From Apartheid to Democracy - Katherine Elizabeth Mack Rhetoric and Democratic Deliberation

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final Report. The Report goes so far as to suggest that “a spontaneous call has arisen among sections of the population for a return to ubuntu” (1: 127), a claim it supports by quoting the testimony of Susan van der Merwe, whose husband allegedly died at the hands of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC. In her testimony excerpted in the Report, Van der Merwe references ubuntu as the source of her belief that “every person’s life is too precious” (1: 128). The Report’s strategic excerpt supports the TRC’s claim about both the ubiquity and indigeneity of ubuntu in South Africa. It also underscores its nonracialism—Van der Merwe’s whiteness does not prevent her from affirming this “African” concept. The final Report also cites the statement of Cynthia Ngewu, whose son was among the “Gugulethu Seven” killed by the police in 1986: “We do not want to return the evil that perpetrators committed to the nation. We want to demonstrate humaneness towards them, so that they in turn may restore their own humanity” (5: 367). These presumably unsolicited statements of ubuntu provide support for the Report’s assertion that South Africans concurred with its understanding that there was a “need for ubuntu but not for victimization” (Republic of South Africa). The commissioners undoubtedly used ubuntu as a rhetorical resource to explain and justify “healing” truth and its relationship to the goal of reconciliation. But once the term ubuntu circulated, participants and critics of the TRC defined it in their own ways. For my purposes here, the authenticity or origins of ubuntu matter less than its function as a topos, or place of argument, for participants in and respondents to the TRC process.

      The TRC’s truth typology produced a tangled knot more than a seamless weave. Criticism of what historian Deborah Posel calls the Commission’s “wobbly, poorly constructed conceptual grid” of truths abounds (155). Some argue that the TRC’s major dilemmas resulted from the fact that “the two processes—quasi-judicial fact-finding versus victim-centered storytelling—were fundamentally irreconcilable, and for a simple reason: different kinds of truth were at stake” (Simpson 238). Anthony Holiday argues similarly: “The former set of [forensic] facts served the interests of the TRC’s truth-gathering task, while the latter [psychological] set, once bared in public, would be grist to the mill of national reconciliation” (54). Still others argue that the TRC never intended for the truths to cohere. To wit, Daniel Herwitz proposes that the Commission’s typology was instrumental, “operat[ing] as a homily throughout the proceedings” so as to facilitate the movement from truth to reconciliation (16). More recently, Paul Gready, while generally laudatory of the TRC framework (56), has cautioned against the embrace of a “banal post-modern” conception of truth that does not “confront and refute” obviously untrue narratives and perspectives (73). Gready notes that “simply mapping contradictory truths potentially enriches difference,” and he chastises “writers and critics” who, consciously or not, provide “ammunition” for such an approach (71, 73). Gready writes primarily for scholars and practitioners of transitional justice and human rights. He seeks to draw general insights from the South African experience about the usefulness of truth commissions as a transitional justice mechanism.

      My aim in the following chapters is not to judge the consistency or coherence of the TRC’s truth typology—the job of the philosopher or historian. Nor is it to evaluate the typology’s usefulness as a tool of reconciliation—the job of a scholar or practitioner of transitional justice. My interest instead lies in the ways in which the Commission’s engagement with different kinds of truth, as well as its claims about truth’s varied effects, generated contestation in the public hearings and spawned a range of imaginative receptions of the TRC process. A cultural rhetoric approach that reads across genres is able to capture this ecology of truth claims, as it occurs at the interstices of, and traverses, institutional, political, and cultural realms. The imaginative texts that I examine do not offer ambiguous postmodern conceptions of truth but rather make pointed arguments about the limitations, strengths, and unanticipated effects of the Commission’s process and arguments. Because the HRVC and AC emphasized different kinds of truth and made different arguments about the effects of those truths on TRC participants and South African society at large, I address their work in different chapters. The HRVC, whose work dominated the first year and a half of the TRC process, prioritized narrative truth and suggested that it would culminate in a healing truth for individuals and those who bore witness to their stories. To this claim, captured in the slogan “speaking is healing,” I now turn.

       AMBIVALENT SPEECH, RESONANT SILENCES

      Memories, like stories, can never be free.

      —SARAH NUTTALL

      I am not going back there. Pray to God that I am not asked to appear before the TRC again. Yes, going to the TRC was a victory. It was a victory in that I found the courage to confront my rape. It gave me a platform to share my grief. It made me talk. Hopefully, I will heal in time.

      —THANDI SHEZI

      The Commission’s work relied on giving words to experience. Yet, women’s “silence” can be recognised as meaningful. To do so requires carefully probing the cadences of silence, the gaps between fragile words, in order to hear what it is that women say.

      —FIONA ROSS

      Scholars and human rights activists agree that telling one’s story does not necessarily promote long-term psychic recovery or healing (Hamber). However, they have found that doing so fulfills a basic human desire to “break the silence.” As Priscilla Hayner explains, “truth commissions seem to satisfy—or at least begin to satisfy—a clear need of some victims to tell their stories and be listened to” (Unspeakable 135). Those commissions that hold hearings aim to create the conditions for “free speech” by providing victims with the opportunity to share their stories before a sympathetic audience. The validation that results from speaking (and from being heard) ostensibly contributes to the restoration of victims’ dignity and also promotes their inclusion in the national community from which they had been excluded, thus contributing to a truth commission’s nation-building project. These scenes of “free speech” intrigue rhetoricians, who share with truth commissions a faith in the transformative and dignifying power of speech. Speaking freely about the past, though, proved to be more difficult than the TRC had anticipated for both the perpetrators and victims of apartheid violence. In this chapter, I take up the topos of speech and silence in relation to women survivors of apartheid violence. Women survivors worked within and against the Commission’s assumptions about the significance of the violations they suffered, about the spaces wherein they would want to speak their memories, and about the meanings of their silences. Some did so within the space of the Commission’s Women’s Hearings, while others did so by refusing to speak—by remaining silent. Their participation in the TRC process traversed the spectrum of speech and silence, revealing the rhetorical resonance of each.

      Reading across time, context, and genre, beginning with the texts generated by the TRC and then considering various nonfiction and imaginative receptions of its process, creates a nuanced portrait of the rhetorical situation generated by the Human Rights Violations Committee (HRVC) and women’s responses to it. In this chapter, I first provide the theoretical foundation of the TRC’s belief in the causal relationships among voice, dignity, and citizenship. I then demonstrate how these beliefs shaped its engagement with women participants who tended to speak about the violations suffered by the men in their lives, rather than their own direct experiences. Women’s silences about their direct experiences of human rights violations threatened to obstruct the TRC’s truth-gathering and nation-building project. Commissioner Mapule Ramashala observed, “If women do not talk then the story we produce will not be complete” (qtd. in Ross 22). The Commission thus made special efforts to get women to speak through the creation of Women’s Hearings. Thandi Shezi, a woman survivor, testified at these hearings in 1997. While Shezi was not a public figure prior to her appearance before the TRC, since testifying she has figured in scholarly articles, a documentary, and a play about women’s experiences in detention and

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