Staging Solidarity

Truth and Reconciliation in a New South Africa

Tanya Goodman, Ronald Eyerman, Jeffrey C. Alexander

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781594512858
• eBook ISBN: 9781317251484
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is a modern social drama that enabled the nation's apartheid past to be constructed as a cultural trauma, and by doing so created a new collective narrative of diversity and inclusion. The TRC relied primarily on testimonies from victims and perpetrators of apartheid violence who came forward to tell their stories in a public forum. Rather than simply serving as data for setting the historical record straight, this book shows that it was not only the content of these testimonies but also how these stories were told and what values were attached to them that became significant. Goodman argues that the performative nature of the TRC process effectively designated the past as profane and simultaneously imagined a sacred future community based on democratic idealism and universal solidarity.

1

A Home for All

South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white…. Our country will never be prosperous or free until all our people live in brotherhood.

The Freedom Charter of the ANC Adopted at the Congress of the People, Kliptown (June, 26 1955)

We must clearly demonstrate our goodwill to our white compatriots and convince them by our conduct and arguments that a South Africa without apartheid will be a better home for all…. No men or women who have abandoned apartheid will be excluded from our movement towards a nonracial, united and democratic South Africa.

Nelson Mandela’s speech in Soweto after being released from prison (February 13, 1990)

Our Vision: A South Africa that is a home to all its people. … This vision is inspired by the following words by Albert Luthuli (1962): “South Africa is not yet home for all her sons and daughters. … There remains before us the building of a new land, a home for [people] who are black, white, brown, from the ruins of the narrow groups, a synthesis of the rich cultural strains which we have inherited.”

Home for All campaign launched by white South Africans (December 16, 2000)

INTRODUCTION

Despite decades of race-based oppression and state-sanctioned violence, the African National Congress (ANC), the primary antiapartheid political movement, retained its commitment to a nonracial, democratic South Africa as set out in its foundational document, the Freedom Charter (1955). This was evidenced when, upon his release from prison in 1990 after twenty-seven years, Nelson Mandela publicly endorsed and reaffirmed the ANC’s commitment to the ideal of inclusion, whereby South Africa would be “a home,” as the Freedom Charter had promised, to “all who live[d] in it” (Mandela 1990). But for many years, blacks¹ and whites had been socially, politically, and physically separated, often by violent means such as murder, detention, and abuse. How was it possible that in December 2000, ten years after Mandela’s release, a group of white South Africans could come together and sign a declaration called the Home for All, marking their agreement with the ANC’s vision of inclusion? After many years of segregation and repression, how did black and white South Africans arrive at the point of constructing a sense of social solidarity whereby they could see themselves sharing a “home,” living together as members of the same moral and national community?

That is the question that underlies this book. But the question is also larger than the South African case. Once institutions or social groups have solidified attitudes about others into practices that perpetuate prejudice, racism, or discrimination—some of which leads to often violent oppression or even genocide—in what ways is it possible to reconstitute the categories of exclusion that necessarily underpin such actions and reverse the trend? If these types of practices and attitudes are taken–for granted, then change to requires a challenge to the definition of the situation. I believe this (re)definition relies on the construction of a new sense of solidarity, which requires the reconstitution of the boundaries of what is considered to be the moral community and of categories determining who belongs. So what might be the mechanisms that enable the boundaries of this type of moral exclusion to shift, dissipate, or be redefined? Regarding South Africa in particular, what happened in the ten years between Mandela’s release speech and the Home for All declaration? I will argue that the institution of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) at a key moment in the transition to democracy helped facilitate the nation’s transformation.

After hearing testimony from victims and perpetrators of apartheid violence for two years, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chairperson of the TRC, handed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Final Report (1998) to President Mandela and claimed that the the report’s findings and widespread publication would mark a turning point:

We will have looked the beast in the eye. We will have come to terms with our horrendous past and it will no longer keep us hostage. We will cast off its shackles and, holding hands together, black and white, we will stride together into the future. And looking at our past, we will commit ourselves: Never again! Nooit weer nie! Ngeke futhi! Ga re not tlola! (Tutu 2000)

The focus of this book is to understand the path carved by the TRC and the remarkable shift to which it led. I will argue that in postapartheid South Africa, the TRC was established in part to deal with the question of how to reckon with a divisive past. But rather than being a legal structure that simply heard adversarial testimonies and dispensed punishment, the TRC became a public space of storytelling and witnessing to which the nation, and the world, were invited. By characterizing it as a modern ritual of performance, I will propose that the TRC set the stage for a new national narrative, and the stories that were heard inside its walls became threads in the social drama of trauma and triumph. To explain how the testimonies given to the TRC were deployed and inserted into a narrative for the new nation, I will show their movement through space and time. Through a series of performance cycles, and with the aid of what I term empathic interlocutors and sympathetic interpreters, my research demonstrates how the TRC process helped to designate the events of the apartheid past as evil and the future of the new democracy as sacred.

The TRC operated during a particularly ripe period in the trajectory of the nation. This window of opportunity was deeply connected to the founding moment of a new democracy and the euphoria and effervescence that surrounded that moment. The term “new” was used to refer to South Africa almost as soon as the end of apartheid became palpable. I will argue that, for most South Africans, the decision to describe the country as “new” was premised not only on the principles underlying real democracy in all its legal specificity but also on the general recognition that all now belonged. This expansion of the notion of belonging forms a central part of my analysis of the TRC. But before we explore this phenomenon, we must begin with a brief overview of the history of apartheid in South Africa.

THE ARCHITECTURE AND IMPACT OF APARTHEID

Racism, discrimination, and oppression in South Africa can be traced back to the arrival of the first white settlers in 1652. Portuguese explorers had arrived at the Cape of Good Hope as early as 1488, when Bartholomew Dias began to establish the area as a trade-route stop, but 1652 marks the beginning of the country’s official colonization under the leadership of Jan van Riebeek of the Dutch East India Company.² Besides enslaving indigenous Africans, the Dutch also imported slaves from Indonesia and Malaysia. As the Dutch settlers (many of whom, namely the Boers, were engaged in farming) expanded their activities further into the interior, a series of battles were waged. But it was when the British arrived in the early 1800s that further conflict ensued and colonization and oppression really took force. Meanwhile, the rise of the Zulu Kingdom was underway, characterized by King Shaka’s own notorious manner of killing and enslavement, and waves of Africans began to migrate south. There were numerous disputes between the British, the Boers, and the Zulus (for example, the Battle of Blood River in 1838 and the Anglo-Boer Wars of 1880–1881 and 1899–1902), culminating in a British rise to power in the early 1900s.

It was during this time that the early architects of the apartheid system began to institute key legislative acts that established geographic, social, political, and economic barriers based on race. Apartheid, literally meaning “separateness” in Afrikaans, was essentially a legal and cultural system of division and exclusion that was imposed across all spheres of life. Formal policies instituting separation and domination reached their zenith in 1948 with the election of the white-only, Afrikaner-dominated National Party (NP). Once the NP came to power, the regime embarked on a project specifically designed to construct artificial lines of segregation based on categories of race by introducing and formalizing a whole array of legislation. Some of the most notorious legislation included the Land Act (1913), the Group Areas Act (1950), the Population Registration Act (1950), and the Separate Amenities Act (1953). (See Table 1.1 for more highlights of significant laws implemented during the consolidation of the Apartheid state.)

Table 1.1 Examples of Legislation Implementing Apartheid

Year	Act	Impact
1911	Native Labor Regulation	Discriminated against blacks in employment, prohibiting strikes by African workers and limiting skilled jobs in mining to whites.
1913	Natives Land Act	Separated South Africa into areas in which either blacks or whites could own land. Blacks, constituting two-thirds of the population, were restricted to 7.5 percent of the land; whites, making up one-fifth of the population, were given 92.5 percent.
1949	Prohibition of Mixed Marriages	Made marriages between whites and members of other racial groups illegal.
1950	Population Registration	Classified all residents as white, coloured, or native (later called Bantu) people. Indians later included as Asians (1959).
1950	Group Areas	Extended the Natives Land Act (1913) and divided South Africa into separate areas for whites and blacks (including coloureds), giving the government the power to forcibly remove people from areas not designated for their particular racial group.
1950	Immorality Act	Extended an earlier ban on sexual relations between whites and blacks (the Immorality Act of 1927) to a ban on sexual relations between whites and any nonwhites.
1950	Suppression of Communism	Banned the communist ideology and any act aimed “at bringing about any political, industrial, social, or economic change within the Union by the promotion of disturbance or disorder.” Allowed the Minister of Justice to ban members from holding public office, attending public meetings, or being in any specified area.
1951	Bantu Authorities	Established separate rural areas or homelands called Bantustans for different tribal groups.
1953	Reservation of Separate Amenities	Stated that all races should have separate amenities—such as toilets, parks, and beaches—and that these need not be of an equivalent quality.
1953	Bantu Education	Decreed that blacks should be provided with separate educational facilities.
1953	Public Safety	Enabled the government to suspend all laws and to proclaim a state of emergency.
1953	Criminal Law Amendment	Stated that anyone accompanying a person found guilty of offenses committed while “protest[ing], or in support of any campaign for the repeal or modification of any law,” would also be presumed guilty (this later became known as the Common Purpose Law).
1954	Resettlement of Natives	Legalized forced removals to Bantustans.
1956	Native Administration	Permitted the government to banish Africans by exiling them to remote rural areas far from their homes.
1956	Customs and Excise Act of 1955 and the Official Secrets Act	Gave the government power to establish a Board of Censors to censor books, films, and other materials imported into or produced in South Africa.
1959	Extension of University Education	Prohibited blacks from attending white universities and colleges, with few exceptions, and established separate institutions for Africans, Coloureds, and Indians.

Source: Adapted from U.S. Library of Congress 1996.

Often enforced brutally (see Table 1.2), the system of apartheid thus determined not only who could vote but also legislated where people could live, who they could marry, where they could work, where they could send their children to school, with whom they could meet, and what they heard on the news. As a result, black and white people rarely if ever encountered one another as equals in the political, economic, and social realms of everyday life.

Table 1.2 selected Statistics of Apartheid Violence

Between 1960 and 1990

16.5 million South Africans criminalized and harassed under the pass laws. (a) 4 million forcibly removed from their homes and land. (a) 300 apartheid laws put on the statute books. (a) 80,000 detentions without trial, including 10,000 women and 15,000 children under age fifteen. (b) 3,000 people banned. (b) 15,000 charged in court under security legislation. (b)

Between September 1984 and May 1993

15,843 fatalities as a result of political violence. (c)

Various States of Emergency

March 1960: State of emergency is declared following Sharpeville Massacre on March 21, when 69 people were killed and 186 wounded as police opened fire on marchers protesting the pass laws. 11,503 people detained. (d) June 16, 1976: Soweto uprising begins when police open fire on students protesting against the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. Resistance spreads throughout the country. In the end, there are 575 official deaths, and more than 2,000 people injured. (d) July 1985: State of emergency: 8,500 people detained. (c) June 1986: State of emergency: Over 25,000 people detained by 1987. The emergency is reimposed annually until 1990. (d)

Sources:

(a) Christie 2000: 13

(b) Christie 2000: 21–22

(c) Christie 2000: 28.

(d) TRC 1998, vol, 3, chap. 1

On the whole, in typical colonial style, whites considered blacks as Other, treating them at best as children who needed guidance but more often as animals that required mastering. Black people’s impressions of whites, on the other hand, were fueled by hatred or fear either of greater impoverishment or of physical abuse. These images were reinforced with violence, buttressed by the law, and sustained through education and the media.

The polarization only increased as the antiapartheid struggle gained momentum from the 1950s onward and the South African government resorted to banning activists and their political organizations, placing people in detention without trial (where many died or languished for years, sometimes in isolation), forcibly removing communities of black people from certain areas, fostering interethnic violence, and assassinating antiapartheid political leaders. In addition, laws enabling the South African government to control the media and censor publications made it exceedingly difficult for white South Africans to understand the goals and strategies of the antiapartheid political movements (Thompson 1995: 236). The black liberation movements went underground or into exile and splinter organizations resorted to forming military wings in the 1960s, after years of nonviolent resistance. The government’s numerous violent strategies were used to quell black demands for inclusion in the polity, and many in the minority white population willingly ignored or supported these actions, in part because they believed the NP’s claim that the enemy was part of the communist onslaught, the rooi-gevaar (red danger). The NP so successfully demonized those involved in the black resistance movements as communists, atheists, or terrorists that most white South Africans did not see black people as human beings, let alone as individuals worthy of belonging to a moral community.

In light of this briefly outlined history, it is remarkable that in composing its central ideological document, the Freedom Charter, in 1955, the ANC could so vividly privilege an inclusionary ideal for a future South Africa, one whereby the country would be viewed as belonging to “all who live in it.” Understanding the legacy of this inclusionary ideal in relation to the ANC’s evolution as a political organization is a topic that warrants its own attention. Suffice it to say that such an analysis, by tracing the ANC’s ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 A Home for All
• 2 Theoretical Backdrop
• 3 Weaving the Threads of a Cultural Trauma: Testimony at the TRC
• 4 Broadcasting the Trauma Drama: The Media as Sympathetic Interpreters
• 5 Extending the TRC Narrative: Analyzing Positive Audience Response
• 6 Ramifications and Conclusions
• Appendixes
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author