At the end of April, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the establishment of a commission of inquiry into long-standing delays in Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) case investigations and prosecutions.
It sounds nice. It is well-meaning, but it will (deservedly) benefit only those who lost friends and family members who were killed by apartheid’s security forces between 1961 and 1994.
We should not traduce the suffering and the injustices inflicted on ANC and PAC activists and guerrillas — many of them maimed or murdered — in the conflict between the liberation movements and the apartheid state.
Nor should we dismiss, out of hand, the people “on the other side”: the military personnel, police (who fought in defence of apartheid) and civilians (on whose behalf the military and security establishment defended apartheid) who were killed during the conflict.
This new commission, as reported by Daily Maverick’s Nonkululeko Njilo, will look into “allegations of improper influence in delaying or hindering the investigation and prosecution of apartheid-era crimes that have persisted from previous administrations”.
As if apartheid never mattered
The problem with the TRC, as I understood it at the time, was that it was never about justice. The ANC and National Party framers of the terms of reference (and the entire process) failed to see that a country of 44 million people (the population in 1994), at least 80% of whom had been victims of apartheid, needed redress for decades of injustice and abuse that had nothing to do with the armed struggle.
Significantly, also, was the fact that the TRC ignored the vertically segmented privilege of European colonisation and white settler colonialism. It was as if apartheid didn’t matter; only the conflict between the liberation movement and the state security forces mattered.
I discussed this with Dullah Omar and Kader Asmal before the TRC process began, while the terms of reference were being discussed and codified, and the arguments I made (then) remain valid.
I repeat, then, that the TRC process had little to do with apartheid as a crime against humanity and the somatic and structural injustices that endure.
The TRC was about two main things. In the first place, it was about settling scores between the National Party and (mainly) the ANC, brilliantly and wilfully tangled up in legalese with references to gross violations of human rights … you ensnare something in legalese to the extent that nothing and nobody can move through the thickets of laws and regulations.
In the second instance, it had to do with “moving on” which, effectively, sanctified all white people who today would tell us, often explicitly, that we have to “move on” — people who “don’t see race”, who fail to accept, or even recognise that something was wrong with the country during the settler colonial period.
In this sense, it had little or nothing to do with justice for people who were, for instance, forced off land, dumped in ethnic “homelands” or moved from homes in urban sites, like Sophiatown or Vrededorp in Johannesburg; Simon’s Town or District Six in Cape Town; and South End in what was, then, Port Elizabeth — to make way for white people.
Wilful forgetting is the imprimatur that the TRC has left on post-apartheid South Africa, with sequestered truths and selective reconciliation.
The refrain is that apartheid was in the past. Let’s not discuss it (sequester or suppress uncomfortable truths), and there is discomfort, as with the question, “What about reconciliation?” Reconciliation is a one-way street. Black people must forget, and when memories come alive, they have to forgive and forget (reconciliation, eh!), and move on.
If they happen to remain aggrieved, or recall the way that forced removals destroyed families, communities and severed the threads that held together society, the white imagination retreated into that odious idea that they (whites) were the chosen ones of history’s moral purpose.
We need look, only, at the way that current global conflicts and Donald Trump have emboldened a sector of society to the extent that the US president’s war on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) lifted the veil of the Democratic Alliance — and exposed its opposition to correcting injustices of the past.
Just mentioning all of this is considered to be “race-baiting” or selectively invoking that (meretricious) Nelson Mandela meme of reconciliation — which placed a halo on the sinners’ heads!
The cuteness of RSA, not DNA
We live in a country that is going through the most awful breakdown in infrastructure, wayward moral wandering and rampant lawlessness. These are all worthy of discussion, to be sure.
What cannot be discussed, not in any serious manner, is total acceptance that actual policies like the Group Areas Act, Bantu Education or Coloured Education, Influx Control and the Bantustan policies (among many others) were to shore up white South African privileges and prestige.
This is one of the discussions (fact-based) that is sequestered, and then the wand of reconciliation is waved. We live in a country with a deep history of racism, with nary a racist in sight…
I turn here to the words of Reni Eddo-Lodge in “Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race”, in which she restated the following passage:
“I’m no longer engaging with white people on the topic of race. Not all white people, just the vast majority who refuse to accept the existence of structural racism and its symptoms. I can no longer engage with the gulf of an emotional disconnect that white people display when a person of colour articulates their experience. You can see their eyes shut down and harden. It’s like treacle is poured into their ears, blocking up their ear canals. It’s like they can no longer hear us.”
The cute and fuzzy meme today is “not DNA, RSA” (or something like that) — in other words, forget! Some of us have memories that prevent us from forgetting while others have layers upon layers of privilege stacked over years, decades, of accumulating social, cultural economic and symbolic forms of capital — all of which have been denied to the majority of black people over centuries and are now justified with claims that “we have worked hard for our money and positions of power and influence”.
By denying the social impact (which includes economic and political) and wishing away the spatial legacy of apartheid and the enduring damages of that era, whites have staked claims on a singular historical relevance; that of European colonists and subsequent settlers. They are the only ones who matter.
All of this was what fed into my opposition to the TRC in the early 1990s, and what (I fear) any new commission will ignore; it’s what happens when carefully arranged facts are highlighted or foregrounded, and others are sequestered.
The TRC had little to do with justice. It did not adequately address the actual injustice of apartheid and all its somatic and structural violence. The fact is that the police force’s and security establishment’s targeting of activists and guerrillas was in defence of apartheid. Ruthless and bloody as it was, it was not the only thing that was happening in South Africa from 1961 to 1994.
Our compatriots will, predictably and quite in character, recognise the “broken courage” — the trauma-based cultural syndrome in Cambodia — that the communists of the Khmer Rouge left behind.
Having spent most of the past three years back and forth to Southeast Asia, I became all too aware of the anger that sits just below the surface in Cambodia, and how little it takes for violence to erupt.
Here, in South Africa, after the halo has been placed on the sinner’s head, there are only innocents. Anger is dismissed as irrational or unreasonable (and the reconciliation trope is rolled out).
And so, when white liberals in South Africa are implicated, the suffering and traumas of the past that endure and that continue to shape South Africans are sequestered.
Refer to ANC corruption, and there is applause. Refer to crypto-fascism, authoritarianism and tribalisation, and there is applause (with attendant sanctimony and self-satisfaction). Mention apartheid and there is anger, the anger that is “fair” and “allowed” and justified.
The TRC failed terribly in this respect and there is little chance of any new commission turning things around. It is, for the most part, too late to call the perpetrators to book, and their offspring carry the sinner’s halo with a Trumpian bounce in their step.
There should be no room for the politics of revenge in South Africa, but the sequestration of truths that upset — upset that invokes the “what about reconciliation?” claims — means the country might well continue to remain a moral basket-case. DM