highlights the differences of emphasis for the public, as opposed to the government.

The centrality of this predetermined script for the ‘new’ South Africa is evident in the two particular ways in which this South African Commission departed from preceding Truth Commissions in other countries.⁶ First, hearings were held in public fora, with extensive media coverage, including radio microphones and television cameras, which underlined the necessity for disseminating the TRC narratives widely. Secondly, it heard the testimonies of both perpetrators of human rights abuses and survivors. This blurred the distinctions between the various processes of producing sources, archives, narratives and a history,⁷ particularly given the multiple interlocutors involved, and allowed the script to emerge from the hearings, as directed by the commissioners.

Posel and Simpson argue that the sense of direct retrieval of memories through live narratives ‘became the basis for their collective authentication’, especially through the mediatised close-ups which, they argue, ‘confirmed the immediacy and veracity of the truths being told’ (2002: 7). This in turn supported the TRC’s presentation of itself as a ‘fact-finding’ body. However, this representation is misleading, as the TRC was actively shaping the material at every stage. It has been referred to as a ‘founding theatrical event, a metaphysical “tournament of value”’ (Taylor, 2008: 9), which was not presenting facts so much as defining a shared understanding of apartheid, while (re)defining concepts of ‘truth’, ‘reconciliation’ and ‘forgiveness’.

This notion of the TRC as a national theatrical event makes for comparison with the so-called ‘state-of-the-nation plays’, which Dan Rebellato suggests are characterised by large casts, public settings, epic timescales and national venues (2008). Critics apply the term to works that explore the nation in a state of rupture, crisis or conflict. Holdsworth argues that

in general terms, the state-of-the-nation play deploys representations of personal events, family structures and social or political organisations as a microcosm of the nation-state to comment directly or indirectly on the ills befalling society, on key narratives of nationhood or on the state of the nation as it wrestles with changing circumstances. (2010: 39)

What is significant here is that the state itself set out to stage a national public event to address these same issues, using individual stories to create specific coherent narratives about the past and thus to facilitate the growth of a coherent future nation. This involved outlining a script.

The scripting began with the Information Management System (IMS)⁸ used to collect and collate the data. Burr explores how the IMS set the parameters that not only facilitated the process for translating local, specific narratives into ‘signs of gross human rights violations’ that were ‘superimposable’ and ‘combinable’ (2002: 80), but also determined which narratives would be included. The parameters included a specific time frame, including specifically defined events or historic moments for consideration in the hearings,⁹ spatial co-ordinates and definitions of categories which determined a specific understanding of the past, and a coherent time-line of past events that would ultimately become part of the ‘new’ national history (ibid., 78). Thus we can argue that the history being offered for consensualisation pre-dated the first hearings, was implicit in the conceptualisation of the Commission, and was defined in part by the systems chosen to record its operations.

The next aspect of the ‘backstage’ events of the Commission was the process of selecting narratives for public hearings, both for the HRVC and the AC. The first direct contact between the Commission and applicants was with statement takers, some 40 persons in 1996 and 400 in 1997, many hired from community groups and non-governmental organisations.¹⁰ Although some 20,000 applications were made by people wishing to testify to the Commission, only 10% of these were selected for the HRVC hearings by Commission staff. This is important because the transcriptions of all the applications and the testimonies finally heard at the various hearings form a significant part of the TRC archive, and thus provided the basis for the final narrative.¹¹ The selection process was based on ‘the totality of the experience of that particular region or that particular city’, fair distribution of race, gender, ethnicity, representing diverse political constituencies, and also on the need for stories that would ‘resonant the most with people’ (Cole, 2010: 9) The Commission also selected ‘window cases’: defined as cases that could be representative of broader patterns of abuse.¹² This suggests a selection process that was both pragmatic and ideologically predefined in relation to the aims of the Commission, as set out by the African National Congress’s Statement to the TRC (1996).

The repertoire: ‘On-stage’ dimensions of the TRC (1996–98)

The TRC’s mandate was extraordinary. It involved accessing and researching people and backgrounds in widely diverse locales in South Africa, validating the approach to this event as a ‘state-of-the-nation play which involved large casts, public settings, epic timescales and national venues’.¹³ To achieve its mandate in the limited time available, hearings were ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note on terminology
• Introduction
• 1 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s reconfiguring of the past: remembering and forgetting
• 2 Dramatising the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: the role of theatre practitioners in exploring the past
• 3 Staging a nation: the Voortrekker Monument and Freedom Park
• 4 Performing the African Renaissance and the ‘rainbow nation’
• 5 Post-apartheid repertoires of memory
• Select bibliography
• Index