REVIEW BY MARINA CARMAN
The politics of truth and reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the post-Apartheid state
By Richard A. Wilson
Cambridge University Press 2001
271 pages $39.95
Finally, the story behind the "miracle" transition in South Africa is starting to be told. A number of factors have combined to produce a deafening silence in terms of critical literature on South Africa during the 1990s.
After 1994 the African National Congress (ANC) became virtually immune from criticism due to its status as leader of the anti-apartheid struggle, as did the national consensus around the idea of a "Rainbow Nation" where forgiveness and compromise, transformation and justice were supposed to be the order of the day.
Internationally and within South Africa, radical academics, social movement activists, and non-government organisations have been busy in community campaigns and government structures. Many have succumbed to the lure of cushy positions in government or the trade union bureaucracy.
Nevertheless, from within South Africa a handful of critical books have emerged in the last few years. The most comprehensive and damning of the ANC's shift to the right and abandonment of its promises for socio-economic transformation are Patrick Bond's Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neo-Liberalism in South Africa (1999), and Hein Marais' South Africa: Limits to Change: the Political Economy of Transformation (1998).
Now even the internationally-acclaimed Truth and Reconciliation Commission is getting some critical treatment.
Wilson's book is fairly academic, but through extensive research into internal TRC functioning, and into the impact on individuals and communities in townships around Johannesburg, he provides some very interesting insights.
He argues that the over-arching language and concepts of reconciliation used by the TRC were predominantly focused on the need to legitimise the new post-apartheid state (and in doing so served to aid the consolidation of the power of a new bureaucratic elite).
This meant that the TRC failed to produce an adequate picture of the past. It was more concerned with creating a consensus on the moral bankruptcy of past gross human rights violations, than exposing the system which produced such acts (and the large amount of other "legal" violent and oppressive acts).
Wilson argues that it also meant that the TRC process did not adequately take into account the need of individuals for some retribution. Amnesty provisions removed the ability of victims to pursue civil or criminal cases against perpetrators who came forward. He argues that the need for retribution remained strong and that the ideas of forgiveness and reconciliation promoted by the TRC did not permeate the townships.
Adding to the problems that Wilson outlines, the lack of government action on TRC recommendations for financial reparation payments to victims, and the lack of broader socio-economic transformation for the majority of the black population, are further undermining what reconciliation may have achieved.
Poverty, criminal violence and cynicism in relation to the ANC are all on the increase. On a more positive note, so too are independent township campaigns around privatisation and the myriad effects on daily life for black workers of the ANC government's neo-liberal economic restructuring drive. A still very politicised population is increasingly demanding that the government follow through on its reconciliation rhetoric and deliver the socio-economic transformation that was promised.
The debate around the relationship between reconciliation and socio-economic transformation, and others such as the conflict between reconciliation at an individual and collective level, are taken up in more detail in other books.
Two of the most important are After the TRC: Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa edited by Wilmot James and Linda van de Vijver and Looking Back, Reaching Forward: Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa edited by Charles Villa-Vicencio and Wilhelm Verwoerd. Both contain contributions on a variety of issues from TRC commissioners, academics and victims who participated in the TRC.