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the imperative to document and acknowledge past wrongs. They drew connections between the absence of truth telling about events in South Africa’s past and social relations in the present. Antjie Krog followed Mary Burton in referencing the abuses suffered by Afrikaners in the concentration camps, but she did so to endorse Omar’s proposal for a truth commission. Presenting a counter-factual, she suggested that the lack of recognition of the Afrikaners’ “intrinsic humanity” and “equality,” evidenced first by their imprisonment in concentration camps and then again by the absence of truth telling about their suffering, contributed to the inhumane mindset of apartheid: “Wasn’t the mere fact that the abuses of the [Anglo-Boer] war were never exposed perhaps not a key factor in the character that formulated apartheid’s laws? . . . Perhaps if compensation had been experienced not only in material terms but also through the recognition of the intrinsic humanity and equality of all inhabitants then South Africa’s history would have looked different (in Boraine and Levy 112–13). Had the English acknowledged the extent of their wrongdoing, Krog suggests, perhaps the Afrikaners would have been less likely to imagine and enforce the dehumanizing system of apartheid. Febe Potgeiter, deputy secretary-general of the African National Congress Youth League, considered the implications of Krog’s argument for South Africa’s future by linking analysis of the abuses of the more recent apartheid past to the creation of a different culture for the “new” South Africa. He observed, “In the process of identifying where boundaries have been over-stepped, we will be redefining our common understanding of a human rights culture” (23). In his response to the South African attendees, Dullah Omar echoed Krog’s and Potgeiter’s understanding, asserting that “the proposed commission should be seen as part of the attempt to build a new society” (130). Despite some misgivings, then, the South African conferees generally agreed that the proposed truth commission’s critical and moral inquiries into the past would serve the goals of the new South Africa.

      Prior truth commissions, along the lines advocated by Ignatieff and Steiner, had sought the most basic form of truth: a “record of who did what to whom and when” (Steiner 16). The TRC, in contrast, acknowledged truth’s inherent rhetoricity by acknowledging and theorizing four kinds of truth: forensic, social, narrative, and healing. With the exception of forensic truth, the Commission’s four-pronged typology recognized the role of human perception and language in the production and effects of truth claims. Participants at the South African Conference on Truth and Reconciliation first introduced the notion of multiple truths. Albie Sachs distinguished “microscopic” truth (“factual, verifiable and can be documented and proved”) from “dialogic” truth (“the truth of experience that is established through interaction, discussion, and debate”), and he argued that the latter should be the TRC’s “primary concern” (in Boraine and Levy 103). Sachs’s “microscopic” truth became, in the language of the TRC, “forensic or factual truth,” which encompassed “the familiar legal or scientific notion of bringing to light factual, corroborated evidence, of obtaining accurate information through reliable (impartial, objective) procedures” (TRC, Report 1: 111). The Amnesty Committee’s quasi-juridical function made it rely most heavily on this form of truth. The TRC’s notion of “social or dialogic” truth echoed Sachs’s language almost exactly. The final Report defines it as “the truth experience that is established through interaction, discussion, and debate” (1: 113–14). The TRC’s public process facilitated the making of “social truth.”

      At the same conference, Antjie Krog presaged the TRC’s notion of “narrative” truth. She pleaded for the proposed truth commission to allow for the “uninterrupted telling of experiences as perceived by the victims” (in Boraine and Levy 116). The TRC heard Krog’s plea. “Narrative truth” informed the “victim-centered approach” of the HRVC, wherein deponents had the “right to tell their stories of suffering and struggle” (TRC, Report 1: 53). According to the Report, “narrative truth” coincided with the “value [that] continues to be attached to oral tradition” in South Africa (1: 112–13). Through the extensive use of simultaneous interpretation, the TRC also heeded Krog’s proposal that it record these stories “with respect to the individual’s language, vocabulary, accent and rhythm” (in Boraine and Levy 116).

      The fourth truth, “healing and restorative truth,” furthered the Commission’s goal of reconciliation as well as its attempt to foster a culture of human rights. The Report explains that “[healing truth] places facts and what they mean within the context of human relationships—both amongst citizens and between the state and its citizens—[and] contributes to the reparation of the damage inflicted in the past and to the prevention of the recurrence of serious abuses in the future” (1: 114). Healing truth worked in tandem with the Commission’s embrace of ubuntu, a Nguni term typically translated as “humanness.”⁵ In the section entitled “Ubuntu: Promoting Restorative Justice,” the TRC Report defines ubuntu as a “traditional African value” that “expresses itself metaphorically in umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu—‘people are people through other people’” (1: 127). Nosisi Mpolweni of the Xhosa department of the University of the Western Cape describes the social relationships that lie at the heart of ubuntu: “The African kind of interconnectedness . . . opens up all the time, it broadens. First we take care of the person next to us, then it opens up to the family, you share, then it grows to the community. Whatever we do, we don’t do it alone” (Krog, Mpolweni, and Ratele 202). In her explanation of the term, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, former TRC commissioner and now a professor of psychology at the University of Cape Town, similarly emphasizes the roots of ubuntu in African culture and its role in repairing and sustaining relationships. She states, “The emphasis of ubuntu is on social relationships that are based on cooperation for the good of the community. Ubuntu is part of the deep cultural heritage of African people” (Gobodo-Madikizela 163).

      There are ongoing debates about whether ubuntu is, in fact, part of Africans’ “deep cultural heritage.” In his memoir No Future Without Forgiveness, TRC Chairperson Desmond Tutu claims that it is consistent with the “African Weltanschauung” in which “harmony, friendliness, community are great goods. Social harmony for us [Africans] is the summum bonum—the greatest good” (31). Like Tutu, South African theologian Reverend Wesley Mabuza, director of the Institute for Contextual Theology, states that there is “a strong link between their religious understanding of reconciliation and their African cultural roots” (qtd. in Van der Merwe 2). Mabuza asserts that ubuntu stems from the “African mind”: “I need to say that this idea that there is secular on one side and religious on the other is a western approach. For us it is an ubuntu situation. Whether you are religious or not, what is the human thing to do in this situation? From the African mind I would have problems with this demarcation” (qtd. in Van der Merwe 2). Mark Sanders argues that ubuntu, defined as “an African ethos of reciprocity,” guided the HRVC hearings by positioning the Commission as a sympathetic substitute for those perpetrators who would not claim responsibility for the human rights violations about which victims testified (9). In so doing, he argues, the TRC “generalized perpetratorship and reparative agency” (9). Other scholars, however, tend to view claims about ubuntu’s indigeneity and pervasiveness among African peoples with a great deal of skepticism. Yianna Liatsos suggests that ubuntu was promoted and cultivated by the TRC commissioners to “affirm an organic affinity between ‘African ways’ and the Christian message of forgiveness and redemption that Tutu and the Act advocated for post-apartheid South Africa” (“Keeping Faith”). Drawing on his research in urban black South African communities that maintain strongly retributive and violent justice practices, Richard Wilson claims that “[ubuntu] became the Africanist wrapping used to sell a reconciliatory version of human rights talk to black South Africans” (13).

      Whatever its origins, appeals to ubuntu did appear in the earliest phases of South Africa’s transition from apartheid and continued to appear well after the conclusion of the TRC process. The 1993 Interim Constitution and the preamble of the National Unity and Reconciliation Act both contain the following oft-cited statement about what the new South Africa would require: “There is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimization.” Ubuntu was a key feature

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