A Nation Built on Feeling
For at least a decade, the world witnessed the remarkable and inspiring transformation of South Africa from a violent and repressive regime, a pariah nation, into a peaceful democratic republic. With a timeline that moves rapidly from the giddy optimism surrounding the unbanning of the ANC and the freeing of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990, to the exultant spirit of the first democratic elections in 1994, to the emotional culmination of the public hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1998, South Africa has been portrayed as the exemplary case for honestly and emotionally facing the trauma of its brutal past and incorporating its lessons into the model of an inclusive utopian republic—realizing the dream of what Archbishop Desmond Tutu once termed the “Rainbow Nation”.
But how does an entire country collectively heal from such a traumatic past and facilitate a peaceful reconciliation among its citizens? And of what might the cultural and artistic expressions of such a dramatic transformation consist? The new constitution of South Africa encoded the urgent necessity for collective healing from the cultural trauma of apartheid in its provision for national reconciliation: “there is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimization”.1 The fulfilment of these national “needs” was to culminate in the public hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: the public articulation of the suffering of victims and the appeals for forgiveness from the perpetrators. Broadcast nationally via newspapers, radio and television, these emotional testimonies would allow the national community to coalesce, unified by empathy and ubuntu, and heal together, curtailing the devastating trauma of history.2
The political and social impetus to create a new South African citizen for a “new” egalitarian South Africa resulted in a compelling societal incitement to feel in particular ways: to feel compassion, empathy, guilt, forgiveness, to name the most prominent affective positions being foregrounded in South Africa after 1994. The cultural icons of the “new” South Africa, specifically President Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, explicitly modelled the fledgling affective citizenship of the country Tutu idealistically christened the “Rainbow Nation”. Such modelling was dependent upon the public prominence of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Hearings that took place from 1996 to 1998. These hearings became performative forums, eliciting the profound feelings of both victims and perpetrators of gross human rights violations and broadcasting this affecting testimony to the nation, as well as to the world at large, so that these feelings could then be empathized with and even mirrored by the viewing/listening/reading audience.
This book elaborates upon the premise that cultural and national identity in South Africa has undergone a radical transformation to supplant the harsh hierarchical, political, economic and social divisions created during the apartheid era (1948–1994) with a harmonious and egalitarian nation that was born when Nelson Mandela was elected in 1994, and that this transformation may be measured and evaluated in large part through the lens of affect. Through an examination of a range of South African texts produced during and after that historic date, I will demonstrate that the transition from the “old” South Africa to the “new” Rainbow Nation involved the deployment of a variety of affects intended to transform previously disenfranchised South Africans into fully-fledged citizens, to convey the traumatic tales of victims as well as perpetrators of apartheid-era human rights violations to the nation, and finally to transcend the trauma of the recent past and reconcile the divided cultures of the “old” South Africa. The spectacle of the public hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an event that permeated the lives of virtually every South African as well as much of the global community, provides an exemplary case for how the “new” South Africa was intentionally constructed on a foundation of affect: pain, grief, hope, shame, remorse, compassion and forgiveness.
The ethical ideal connected with, and foundational to, the “new” South Africa was quickly consolidated and brought to fully embodied life in two venerated figures who, not coincidentally, became, respectively, head of state and chief commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC): President Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Tutu, as a consequence of his chosen vocation, moved without difficulty into the position of spiritual advisor to the nation. His recourse to the African concept of ubuntu, or interrelatedness—which will be discussed at greater length in Chapter 3—aligned seamlessly with his Anglican faith, and his Christian beliefs added gravitas to his entreaties for confession, forgiveness and reconciliation. While Tutu represented a sort of spiritual bedrock for the values prized by the incoming ANC government, Mandela represented the realized potential of the angry black South African to transform himself into a genial, forgiving and thoroughly reconciled citizen of the “new” South Africa. As such, Mandela became the prototype for the recently acculturated citizen. Entering prison in 1962 as an angry revolutionary and guerilla fighter, co-founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the ANC, Mandela walked out of prison in 1990, a smiling elder statesman advocating peaceful negotiations with the ruling National Party and championing national reconciliation.3
Because the National government that imprisoned him banned all photographs of Mandela and similarly made it illegal to quote him, it appeared to be a moment of shockingly instantaneous metamorphosis as the young, imposing and combative terrorist who entered incarceration emerged, twenty-six years later, as a distinguished, genial leader: more frail yet astonishingly serene, amiable, warm and forgiving. The image of the benevolent Mandela emerging from Victor Verster prison on February 11, 1990—an image, as History Professor Martin Leggassick remarks in his 1998 review of Mandela’s autobiography, that has been “reproduced […] in the South African media almost daily”4—visually embodies themes that have been carefully and consciously deployed by the ANC government in the social, political and cultural narratives of the Rainbow Nation: the theme of personal transformation as a means of achieving national reconciliation and the complementary thesis of the need, as Sarah Nuttall suggests, “to find a place between public resistance and private healing; and between private resistance and public healing”.5 Nuttall discusses Mandela’s autobiography as a prototypical representation of the post-apartheid zeitgeist insofar as it conspicuously emphasizes the importance of making the private public. As Nuttall notes, Mandela “makes it clear that the autobiography is a ‘memory’ which is not exclusively his: in prison it was ‘edited,’ as Mandela wrote it, by fellow prisoners Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada. The monologic voice becomes dialogic”.6 In his review article, Legassick similarly notes the public intentions of Mandela’s supposedly private autobiographical voice, intentions made evident through the editing process. When Mandela quotes from his famous Rivonia Trial speech, for example, the extracts that he has chosen “excise any reference to the word ‘nationalisation’”.7
Mandela’s autobiography textually represents the contemporaneous impetus to cede the privacy of individual identity for the greater public good, an impetus that reaches its full expression in the mandate of the TRC hearings to showcase personal confessions from victims and perpetrators alike. The hearings, which will be discussed further in the following chapters, are notable for being the first such process open to the general public and reported on widely by national and international media—making the personal grief of victims and the complicated remorse of the perpetrators readily available to the national as well as the international community. In addition, the TRC hearings became, in the opinion of its architects, the recovered history of the nation; the individual testimonies comprising the archives of a dark, previously suppressed history of apartheid. Just as Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom relates the history of the nation through the story of one suffering but heroic individual to the point where Mandela becomes conflated with the nation as a whole, so too did each testimonial at the TRC hearings become one recovered voice within a chorus intent on expressing a diverse and traumatic national history. As Jane Taylor writes in the introduction to her acclaimed multimedia performance, Ubu and the Truth Commission (1998), at the h...