University of Venda Discourses on Difference and Oppression

Losing life and re-making nation at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Nthabiseng Motsemme and Kopano Ratele The paper focuses on the competing narratives of nation and loss that emerged in the collective and individual constructions of the past during the Truth Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process. We consider the transitional period between the end of formal apartheid and the new democratic dispensation and the government led by the African National Congress to be most crucial in giving shape to the TRC. It is the arrangements arising out of the context which shapes the aims of the TRC. In its purpose to confront past abuses the commission would end up privileging particular truths in helping us to understand the past. Rescuing other views such as those which come though in women’s testimonies shows the versions of truths which have dominated the TRC, whose cast is both nationalist and patriarchal. Our task is thus to demonstrate how, the way they narrated their lives under apartheid, black women were effectively at pains to insert a counter-narrative. The women’s stories primarily testified to the difficulties in maintaining relationships with their men-folk and their perceived struggles and failures to maintain families and homes. Women have tended to tell of a different history which is at odds with the mainstream one which has sought to underwrite the nationalist text of a renewed democratic South Africa. Introduction

To what ends do nations and individuals remember the past? What kind of past is remembered by individuals as opposed to societies? Does calling to mind and speaking about a violent history involve a different language from an orderly one? Through which routes are the past of nations and those who are its members construct and access their pasts? And, is it worthwhile to search for commonalities/differences in the way male and female subjects (re)produce the past?

It has become widely agreed that memory is always a contested. Remembering is not merely personal act. Thinking about the past happens at the interface of individual and society, has political overtones, and is founded in power/knowledge system. In recollecting past events certain memories, and not others, will be afforded privilege; if repeated often enough may quickly acquire the status of truth. At the same time other possibilities about the same past will get repressed, marginalised, silenced. In South Africa the collapse of apartheid opened up a space on which the new South Africa could be inscribed with the help of particular memorial acts. This process of fashioning a South African identity and nation out of personal-political evil, of addressing a violent political past and talking into life a new democratic society, was shaped largely by historical and current political forces in which the white apartheid relinquished formal political authority to an African National Congress-led government. In the process leading to this, during the ‘talks-to-democracy’, an amnesty agreement was written into the interim South African constitution. This negotiated settlement between the past establishment and the new dispensation gave birth to the TRC. Among other things, the commission was required to get to an understanding of the "antecedent circumstances, factors and context of gross human rights violations as well as the causes, motives and perspectives of the persons responsible: (Section 3(1) of the Act).

The paper outlines the extent the TRC was already and always going to be nationalist in its object, hedged in and limited as it was by the miraculous political solution, the peaceful transition from apartheid to the new dispensation. Out argument is that the political miracle, continuities, and hegemonic ideas of nation shaped the way the past would be recalled, and how the future South Africa be. In this context the collection of testimonies was overtly or covertly aimed assisting in the creation of a collective national consciousness. But in our analysis of testimonies another version of the truth about the past emerges. These testimonies speak centrally about particular kinds of loss. They point to destruction of homes and relationships. They call attention to how apartheid violence destabilised black families specifically. That those who tended to speak thus are women far more than men is significant. While gendered identities have gotten attention from feminist writers, masculinity has for the most part been ignored in explanations of mass atrocities.

The Commission was formulated to be a transitional body. One of its tasks was to allow ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’ to come face-to-face and confront the past. This process was envisioned as a means of facilitating healing and, perhaps, forgiveness in the brutally divided South African society. It would encourage individuals to narrate their experiences of past abuses or provide testimony or witness to the past. These individual stories would then provide the text for a collective future South Africa being forged. Coloured vividly with nationalist intentions, the Truth Commission sought to celebrate a heroic and selfless past which had given a painful birth to the new South Africa. In its performance and ritualisation it created a liminal space in which the spoken work would be transformed to truth and become history. In other words, it was both the history lesson and an enactment of this lesson.

However, any conscious act to remember the past will be exclusionary; it will reflect partial truths. Women’s testimonies within the TRC reveal a different version of the past, and thus foreground the idea of competing and uneven recollections of the past. In their descriptions women testify to the difficulties in maintaining relationships with their men folk and perceived struggles and failures to sustaining families and homes. Their memory, in other words, is not what generally tends to be spoken of as heroic. Women’s testimonies tended to be filled with a deep sense of loss and often negative recollections of the national struggle. In hearing their stories here, and reading their silences there, women appear to centralise the difficulty in simply trying to live under apartheid and patriarchy: the patriarchal discursive system of apartheid and cultural patriarchies. Women lift up the woven weight of race, culture and class discourses in shaping their social worlds. In this way the women insert what we regard as a counter narrative amidst the major one which the new state power sought to use to underpin the nationalist text of the post-apartheid South Africa.

Given the newness of critical analyses relating of the TRC, the paper has creatively explored a number of sources in order to reveal these voices of the nation and voices of loss. Taking an interdisciplinary approach it has attempted to forge a nuanced understanding of black women in post-apartheid South Africa. The paper will be structured in the following way. In the first part five women’s testimonies presented and analysed. The selected testimonies are those of Nyameka Goniwe, Nonceba Zokwe, Nozibonelo Maria Mxathule, Eunice Miya, and Joyce Marubini. The selection of these testimonies is a conscious effort to insert the analysis of ordinary women’s experiences during apartheid and in turn undermine the seductive knowledge of black women’s experiences as embodied in national figures, to wit, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. This is also an attempt to shift the gaze of popular and often distorted images of black South African women. Within these selected testimonies a counter-narrative will be identified and described. It will be shown that this counter-narrative was established through a number of strategies which included: subverting the prescribed victim status; undermining the images of the powerful matriarch which were sought to underwrite the nationalist narrative, and women’s centering of not only issues of race but patriarchy and class in South Africa.

In the second and third sections of the paper we re-place the women’s testimonies within its relevant context. The context is that of the transition process and period in South Africa, and the TRC processes; re-placement implies that the women’s stories of loss can only read, heard, and fully understood within the political and social contexts of apartheid and the subsequent processes engaged to undo its effects and bring about a new national order; but it implies also that there is the everpresent possibility that narratives can be read differently. The two sections will separately and jointly outline the major continuities and discontinuities found during the transitional period, which also give additional meaning and shape to the women’s voices. We look at the Constitution, the National Unity and Reconciliation Act, complementary policies and acts which gave birth and which institutionalised the truth project, and the project’s mandate. The negotiated amnesty deal will be stressed as crucial in shaping the meanings that became attached to the commission, producing its legitimacy, influencing fundamentally its way of working. This section will go on to demonstrate how powerful the performance ritual aspect of the TRC was in constructing an inchoate national mythology of the past. Here we illustrate how, through employing performance and ritual, the speaking voice gets introduced into history, voices got authenticated, specific representations are privileged. What we try to highlight is the extent to which the TRC appropriated familiar tropes of black women and their painful words of injustice to inscribe a specific national consciousness.

The other story

The collective story of women who came to the TRC can be seen as the counter-narrative to the patriarchal discourse of nation. This other narrative is found in the way in which women implicitly or explicitly positioned themselves. In exploring what women were saying, and how they articulated their victimisation and survival at the hands of the perpetrators, several issues emerge. One of the striking ones is the extent women situated themselves within everyday experience, rather than larger causes of national revolution or defending the social order. Home, domesticity, relationships, quotidian lives, were employed to relate the women’s experiences of human rights violations.

At the same time the other story is full of gaps, of silent gaps. The women’s accounts raise, once again, the importance of silences, of the dilemmas in interpreting silence so obviously full of meaning (see Das, 1996). The meaning of this sort of silence is contested; the assertion that it be viewed as language raises challenging questions about new constructions of agency.

Locating women’s narratives

The testimonies of the women who came to tell their truths and reconcile at the sittings of the TRC need to be placed within the context of the various competing discourses in South Africa during the ongoing transitional period. This contextualisation will highlight the extent re-membering is constructed, thus the way a person chooses or is compelled to tell a story about the past. The women were caught between the public remaking of a nation, which the truth body was helping to inscribe through the story it sought from victims and perpetrators on the one hand, and their more private everyday experiences of apartheid on the other. Out of this arise their narrative strategies which would allow them to recover their private pasts from the public truth, to be heard amidst the clamour to forgive, and reconcile, and build a new nation (Ross: 1996; Das: 1996; Bozzolli: 1998).

It has been argued that a researcher, in selecting the people who will be interviewed, shaping the truth by asking certain questions and not others, reacting to answers in an individual and peculiar manner, and giving the responses their final published form, context, and explanation, is another mediation which individuals must contend with in the telling of their stories (Portelli, 1998). The argument can be extended to the role that the commissioners played in mediating individuals’ testimonies at the TRC. At the hearings people did not speak in the abstract but with the help of questions and direction from the commissioners; the women thus spoke to and through the mostly male commissioners. These layers of historical, linguistic and gendered mediations suggest the difficulties the women, for example, faced in avoiding becoming properties or objects of a the emergent nationalist project. What it brings to the fore are the complex relations between individual consciousness and culture, self and nation, revealing another instance of the problem of individual-society. It is therefore critical to be constantly aware of the various scripts around which women shape the presentation of their lives (Portelli, 1998; Sangster, 1998). It is important that we keep pursuing attempts to uncover the privatised senses of the past which are usually generated within lived experience from the dominant public and institutionalised discourses at play.

Everyday experience and the domestic realm

Nonceba Zokwe related a moment with her son who had temporarily come out of hiding to see her:

‘On that day Truth Commission, I was from the wholesale, I met him when he was on his way to town. He was together with my grandchildren. You know he was putting them on his shoulders, there was one grandchild of mine who went with me to town.. .You know this child was troublesome, he also had this feeling, that he wants to reach home, he only came after Christmas, this was now the first time. He saw me and gave me a hug, he said mum, I thank God, because I wanted to speak to you personally, I want to make a will, I want to write a letter that you really brought me into this world, you gave me life and out of that I got education...’ At a grave affair, where truth and forgiveness, healing and nation making are being searched for and tested, shaped and reshaped, Zokwe (one could say, quietly) tells of the incredibly prosaic experiences of shopping at wholesales and troublesome grandchildren going on playing, Christmas and mother-son relationship. Passerine’s (1998) work on the analysis of popular memories of Italian fascism in Turin, found that individuals tended to speak little about organised institutions and instead largely spoke about their jobs, marriages, children and instances in their daily lives. Such accounts tell us less about events but more about their meaning. These ways of giving information about the past ‘tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did’ (Portelli, 1998, p. 67). In this way many testimonies may depart from fact as imagination, symbolism and desire emerge. Ross (1996), in the early work exploring testimonies to the TRC, noted that the stories women told ‘were not only interested in the event but the contexts of daily life in which women attempted to make and maintain homes, to work and to raise children’. Sangster’s (1998) supported this in finding that women’s narratives have consistently intertwined with the daily chores of family and work. This embeddedness in domestic and familial life may not only shape women’s view of the world but also their notions of historical time.

Miya recalled how she heard about her son’s death: ‘we were listening to the news with my daughter...’ (2); Goniwe recalls of her husbands years in detention, of constant arrests and how, ‘Matthew would come back at 12 and obviously their meeting would go on till late...’ (7); Mxathule told of how she was repeatedly harassed and abused and her husband could do little as ‘he was a cripple’ (5).

That stories are over and over placed in the everyday is obvious in the testimonies selected here. We have heard Zokwe’s personification of the commission in her recollection of events leading to how her son Themba was shot by the state police in her home, saying "on that day Truth Commission, I was from the wholesale, I met him when he was on his way to town..." (7), is echoed in Miya’s testimony. Miya provided testimony on behalf of her son Jabulani Miya who was fatally shot by the police also. She began‘...We had parted in the morning at half past four, and I was going to catch a train at quarter to five.. ."(2). Mxathule similarly relates in her testimony how, she ‘was working and cleaning the kitchen floor at that time’ (1). This re-construction of the past using home, hearth and what’s around them as benchmark centralises the social and material space in which these individual women live of course but also what’s important to them, we suspect, and so what constitutes them. However, as Ross (1996) has contended, even though women testified of their losses utilising experiences and metaphors drawn from their domestic roles, this does not imply that they belong naturally or totally to the domestic. For example, black women like Miya and Zokwe tried to balance, as all women in the context of career and family are constantly urged to do in women’s magazines, the difficulties in negotiating relationships with sons who were involved in a national struggle against the hardships of making it through the day; and educated ones like Goniwe, living though constant harassment and intrusion by the state in their lives, reveal the added difficulties women had to overcome to be available to their children, to their studies, and still manage to give support to politically active husbands; Zokwe interweaved in her story daughters-in-law and grandchildren who all stayed in her house; Miya recalled how on the day he died her son, ‘requested that I [should] give him R2, 00. I told him that I had R5, 00 I did not have R2, 00 and the R5, 00 was just enough for me to buy my weekly ticket. We split the R5, 00 up.... We split the R5, 00 up and then I had to leave for my train to work...’ (She worked as a char at Sea Point in Cape Town); Goniwe related how, while Matthew was in detention, she had to confront the decision to leave her children with grandparents so she could study and maintain them. In these stories we are not only allowed to observe the interpersonal relationships between these women and their men-folk, but also witness their most basic struggle of maintaining families by providing economic resources as best as possible. The socio-economic issue is central in outlining not only the material worlds of these women, but the material conditions in shaping experience within their social worlds and their loves and lives. In their autobiographies of living under apartheid, Magona (1992) who was a domestic servant, and Mashinini (1989) who had worked in a factory, dwell on the power of economies in shaping their experiences as black women in South Africa. Using home and close relationships and everyday life then draws attention to the way women use domesticity to map out extreme and violent invasions in their lives. The violent intrusions into their homes highlights exquisitely the loss, the loss of control, the pain, brought to in their lives as domesticity, which usually marks a relatively ordered and predictable world, becomes violated.

The stories of living in a generalised state of fear characterised by constant harassment, bugging of telephones, body searches and killings by the state police also tell of disruptions of family and community lives. In their spoken accounts these women often view the ‘struggle’ in terms of what it had cost them as members of families and communities. The selfless nationalist narrative that the TRC sought to underwrite the new South Africa was at times rejected. So while Miya proudly asserts that her husband was ‘a propagandist of human rights’ (2), she also recalls how her sons ‘disappeared’ (3) to Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Australia; Botswana, Angola, East Germany, as she was later told by her lawyer. Recalling the moment she arrived at home just after her son and his friend had been murdered she says: ‘When we got inside, I could see it is where Sithembile and the other one were taken. I could see that they were taken there in that room. There was a wardrobe just behind the door, there were also suitcases on top of this wardrobe, but when we came in, all the suitcases were all on the floor and they were bullet holes. They were two suitcases; they were still there. Everything was in tatters having been destroyed by the bullets that were shot at the suitcases. Underneath the wardrobe as it was very close to the bed, there was what looked like blood. It was just a bit dot and would need a lot of water to be washed away...there was another spot on the wall, you know the curtain is still there even today, it was really torn apart.. .There were holes and holes, spots and spots, we don’t even know what really happened, even the handles were broken" (11). Miya also recounted how she ‘saw my child on TV and nobody had come to tell me that Jabulani had passed away’. Goniwe spoke of the failures to protect her family from state violence as the message about how a burned car with burned bodies had been found was told by police to a 14 year old child; how the police failed to treat, ‘the family with dignity and respect’ (8). Zokwe recalled how, during one of the regular harassments by the state police who were supposed to be looking for her son, ‘the van reversed in my yard, it trashed my gate and also the wall of my house and then it went over the wall and its also went into the lawn and destroyed my flowers there’ (9). In this last regard, in her analysis of testimonies in Alexandra, Bozolli (1998) points to how the destruction of physical homes and material possessions was felt as part of the loss. In some ways these stories reflect the extent women were unsuccessful in maintaining families. They also show profoundly the violation of boundaries between state and home, and between what these women perceived as private and public. Overall the location of stories within the domestic highlights the failures of home to protect and to contain children. They point directly to the state’s intrusion that black women suffered daily in their homes. The stories, as has been argued (Bozzoli, 1998), had less to do with large causes as they spoke about immediate, intimate loss and private abuse, more to do with wholeness of self and family, body and home that had been breached in ways that left the female victims bereft of something more precious than nation.

Silence and Voice

We turn now to silence. Feminist theorists have argued for the privileging of voice especially in respect of women whose voices have been unheard, marginalised, silenced. The importance of voice can be seen in gender work that honours speech (Sasaski: 1998). Within this perspective writers regard language as the primary means by which persons can enter into the social and intellectual life of the community, and ultimately into connection with themselves. Ross (1996:22) has noted that this is precisely the aim of the commission which assumed that, ‘the world is knowable only through words and that to have no voice is to be language-less, unable to communicate’.

However several feminists have argued for the reinterpretation of silence as not necessarily langauge- less. This work argues for silence to be read differently, even as another language (Das: 1996; Ross: 1996; Sasaki: 1998; Sangster: 1998). What is pointed to are the different types of silences where, for instance, silence can arises out of the inability to speak, but silence can be grounded on the unwillingness to speak (Sasaki: 1998). The idea is to distinguish between the meanings of silences, where is open to the idea that silence is not always equal not having space to speak, not knowing what to say, or having nothing to say, that is not a wordlessness or no language, but opting not to speak or not having the words to say or something some akin to coming against unrepresentables.

The idea of silence as gendered is also suggested above (Ross, 1996; Rosh White, 1998). This connects to the ways in which it becomes the legitimate discourse of pain within nationalist narratives (cf., Ramphele: 1996). Although Das (1996), in her work on memories of partition by Indian women, ably demonstrates how, during partition in India, when female bodies became surfaces on which the nationalism discourse was to be written and read, they used silence as a survival strategy in their highly patriarchal communities, and Ramphele (1996) illustrates how embodied silence is evident in the politicisation of widowhood in South Africa, in this instance the widows’ body used as public text to project the new nation, it is also vital to recognise the extent race, class, historical and cultural factors re-shape the meaning of silence. Such factors complicate the extent to which silence can be argued to be solely informed by patriarchy.

In respect of apartheid, especially, silence may have been used by black, and white, mothers to create illusions of different kinds of stability, of constancy and of matter-of-factness for their children. This silence was then one form of communication. It may have served further as a form of connectedness between mothers, neighbours about the hostile world they shared. In other words, silence may have been, may be, charged with a multiplicity of culturally inflected ways of responding, knowing, and caring (Sasaki: 1998) which are often unnoticed. After all, silence can be a survival strategy in a hostile and uncaring world, particularly when individuals agency is systematically undermined (Rosh White: 1998), such as the case of apartheid. Beginning to view silence in this manner allows it to be interpreted as a form of agency, a choice to withhold oneself or information (Ross: 1996; Das; 1996; Sasaki: 1998). Sasaki (1998: 122) also highlights how silence can act as a form of resistance to the, ‘invasive gaze of those who have historically held the power to interpret both speech and silence of the ‘other’‘. in her analysis of silences in the holocaust testimonies Rosh White (1998) reveals how some women created silence of their own experiences of violation.

But the relationship between silence and words is always ambiguous since words can be argued to be weapons giving voice to the voiceless, and making oppressions public. This is what has informed the feminist project and the TRC, both seeking to give those who have been previously silenced the occasion to speak and allow their feelings and thoughts to be heard, their actions and plains known, their experience to become knowledge, and their knowledges to be acknowledged. Compelling examples in research further assert that moving from silence into speech is a gesture of defiance that heals and that makes new life and growth possible (Rosh White, 1998). And as Das (1996) comments, the image of empowering women to speak is indeed heroic. What these positions seems to outline is that silence may be both a barrier, and a bridge, between women and their patners, children and neighbours, and so between subject and her community, the struggles she has seen, and nation. This also permits for the consideration that while other women may transform the pain of personal experience into discursive political acts, others posit silence as agency, resistance, courage and insight (Sasaki: 1998). Silence thus comes to symbolise something that is both forged by and in spite of women. Let us view how women used or did not use silence within their testimonies.

One of the silences that emerges from the testimonies is the extent that silence was shaped by activism. This form of silence was necessary when one wanted to hide loved ones who were in the house, neighbouring towns or had crossed borders and the state was hunting them down. Zokwe recalls how after months of not knowing where her son had disappeared was told by the lawyers that she was not ‘supposed to know where he was’ (7). In another context Montiel (1995: 3), a student activist in the Philippines in the 1960’s recalls how, ‘it [was] better to be quiet; it [was] safer. Know that information leakage may engender other lives as well. If you feel something is important, do it, do not talk about it’. This construction of silence within underground movements and liberation struggles also highlights the extent historical factors shaped individuals social worlds.

Ross (1996, 1998) draws out the play of silence in gender struggles. She cites and contrasts these examples of Mrs Mfethi and Govan Mbeki. Mfethi said, ‘We are not allowed to ask our husbands about politics in my culture’; Mbeki complained that, ‘After work we went into the townships to educate. The police were looking for meetings. So when you left you did not tell your wife where you were going, and when you returned, at twelve or one in the morning, they were asleep and your food was on the stove...Women created problems for the liberation movement because they always wanted to know’ (Ross, 1996: 191). This uncovers the interrelatedness of secrets and the gender of speech and silence as the occur within brutal regimes and their effects on marital and familial relationships. The management of secrets and its accompanying silence also illuminates women’s added complexities in managing life under apartheid.

Historical forces were powerful in shaping the necessity for violence. Kompe, a former trade unionist and campaigner for rural women’s rights recounts:

‘I lived in a society for many years using false identities for my survival because I was a victim of the influx control. I had to do with my own African culture, with my own self and call myself a different thing so that I could come to work, because I was not allowed to work in the so-called proclaimed areas of Johannesburg because I didn’t qualify. I was a rural woman. I had to use false names and identities.. .The surname Kompe is not my surname’ (Goldblatt and Meintjies, 1996:13). Lies and silences were thus also forged in order to fulfill economic survival. But such accounts also point to being uprooted and the systematic undermining of identity.

The silence that stems from sexual abuse is also pervasive within testimonies given by women. In fact the TRC has expressed a concern of the lack of women testifying about such crimes (Ross: 1996: Krog: 1998). Krog (1998), outlines that a number of women were raped and sexually abused not only under the previous dispensation but also by own comrades in the townships and in liberation camps. Mtinso goes into detail about the abuses women experienced in the underground structures of the liberation movement, recalling how women would not talk about having been raped (Goldblatt and Meintjies: I 996).This silence may be read as women trying to protect their male colleagues for the benefit of the struggle, reflecting the privileging of race issues over gender concerns. This silence may be further linked to the general veil of silence regarding some of the experiences within the ANC.

Cultural factors also inform this silence where sexual abuse is perceived as shameful. Turshen and Twagirayaina (1998) point out that in societies of strict patriarchal honour, to complain about rape is at once to admit to illicit sexual intercourse, an accusation which is often turned back on the woman to convict her of adultery or prostitution. This reveals how socio-cultural factors may contribute to the normalising of silence around sexual abuse. Silence around sexual abuse is often articulated in women’s positioning themselves as vulnerable within a context where their womanhood is constantly threatened. Maruhini, an ANC youth organiser, related how, when she was assaulted and her undergarments, drenched with blood, were torn and exposed by male security officers felt, ‘dehumanised. . .[and] helpless’ (5). Even now she would tell the commission how, ‘I don’t feel very well. I’m highly stressed. Whenever I think about what happened to me, I feel angry and so helpless and not having been able to defend myself or do something about it’ (6). Goldblatt and Meintjies (I 996) argue that women often experienced such humiliations as a systematic undermining of their identities, worse than actual acts of violence. Mxathule told of how a fellow comrade whom she later discovered was an informer assaulted her and tried to rape her. One finds another cast to te story. As argued earlier, the whole testimony, including the assault and attempted rape, is better understood as embedded in the domestic realm. It is not simply out of confusion that commissioners struggle to find the ‘political context of the story’ she told them’ (5) but more of the said attempt to hear and re-write nation. Where Mxathule and other women point to and cross the thin line between domestic violence and political violence which the gender submission to the TRC underlined, the commissioners pit the strugggle to re-make nation against what they regard as privatised anguish.

Linked to these issues of domestic and silence are possible hew constructions of agency.’As outlined earlier silence need not be viewed as always harmful and irrelevant, but also as conscious agency (Das: 1996). Further as shown women’s silences are nuanced and need similar interpretations to reveal their hidden meanings. The testimonies also highlight an interesting aspect about speech where it becomes used to mask direct reference to traumatic or what are viewed as private events, in the TRC this was primarily achieved by employing various narrative strategies that involved evoking the oral. Further, in locating their stories primarily within the domestic, women revealed the constant struggles and their spirited confrontations with the apartheid regime. Finally these testimonies expose that the quest to finding hew constructions of agency will be a complex and challenging undertaking.

Agency

In her testimony Nyameka Goniwe (a social worker by profession), gave a clear and coherent statement about one of the most famous stories of activism in SA, the story of Mathew Goniwe. Speaking fluidly in English, her storytelling rcllected her profound knowledge of the workings of the security agents in SA, the structure and networks of community organisations and the deep psychological impacts of apartheid. In reviewing Goniwe~ testimony Ross (1996:10) comments on the information given as "stark, presented linearly and with emotion carefully in check." In this way Goniwe did not identify herself as victim hut as someone with expert knowledge. She speaks from the single position of authority based in political widowhood (Ross: 1996).

However as Ramphele (1996:112) argues that we need to be careful in reading political widows ‘agency’ by bringing attention to the forces that shape it: " the public role of the political widow derives from her relationship with her husband; she is not seen as a women but as someone standing in for a fallen man. She becomes the ultimate honorary man. Her relationships are shaped by her late husband’s relationships: his friends and comrades become her friends; his enemies become her enemies. Her agency is not completely eliminated, but constrained". In other words the agency of the political widow is by definition constrained by those sponsoring her role. The process of how the public use political widows is poignantly illustrated throughout the testimony as commissioners urge Goniwe to "tell her [your] story to the nation" (I). Later comments on how she has "grown in stature in our eyes, in this region, as a person who goes beyond just thinking about yourself, but who thinks about the broader sharing in the pain of the struggle" (10). Is what Ndebele (1994) was referring to when he spoke of the ‘spectacle of the group’ ideology being prevalent in SA?

If these arguments are taken into account then we might view Goniwe’s statement as not a complete act of agency, but rather one where her politicised marital status shapes the way she becomes compelled to tell her story. In her testimony we note how she gives no details of her experiences of the bodily searches’ (4) she underwent nor her pain, frustration of her husbands consistent arrests, and thereafter the failed inquests. She rarely mentions the effects this has had on her career and family unless explicitly asked by commissioners. Instead what we hear is how Matthew Goniwe, "worked with dedication to mobilise the community, using public meetings for political education" (4), thus placing herself outside the narrative.

Zokwe places herself entirely within the narrative that she tells of her son’s death. She relates passionately how as a "communist mother" (8) she told the head of the security branch -"Tjani, I am the government here on these premises, I am the leader and he said, ‘I am going to kill you.’And I said "the only pain that I know is that of giving birth, and I jumped back over the wall and then was arrested by these people..." (8). Later she confronts the head of the police and tells him-" between you and me, you know very well that the truth will come out one day, you know very well that it will happen" (10). Such acts of defiance reveal women’s fight to protect the home form abusive security fiwces. These acts of agency show that given the many layers of interconnectedness, negotiated meanings, and social spaces that women traverse in their daily lives, women agency is an extremely complex phenomena to grasp (Ramphele: 1996).

Women also acted as lricksters’when they employed the oral to evoke authority in their own right. They are tricksters in the sense that they promise not to lie, but consciously do not tell the whole truth (Clifford and Marais: 1984). In their storytelling mode women such as Miya, Zokwe, Mxathule regularly invite the audience to participate with them as they relate their stories. Within this narrative strategy, repetition, pause, gesture and silence are often used (Ross: 1996; Bozolli: 1998). Their oration becomes powerful as it draws on cultural resonances that prompt the audience to sigh and nod in recognition. An imaginative relationship between them and the audience becomes established (Ross: 1996), rather than giving commissioners the prerogative of framing and representing their experience.

In short these acts of defiance point out the extent women undermined the nationalist narrative which sought to write the new history using their words and bodies. In way they located themselves within their narratives, they subverted the ‘victim’ or ‘secondary witness’ status (Krog: 1 998) which the TRC tried to enforce on them. Although this was an achievement, it also meant that their ‘strong matriarch’ positioning was left unchallenged and very much in tact. The commission never missed moments to appropriate these representations as reflected in one of the chairperson’s speeches after Miya’s emotional testimony-" . . .You mothers we thank you very much because if it was not for you for your strength, and the power you had, I know that we wouldM be here today. So if the pains you’ve suffered will be healed we would appreciate that and we hope that others will also be touched by your pains. And other will see that role that you have taken on this freedom..."(4).

Class and ‘race’ issues

Sangster (1998) asserts that class, race’ and ethnicity create significant differences in how we remember and tell our lives. This is because cultural values shape our very ordering and prioritising of events. Sangster (1998) noticed how class and political ideology shaped people’s recollections in stark and subtle ways. She found that women who were more class conscious, militant did not hesitate to criticise the establishment, and d~y presented issues in a more critical light. Portelli (1998) warns that class issues may further impact on the meaning of speech particularly when trascripts¹⁰are used explore’ folk-informants.’ He indicates that these ~nformants’may be poor in a range of tone, volume and intonation than middle-class speakers who have learned to imitate in speech the monotone of writing (Portelli, 1998).

It is worth taking into account that in focussing on political violations the TRC excluded the investigation into the socio-economic deprivations of apartheid (IKllaren: 1998). In effect radicalised poverty and radicalised wealth, both equally undeserved, were left not addressed leaving structural inequalities relatively intact. Hamber and Kimble (1999) discuss the danger in constructing the ‘truth’ solely from individual testimonies of victims and perpetrators is that the larger picture of continued subjugation, enslavement, oppression and economic exploitation are not taken into account. Alex Borain (in Hamber and Kimble: 1999:13), Vice-chair of the TRC cautions that, "...unhess economic justice is the first item on the agenda, with all that means; unless health, homes, water, electricity and most importantly jobs, become part of the quest for reconciliation, we will remain the very deeply divided society we are". There remains a debate as to the extent socio-economic deprivations of apartheid were emphasised in the TRC’s public process as opposed to its 3,500 pages of its final report.

Certainly within the testimonies women who chose to present using written statements were usually educated and their responses to commissioners were eloquent and clear. Their testimonies also tended to criticise and lay fill responsibility on the past regime. Interestingly when they were asked the language they chose to address and be addressed by, they generally chose English. A good example is the case of Goniwe, whose testimony as shown was chronologically ordered, crisp and clear. This contrasts sharply to the women who spoke of ~shacks in the backgarden’ whose recollections were in the most cases scattered and

Portelli, Asad and Samuel (1998) outline the distortions that Portelli, Asad and Samuel (1998) outline the distortions that may occur when the spoken word is taken down in writing and transferred to the printed page. Portelli (1998: 118) states that, "expecting a transcript to replace the tape...is equivalent to doing art criticism on reproductions, or literary criticism on translations I7and that] A truly faithfiul translation always implies

invention..." incoherent. This was the case in Miya’s, Marubini’s and Mxathule’s testimonies, where commissioners repeatedly asked probing questions to isolate the political and real’ essence of the story. Old’women were inclined to be the one’s who used lolk-lore’ type storytelling allowing the audience to participate. This was the case with Marubini’~s and Zokwe’s lyrical storytelling mode. It is also important to outline how the commission received these various accounts. I argue that the manner in which the women narrated influenced the way commissioners considered their stories to be knowledge. ‘or myth. This issue leads me to ask iIf Goniwe and others like her were seen as providing expert information about the past, were other women’s stories merely considered fictional additions to make the myth of Viation’more compelling and believable?

The stories told to the TRC by women have given insight into the relationships women had with their men-folk and community (Ross: 1996; Bozolli: 1998; Krog: 1998). These stories also begin to reveal the economic realities black SAh women as Miya distantly relates, "...I was a char lady at Sea Point. I was working for Mrs Verholwertz. I think it was at about 10, she asked me if I had a child which is politically orientated. I said ho.’Then she said that in Gugulethu there were guerrillas that had been shot" (2). This short rfrce resonates of the distances between the white woman and black woman. They point to the difficulties of Vace~ language, and contexts in which womanhood and motherhood are shaped, experienced and rest. Distances that are embroiled with questions of guilt, innocence and complicity by white women in SA’s past (Marx :1998). This distance is yet to be fully explored and named in SA. In fact the absence of the white women in understanding SA’s past is I feel highly problematic as we cannot neglect how the constructions of miscegenation and ‘protection’ of the white women provided powerful tools to legitimise racism and sexism in a racist yet patriarchal apartheid SA ( Dubow: 1995; Klausen: 1997).

Important attempts are being made to position the white women within the shifting SA’n landscape. In a book entitled Text, theory, space: land, literature and the history in South Africa and Australia, Adler( 1998) and Whitlock (1998) explore the racial and gendered nature of space and place from the perspective of colonial (but not apartheid) travel literature by White women. Krog (1998), in her account of the TRC also reflects on her positions of privilege, guilt, complicity and desire that the TRC was an adequate process to confront the past’. Olivier (1998) indicates that many readers have and listeners have objected what they perceived were moral and ethical pressures emanating from her account. Earlier I expressed the importance of understanding the ambiguous positioning white women occupied and occupy if we are to filly grapple with the complex gender relations that shape SA. However, I am also left with this nagging query: How does one privilege the white women, her voice and ambiguous positioning, without re-privileging whiteness and its inherent power in SA?

The limits of language

Rosh White (1998) in reflections of absences in holocaust testimony and history, draws attention to the difficulties in articulating the ‘unspeakable.’ She describes how in the process of articulation of traumatic events survivors expressed a "sense of impotence and powerlessness; feelings of having been diminished and humiliated "(1998:2). Narrations of extreme human rights violations and individual’s inability to articulate their pain and suffering highlight dramatically the limits of language. The words we have available become inadequate to the task of conveying the systematic humiliation and degradation experienced. In this instance we experience a complete rapture in language, and the role of language to make sense of experience fails (Rosh White: 1998). Cavell (1996) insists that this failure in such circumstances is largely due to the lack of languages of pain through which we can gaze at, touch or become textual bodies on which this pain is written. This was witnessed as women cried and repeatedly failed to articulate this pain in several of the testimonies.

Relating her experiences of apartheid Kompe (in Goldblatt and Meintjies: 1998: 12) illustrates the limits in language in encompassing and expressing her experience as she reflects- ‘Can one actually say its violence.., it is not so serious as my husband being killed in jail, One could say

For a review ofKrog’s book Country of my Skull see Olivier, C., The Fierce belonging ofAntjie Krog:
Review of Country of my Skull by Antjie Krog, Random house, Johannesburg, 1998"

its not like me having left my own country going to stay thirty years outside. So that’s what I say to myself what is this violence? How can one express it to somebody who can actually feel sympathetic? What IVn telling you now is a story, I donl think it will be seen as violence. It’s a story that this is how we lived in the past. And this is what actually crippled me in my mind"

Mapping the transition

"South Africa," Thornton (1996: 146), "is precisely and fully in the process of `inventing allusions to the conceivable since there is no agreed upon reality, as yet, to which a single discourse be referred." This process can be traced to the death of the once powerful master of narrative which we come to know and recognise as apartheid. In the political interregnum once omnipotent state "is now suddenly recognised as vulnerable, and non-hegemonic ...."

The unbanning of the African National Congress (ANC) and the symbolic release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 marked a changed era in the history of South Africa. The streets of townships and suburbs were unusually quite as black and white sat glued to their television sets. Mostly in disbelief they watched Nelson and Winnie Mandela raise their fists, to the real and imagined audience, in the familiar `amandla’ gesture. Symbolically the transition had been marked and the grand narrative of apartheid had collapsed before people’s very eyes. Behind these spectacular visions was the fact that the beginnings of the process of transferring power had been accepted not because De Klerk (symbolically the keeper of `white privilege’) was converted to democracy, but because he had no choice (Saunders: 1998). This momentous event was soon followed by intense negotiations at the World Trade Centre in Kempton Park on the framework within which the transfer to power in SA would occur. Then end of apartheid and the transition to democracy for all has often been viewed as a miracle. This suggestion of divine intervention highlights the fact that the transition did not involve any revolutionary seizure of power nor any fundamental change (Saunders: 1998), undermining the rolling apocalypse narrative. This negotiated political settlement created a crucial context marker of the scopes within which personal and political identities could be reconciled.

The metaphor offered by Barthes of transitional moments as `when the garments gapes’, offers an apt description of SA, for it was witnessing glimpses of what was normally concealed (Brink 1996). Brink (1996) has observed that such moments obscure our vision of what is truth, illusion or mere possibility. Transitions are marked by their element of crisis where what was stable and continuous collapses. Writing on transitions are quick to note the point that these moments in history involve the construction or conscious self-invention of absorbing the past and the future into a single moment (Thornton: 1996; Cohen-Cruz: 1998; Bozolli: 1998; Marx 1998). Brink (1996: 149) refers to the point as that moment at which the past and the future gathered. At this point questions of who should responsible for remembering the history of the present and future; of, that is, not only speaking and writing about what happened in the past, but helping us to remember historical events in certain ways, shaping and institutionalising memory, and predicating the future of history on this memorial work. Following on the heels of debates on what constitutes an ‘authentic past’ will be contested notions of the present. Queries such as, what is this new South Africa? what’s new about it? who are its subjects? who is against it? become common? Intellectuals take up questions of oldness and newness. Questions around whether the emerging society is one where the old is dead and buried or if what the people are witnessing is the mutability of everything, or an eclecticism, or a type hybridity, abound. In Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie posed some pertinent and compelling questions to us: "How does newness come into the world?" he asks. "Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made. How does it survive... What compromises and deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make?... Is birth always a fall (Rushdie: 1995:4). The questions, we think, become helpful when we try (un)covering the South African landscape of change. They serve as guides in attempting to sketch the continuities and discontinuities of South African society.

One of the visible continuities of apartheid which constitutes a major element of the transition is the continued control of the economy by traditional white elites and multinational corporations (Wilson: 1996). This assurance of white privilege was crystallised within the controversial sunset clauses, as they have come to be called. Amongst other things, these agreement between the ruling party and negotiating partners, scripted by the Communist Party leader, Joe Slovo, made assurances to the then government that no major redistribution of land would occur. This was later translated into the Constitution within the article on property rights, which cements this negotiated agreement on land and property. This aspect has had a number of implications regarding issues of land, belonging, and identity. It created the boundaries within which previously disposessed South Africans could make claims for land. But the land issue, as witnessed in Zimbabwe complicated one where not only ‘Blacks’ but certain White interests make appeals to the land though in different ways. On the one side is character such as Magopa in Gordimer’s (1995:284) novel, None to Accompany Me, who asserts, "we are going to struggle to get our land back up till the end of time"; on the other is Pakendorf(1998) point of how Antjie Krog repeatedly links the notion of the land to personal Afrikaner identity and belonging in her work on the TRC. The land is both a source of strength and destruction, of political and aesthetic power, and lingering unresolved tension and potential and actual conflict. Thornton (1996) had observes that the South African landscape is highly politicised for it is where the blood of both the dead Afrikaner struggle and the Black freedom fighters lie.

The rational progressive bureaucratic administration that translated the i(leas of apartheid into practice remains a profound continuity between the old and the ‘new’ SA (Thornton, 1996; Wilson, 1995; 1996). The resilience of these administrative practices will ensure that apartheid will continue to define some aspects of current politics. This continuity of institutional memory, coupled with a perception of past injustices and illegitimacy (Wilson: 1995) impedes the development of trust and allegiance to the state by the majority of South Africans. The centering of the resilience of bureaucratic administration highlights the notion that post-apartheid South Africa emerges out of a special relationship with modernism, colonialism, and apartheid.

The chasm between traditional authority and formal constitutional authority marks a vital feature of the transitional landscape⁴. In South Africa the status of customary or traditional authorities is contested and ambiguous (Mamdani, 1996; Ntsebeza, 1999). Their current ambivalent position arises out of their positioning in South African society and politics. Chiefs are not integrated into the politics of parliament because of the different grounds on which their authority rests. But any appeal to African tradition depends on the existence of chiefs. At the same time any real practice of power must contradict and undermine the power of chiefs. The notion that, "the new South African nation is not naturalised by reference to its ancientness and continuity with tradition, but in its affirming of the uniqueness of the present" (Wilson: 1996:18), does not consider the ambiguous ways in which tradition operates in SA. In SA the positioning of chief~ shows a case where African identity and origin and the logic of bureaucratic administration intersect. Within these raptures of the dichotomy of traditional and modern, the idea that power is seen as residing in multiple sites (traditional healers, chiefs, kings, and ancestors), becomes evident It becomes apparent how the notion of power itself becomes contested.

Arguably apartheid can be seen to be synonymous with the making and marking of specific differences, the well-known ones being race and ethnicity. Apartheid encompassed the total differentiation of spheres of life based on race. This was accompanied by a master narrative taught in schools, portrayed in monuments, recited in churches and performed in the sacred rituals of the state. The collapse of this discursive hegemony has meant taking away from subjects an easily sloganised ‘target’ or ‘enemy’, an ‘Other’ in terms of which the self can be described (Brink, 1996). The political and social vacuum has had results in respect of the personal, self, and relationships, possibly calling these discourses into a crisis of a sort. Merely appropriating or borrowing from theoretical frameworks which fetishises difference becomes inadequate. For what becomes evident in SA is that identities are shifting, multiplying, and often beyond the grasp of the language we have as they are still ‘unspeakable or even unthinkable’ (Thornton: 1996: 145).

This can be seen in the confusion where in the new SA there are literally no names, no vocabulary, to discuss major aspects and parts of its political being. There exists no agreement on what the boundaries of ‘Black’ of ’White’, of ‘Indian’ or ‘Coloured’ are. No one knows whether to refer to tribes, ‘ethnic groups’, ‘language groups,’ ‘peoples,’ or ‘races’. There are no simple ways to ‘be Zulu’ since the King, the ethnic Party (IFP), the region (Kwa-Zulu) and the category of ‘speakers of Zulu’ are in conflict in some domains, and unresolved in others. Not even colour is a significant signifier any longer. Indeed as Coplan (1998:136) notes, "neither race’, ‘culture’, nor ‘nation’ has any stable or common denotation" in SA. Such issues constitute the unspeakable character of contemporary SA.

South African identities cross cut each other in multiple ways and in multiple contexts. In other words there is no fundamental identity that any South African can claim a common absolute identity to all other SA’s. This multiplicity and fragmentation of identities can also become a principal source of confusion and violence in SA. Accounts of violence in the Reef area⁵, show how identities become multiplied, transformed and circulated in SA. The conflict being described looks different from a number of perspectives. One could argue that this multiplication almost adds a fictional element clearly indicating the self-inventive process of identity formation in SA. It is such cross cutting identities that provide the basis of highly complex and contradictory nature of these identities.

These illustrations on issues of identity also show the extent to which the post-apartheid condition is encompassed by many historical frames, many bows’ lived alongside one another through what is seen internally as irreducible difference by imagined cultural communities (Coplan: 1998). The last author maintains that the conflicted transition from an Afrikaner nationalist to an African Nationalist modernism that is suppose to dominate SA’s political culture is consistently out-played by a discourse of the local and global in a post-modern encounter between the pre-modern and the modern.

However, perhaps the single most unifying symbol of the unfolding SA is the insertion of the ‘reconciliation text’, as embodied in the ‘rainbow nation’ rhetoric and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).The most presiding image in South Africa is ‘not the rough beast, but the rainbow’ (Marx: 1998:211). Marx (1998) outlines that for the ‘rainbow vision’ to create visibility and legitimacy it must he performed through a range of linguistic and visual signs (such as the new constitution; new anthems; new flag; Mandela on coffee mugs). In attempting to outline ‘what is now’ the ‘rainbow vision must present tN~ past as a distortion. Advertisements privileging racial harmony within a hegemonic patriarchy are plentiful in the representations of the new South African nation (Prinsloo: 1999). Such features make this particular transition hear all the qualities of myth as opposed to history (Maake: 1996). Again we are reminded by Roland Barthes reminds us, "myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear... The aim of myth making is after all to cause immediate impression; it does not matter if one is later allowed to see through the myth, its action is assumed to be stronger than the rational explanations which may later belie it" (Maake: 1996: 146). In this way the complete exteriority of the ‘rainbow nation’ becomes an inscription of a series of myths on the emergent SA. The ‘rainbow nation’ rhetoric becomes an act of attempting to create myth through symbols, and to reinforce a false or, at least, partial historical identity?

The TRC provided the text on which this new nationalist consciousness would emerge. This was achieved through the narration of human rights violations (Wilson: 1995; 1996; I 998;Marx: 1998; Hamber and Kimble: 1999) which were publicly held and televised. These oral testimonies provided the opportunity fur the whole ‘nation’ to bear witness to the past (Marx: 1998), and celebrate ‘memory’. And memory is crucial in nation building for as Kundera (in Brink; 1996:148) alerts us that without memory, "a whole society, a whole culture becomes maimed if not paralysed". A critical function of the TRC is precisely this, to keep memory alive. But the more interesting question is which memory’? Which myth of the past features as central and the emergent hegemonic one? And how does it accommodate competing ‘memories?’ Re-imaginings of the past featured strongly in the reconciliation script of the transitional government. Within this construction many ideals of the struggle’ (Ndebele, 1994) were juxtaposed the text of the ‘rainbow nation’. To create a convincing notion of this ‘imagined community’ (Anderson: 1983) the past and present were fused to reflect the future image of SA.

The themes outlined above reflect the extent all levels of South African society could be summed up as characterised by uncertainty. The collapse of the master narrative of apartheid meant that all identities previously legislated and believed to be immutable were suddenly open to threat and negotiation (Thornton: 1996). Within this fluid and ambiguous context. the transitional government attempted to carve a unified and ‘stable’ South African identity whose cornerstone would be ‘truth’ and ‘reconciliation.’ This meant that the forces of the past and present would also shape the TRC, giving this body its complex form.

The TRC and its broad purpose
Due to the balance of forces inherent within the negotiation for a New’ SA, Hamber and Kimble (1999) argue that it was impossible to undertake large-scale prosecutions against apartheid~ perpetrators. This was largely because at the negotiation table the African National Congress had insufficient power to ensure that perpetrators would be prosecuted but had enough power to demand truth in exchange for amnesty. Amnesty thus became a cornerstone of the transition and gave birth to the TRC. The link of amnesty, the Constitution (1995) and the National Unity and Reconciliation Act 34 (1995) highlights the link between the amnesty deal and its institutionalisation via the TRC.

The foundation of the TRC lies in the interim constitution of SA which states:" In order to advance reconciliation and reconstruction, amnesty shall be granted in respects of acts, omissions and offences associated with political objectives and committed in the course of the conflicts of the past. To this end parliament under this constitution shall adopt a law determining the cut off date which shall be a date after 8 October 1990 and before 6 December 1993, and providing for the mechanisms, criteria an procedures, including tribunals, if any, through which such amnesty shall be dealt with at any other time after the law has been passed". This was carried over and finalised in the Constitution of 1995. The structure and workings of the TRC was finalised by an Act of Parliament known as the National Unity and Reconciliation Act (NURA), Number 34 of 1995 which defines gross human rights violations as, " those including the killing, abduction, torture or severe ill treatment of persons" (30); and victims are defined as, " persons who individually or collectively suffered harm in the form of physical or mental injury, emotional suffering, pecuniary loss or substantial impairment of human rights" (4). The TRP began to operate in December 1995, with the broad aims of promoting national unity and reconciliation in a spirit of understanding that would transcend the conflicts and division of the past( in Constitutional Assembly database Project: 1999).

The TRC has been primarily viewed as a transformative strategy (Hamber and Kimble: 1999), or part of building a rights culture in SA (Wilson: 1995; 1996), a nation-building project (Wilson: 1996; Marx: 1999), or an ANC mechanism for justifying and rationalising compromises made at the negotiating table (Hamber and Kimble: 1999). We see it as assuming these multiple roles. However it must be noted that the competing discourses inherent in each of these roles are resulting in the TRC being full of contradictions which, together are producing paradoxical outcomes.

Several criticisms have been levelled against the TRC as an institution. Most have risen out of lively dialogue between academics, researchers, business people, and community members in the several open workshops that the TRC has hosted throughout SA as well as overseas. Several points of debate around the notion of reconciliation, truth, justice, memory and Christian notions of healing and forgiveness emerged⁶.

The TRC as performance ritual

The idea of the TRC as political theatre has been noted by several authors analysing its structural and symbolic form (Ndebele: 1994; Brink: 1996; Wilson: 1995; 1996; Marx: 1998; Bozolli: 1998). Some view it as " theatre of reconciliation" (Cohen-Cruz: 1998:286), or exemplary civic theatre where public hearings of public griefs can be absorbed into the body politics as part of a deeper understanding of how the society arrived at its present situation (Marx: 1998). Marx (1998:2 12) asserts that the TRC has recently been identified as ‘urtheatre’, which combines performance and ritual to form a theatre of power.

But why are Truth Commissions preferable to court proceedings? Wilson (1995; 1996) argues that they have proven to be far more effective than court proceedings in furnishing a dramatic medium for theatricalising new official history. Their interactive, public and visual images inscribed with highly charged emotive language, provide a better appeal to their audience than fonnal and cttmbersome court sessions. Without their legal status the power of them is ultimately symbolic, as they have little power to prosecute and carry little institutional power to carry out any reforms they may have recommended (Wilson: 1996). They further provide a way to educate the public and could be seen as both the history lesson being enacted and the future being performed.

Given the themes of intentionally, relationship between audience and spectators and notions of reality and illusion that performance-ritual highlights (Hughes-Freeland: 1998), this metaphor when extended can be useful in drawing attention to the nuanced workings of the TRC. This is because it reveals the often hidden or ‘taken-fur-grant 1’ processes in any national building process. These include issues of visual representation; the performative nature of ritual; the importance of language and voices in the making of myth or particular histories. It also provides a site where it is possible to chart ways in which the speaking voice is introduced into history. Second, it allows the processes of authenticating the diversity of ‘voices’ that gave testimony to be explored. Third, the power of ritual in creating legitimising symbols, within which processes such as forgiveness and reconciliation can happen, is exposed. Finally, the interaction between those testifying, and the audience can be analysed.

Dr Guma a traditional healer and academic asks whether the TRC was a nationalist project for the recovery of the national memory or whether it was about the recovery and healing of individuals (UCT Public Discussion: 1998). Marx (1998) argues that the TRC was about the former. She maintains that it was through the telling of stories by the ‘victims’ and perpetrators⁷that the TRC embodied the founding text to reconciliation in SA. The importance of this text is that the stories it communicated included those previously denied the voice to speak of their experiences. This was the narrative of the powerless, humiliated and violated. Within this narrative individuals’ narratives came to stand for the larger national context, marking an eclipse of the personal and individual. This occurred when symbols of great national heroes such as Steve Biko, Matthew Goniwe and other individual actions of ‘martyrdom for the struggle’ come to stand for many others whose qualities it shares and whose whole element coalesce around it (Wilson: 1996). This reflects a case of Victor Turner’s notion of ‘unification of the symbol’ coming into play (Bozolli: 1998). But within these narratives it is crucial to ask what may constitute the silences that such a ‘unification of symbol’ permits? How reliable are these symbols in relating a past not shaped by hegemonic discourses of gender, and class for example?

The narrative of the TRC depends largely on the realist narrative (Marx: 1998). This is the language that moves, changes, and transforms. In the TRC this was comprised of the voices of the victimised and the perpetrators’ utterances, what Krog (1998) labels the first and second narratives. As the hearings continued the former evolved as a feminised language of pain, humiliation and bitterness, which the latter remained the language of violence. The ‘perpetrators’ narrative evoked powerful visual imagery where White ‘perpetrators’ related stories of disembodying Black bodies, organising death squads; corruption and organised illegal activities (Pauw: 1991; 1997). Within these vivid representations Afrikaans emerged as the language of the paranoid and oppressors. This occurred in the translation process where the spoken word of Afrikaans to English permitted English to become the language of mediation. Marx (1998:217) reasons that that by structuring the translation in this manner, ‘English gains acceptance as the lingua franca of the country, the liberalising language, the language of upward mobility and international acceptance...’ However, this comfortable representation was interrupted as the eloquent English speaking Craig Wiliamson described the bloody plans he had participated in during apartheid (Marx: 1998). Krog~ (1998) ‘Country of My Skull’, which is dedicated to ‘every victim who had an Afrikaner surname on her lips’, becomes an attempt to break the myth of Afrikaans and Afrikaners as solely responsible for apartheid.

These incidents show how we need to be constantly aware of the relationship that exists between testimony, translation and documentation within the TRC. But Marx (1998: 212) questions whether this is possible in an ambiguous situation such as the TRC where, ‘stories are fractured; the translations are always removed from the origin; the origin itself is at the remove of the moment of the original enactment of trauma; forgetting, remembering and recreating are in constant and fluid interplay with each other?’

Let us turn to representations evident in the first narrative. Contrasted to the evil ‘perpetrator’ images are those of large African mothers (sometimes helpless black men) who are often portrayed as crying and helpless, and at other times as dignified matriarchs and defenders of ‘their communities’. In fact Krog (1998, p.177) is in awe of this African woman and declares, ‘truth is woman’. Pakendorf(1999, p. 8) describes this woman ‘who cares endlessly’‘; ‘she is sitting behind the microphone, dressed in a beret or kopdoek and her Sunday best, everybody recognises her. Truth has become a woman. Her voice distorted behind her rough hand has undermined man as the source of truth. And yet nobody knows her’. These representations of Black women are problematic since it reinforces the stereotype of the ‘strong African woman’, encouraging static understandings of her social positioning. And as a white farmer from the Northern Province comments, ‘If I see another black woman crying, then I remember two Afrikaans expressions form my youth, ‘to cry like a meid’ and to be ‘scared as a meid"’ (Krog: 1998:190). One could easily dismiss this comment by saying that first; this interpretation is flawed as we know how much black women have suffered and endured; one could say, who cares what some White farmer says anyway. But such responses would neglect to confront the effect these sorts of representations have in inserting Black women in national consciousness in ways that are limited and limiting. We need to consider that such representations may risk capturing images that remove us further and further away from the realities of these women. As a ‘nation’ building project (Wilson: 1996) the TRC threatens to merely capture and absorb familiar tropes of African women which marginalises them even further. The image of Black women as victim, formalised in colonialism, extended in apartheid, thus becomes enlarged in the consciousness of the new South Africa.

The audience, which could include both South Africans and the international community also, provides powerful messages that may act as a silencing discourse within the TRC. For as Hughes-Freeland (1998) comments that the audience may be a part of the performance and its ways of participating may construct the nature and meaning of the performance itself Marx (1998) noted a form of erasure of ‘victims’ in her observation of the international media’s responses to the stories of the ‘victims and villains’. She notes the fascination of the images of the powerful (the ‘perpetrators’) and comments, "the stories of those who do more are more compelling than the stories of those that are done to. ..our interest is stirred by the actions of the powerful, by the agents of aggression.. .they are individualised more forcibly because they are the ones to whom our imaginations respond" (1998: 218). Does this imply that the stories of ‘victims’ eventually merge into one faceless lamentation’? Ross (1996) and Bozolli (1998) identified the powerful ways in which the audiences in community hearings were crucial in legitimising the performance of the TRC. Hughes-Freeland (1998) adds that there is a need to be more critical of the notion of ‘audience’. She outlines that the ‘audience’ is multiple and never unitary, and that local perceptions and categories must be used to understand the responses of various audiences.

Spectacular forms of representations are bound to be effective in South Africa, because the history of the country itself has been characterised prominently by spectacle. In reminding us how everything tends to be spectacularised here Njabulo Ndebele (1994, pp. 41-42) called our attention to the "the monstrous war machine developed over years; the random massive pass raids; mass shootings and killings; mass economic exploitation, the ultimate symbol of which is the mining industry; the mass removals of people; the spate of draconian laws passed with the spectacle of parliamentary promulgations; the luxurious lifestyles of white: servants all encompassing privileged, swimming pools, and high commodity consumption; the spawning monotony of architecture in African locations, which are the very picture of poverty and oppression. The symbols are all over: The quintessence of obscene social exhibition..." The spectacle is about the complete exteriority of everything. It is not just romanticised but rooted deep in the national psyche. The spectacle survives partly because the source from which its legitimisation emerges remains wholly political. ‘Everything in South Africa must achieve a political statement’ (Ndebele, 1994: 57).

Against this there have been several criticisms pointing to the need of modes of representation which reject the spectacle and allow growth of consciousness through subjective knowledge (Ndebele: 1994; Brink: 1996; Marx: 1998). In other words, there has been that cultural spectacle fails to account for complexity has run its course.

We argue that in situating the TRC within religious symbols of forgiveness and healing, as opposed to anger and vengeance, provided a ‘divine’ authenticating of the testimonies as ‘truth’. Ritual performance is powerful since it presents a reality where participants make and experience meanings as part of the process of what they are actually doing (Hughes-Freeland: 1998). The ritual element in the TRC was heavily influenced by a Christian religious discourse. Wilson (1998) maintains that the revealing of truth in verbal testimony mirrored the act of confession. This was reflected in the following stages: ‘...recognition of suffering, the morally equalising of suffering, the portrayal of suffering as necessary sacrifice for the ‘liberation’ of the nation, and finally the forsaking of revenge by

victims..." (Wilson: 1998: ). This placing of testimonies within the religious discourse permitted the authenticating of individual narratives as truth.

To complement the Christian discourse a proto-religious form was instituted in the TRC (Bozohli: 170) helping it to become a highly emotional occasion. This was recreated in the community halls and churches in which most hearings took place. Bozolli (1998: 170) describes the proto-religious setting which she encountered in one of the hearings held at Alexandra. ‘Large community halls [were transformed into a proto- religious setting] where an elevated platform at which the four commissioners sat in a row. The tables were covered in immaculate white cloth, flowers were displayed, and the TRC’s own banner and symbols of peace and reconciliation were displayed. Each session opened with a prayer conducted by a figure from the community who would then light a candle to symbolising the bringing of truth’. The symbolic realm of the community hall thus permitted pain to be revealed discouraging anger and vengeance to be demonstrated. One could be a distanced or emotional witness but an angry witness would be daring to pollute the ‘sacred’ space. The ritual element in the TRC set out to allow people to participate in rites of confession, mourning and making public their private pain and anger (Hamber and Kimble: 1999), seeking to transform individuals from resentment, anger, hatred and guilt, to those of acceptance, wholeness, forgiveness and confession (Bozolli: 1998).

The promotion of Christian notions of healing and forgiveness have been challenged on several fronts. Dr Guma maintains that African perspectives of healing and forgiveness have been marginalised by the TRC (UCT Public Discussion: 1998). He argues that ideas of healing and pollution needed to have been integrated within the healing discourse of the TRC. Privileging Christian notions of forgiveness and healing may have masked power relations. This rests on the notion that the TRC failed to link power to privilege⁹. Foucault (1980) in his link of power and privilege outlines how power relations undergird institutional constructions of knowledge. If this analysis is taken into account, one could reason that this promotion might have masked the inherent power relations in SA. In the end then, revelation of truths of the past was partial. Further the theological’ approach to the TRC with its emphasis on confession and forgiveness ignored the possibility that some crimes were unforgivable and some values irreconcilable (US Conference: 1998).

The irony of the TRC appropriation of religious symbols was that the church itself lacked sufficient moral ground. It has been well documented how the various religious institutions, especially the Dutch Reformed Church, were implicitly and explicitly involved in the carrying out of racist policy and practice (Dubow, 1995). So the personal charisma and legitimacy which Archbishop Tutu⁹carried within the Black communities could perhaps be seen as the more convincing force in allowing different meanings to be drawn from religious symbols.

But ritual performances such as those enacted within the TRC are risky, as they are inherently interactive. Rituals are not a text with pre-established structures of meanings, but merge as individuals bring together bits and pieces of knowledge in the performance, creating reality and selves experientially (Hasrup, 1998). In other words, meaning in this case is always emergent or inscribed rather than given and prescribed. And what validates this performance is, ’what is made real by the audience’ (Hughes-Freeland, 1998, p.15).

Overall the ritual element in the TRC can be argued to have provided an important himinal space where acts of confessions (testimonies) were transformed as Truth to shape the narrative of the ‘New’ SA. This religious discourse on reconciliation was further combined

with the liberation narrative, "where suffering itself was given meaning in terms of sacrifice for the liberation of apartheid" (Wilson: 1998: 10). It allowed individuals to become attached to the wider history of the newly freed multi-racial nation, providing the link between the divine and the nation.

It is worth noting that even this national history was built on a variety of carefully chosen public myths that already existed in many townships. Stories of oppression and resistance are frequently told as part of the litany in African nationalism (Bozolli: 1998). And as Ndebele (1994) has shown through the dominance of the spectacle in SA, these stories are in themselves heavily mythologised. It has been asserted that these public myths, with a strong favour for the ANC, were reinstated to some extent by the TRC. The way in which these public myths were invoked within the various testimonies was vital in demarcating the symbolic boundaries of community (Bozolli: 1998). In this public telling of the past, the ANC was usually the principal community from which stories emerged and were told. It becomes apparent that a number of levels myth-making were operating.

Conclusion

The dissertation has explored the difficulties in articulating new versions of the past. It has shown that any recollection of memory is bound to be layered and shaped by contested notions of history, truth and mediated by prevailing power relations. As highlighted the amnesty ‘deal’ was crucial in shaping the parameters in which the past could he imagined and the future socially performed. It gave birth to the TRC, which became an institutionalised Theatre of power. Given the mandate to face past abuses so that South Africa could develop a national consciousness based on truth and reconciliation, the TRC became both the history lesson and the enactment of this lesson. It achieved this by allowing individuals to relate their experiences of the past in order to create a collective national memory. But women’s testimonies point to how this memory was already shaped by political thrces and this sense history had already been constructed. These testimonies reveal the ‘cracks’ in the way particular histories are forged and exclusionary while masquerading as moral truths. Women’s recollections resonate with pain and loss and show the individual and community daily struggles of living under apartheid. These competing voices of what the past embodied, demonstrate the many hows’ in SA, highlighting the extraordinary post-modernist condition of post apartheid SA.

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Audio-Visual

Pauw, J. Prime Evil. Television documentary.

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