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Africa’s interim constitution guaranteed some form of “conditional amnesty” for those who had committed human rights abuses in defense of and in opposition to apartheid. It did not, however, specify the nature of the body that would grant those amnesties. The TRC emerged as a “third way” (Boraine, “Truth and Reconciliation”), an alternative to either Nuremberg-style prosecutions or a blanket amnesty. The TRC’s architects drew on the insights of international human rights actors as well as South African nationals (Goodman). Though a vexed endeavor in ways that From Apartheid to Democracy examines, the TRC nevertheless played a crucial role in South Africa’s transition from apartheid.

      Truth commissions are an inherently rhetorical and now ubiquitous mechanism for “dealing with the past.”¹ They constitute a novel genre of “public persuasion” in that they seek to “advance a cause” or “overcome an impasse” (Zarefsky 30)—typically involving a political transition—by redressing past wrongs through mechanisms such as truth telling, amnesty, and reparations. While they date from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, truth commissions echo the earliest rhetoricians’ faith in the ability of speech to create community and dispel violence. Indeed, they seem motivated by an Isocratean insight: “Since there is innate in us the ability to persuade each other and to reveal to ourselves the things we wish, not only have we put off the life of wild beasts, but we have come together and founded cities; we have established laws and discovered arts, and for nearly all the things we have contrived, logos had been our fellow worker” (Nicocles, § 6). Truth commissions marshal logos, our “fellow worker,” to facilitate a political transition in a variety of ways. They might do so by gathering information for concurrent or future prosecutions; by producing an account of past violations in the hopes of “closing the book”; by showcasing, via a commission’s historical inquiry and process, the new government’s commitment to transparency, human rights, and the “rule of law”; or, in the case of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, by promoting a national discourse of reconciliation. While the specific goals and mechanisms of truth commissions vary, all (1) exist only temporarily, (2) investigate a defined time period in the recent past, (3) focus on gross violations of human rights as defined by humanitarian law, (4) place a high value on listening to victims, and, finally, (5) submit a final report that accounts for their activities and findings.

      Attempts to address a legacy of human rights violations date back to the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials following the Second World War. The emergent field of transitional justice finds its origins in these postwar experiments in justice. Its practitioners assume that “confronting the past” is a necessary component of a successful transition from authoritarian rule to democracy or from a period of conflict to peace and stability (Bickford, “Transitional Justice” 1045). Because transitional justice “confronts the past” in order to promote justice and to facilitate a transition, its practitioners consider a range of mechanisms in addition to traditional prosecutions. As Bickford notes, these include reparations policies, reconciliation initiatives, institutional reforms, and, of course, truth commissions (1046).

      Truth commissions lie at the nexus of debates about how to balance competing demands for truth, justice, and reconciliation. Contingent conditions—a new and fragile government, the threat of a return to violence if prosecutions are an option, and the lack of a strong judicial system—can make retributive justice measures, such as prosecutions, unfeasible. These pragmatic concerns often lead to the decision to hold a truth commission. At a minimum, a truth commission serves to increase public awareness of the abuses committed during the time period covered by its mandate. In some instances, it can illuminate facts about abuses that the former regime kept hidden from the majority of the population. In many cases, however, a truth commission simply acknowledges the truth of abuses that were widely known by the majority of the population but actively denied by the government. Citizens in a repressive environment often fear the consequences of speaking publicly about abuses or are legally prevented from doing so by gag orders. The fear of attracting attention and becoming a victim oneself, and official policies that discourage or ban truth telling, generates what Yael Danieli calls a “conspiracy of silence” (qtd. in Hayner, Unspeakable 135). A truth commission breaks the silence. Ideally, it heralds the transition to a new political order by acknowledging the government’s responsibility for or complicity in the abuses. The president emeritus of the Open Society Institute, Aryeh Neier, suggests that a truth commission’s “acknowledgment implies that the state has admitted its misdeeds and recognized that it was wrong” (34). This official acknowledgment ostensibly enables the new government to gain the trust of citizens who have lost confidence in political institutions and processes. In so doing, the truth commission helps draw a line between the past and the present. For these reasons, some practitioners and human rights activists now consider truth commissions a helpful counterpart to, though not necessarily a substitute for, traditional prosecutions.

      Pragmatism alone, though, has not fueled the surge of truth commissions in the last thirty years. In some instances, human rights activists and academics contend, truth commissions might better serve the needs of victims and societies transitioning from a period of violence or mass atrocity, even when prosecutions are possible. As legal scholar Martha Minow observes, “litigation is not an ideal form of social action” (“Hope” 238). Trials can retraumatize victims who must share their experiences in an adversarial context. They tend not to promote truth telling on the part of perpetrators who, out of self-protection, seek to obscure the details of their past. Finally, given their aim of attaining an individual verdict of guilt or innocence, trials do not typically produce a compelling picture of the myriad individuals, practices, and ideologies that created the enabling conditions for and context of abuse. Truth commissions, proponents suggest, instead address victims’ desire to tell their stories and generate a historical narrative about the recent past that acknowledges human rights abuses. By creating a safe space wherein victims can testify about their experiences, they meet what Priscilla Hayner describes as a “very basic need by victims to recount their stories of violence and survival” (Unspeakable 136). Legal and narrative theorist Teresa Godwin Phelps suggests that the distinctive setting provided by a truth commission can “allow for fuller transformative and constitutive storytelling beyond the scope of any trial” (67). During a trial, perpetrators testify, but they provide only the facts that will serve their case. A truth commission has the power to establish broader parameters for perpetrators’ testimony, furthering the potential for the “transformative storytelling” to which Phelps refers. South Africa’s TRC distinguished itself from prior truth commissions through its individualized amnesty program, which encouraged perpetrators as well as victims to tell their stories. Following the TRC’s example, several subsequent truth commissions have incorporated perpetrators’ storytelling into their mandates.

      The hybrid form and multiple goals of truth commissions make them prime targets of criticism. Truth commissions generate “genre confusion” precisely because they are “an imperfectly realized hybrid genre, spanning the state inquiry, human rights report, and official history” (Gready 20). According to their critics, truth commissions either do too little, or, more frequently, seek to do too much; that is, they set goals that they either should not or simply cannot realize. On practical grounds, some argue that truth commissions should limit themselves to fact-finding, rather than interpretation or evaluation. Doing so, these critics suggest, would enable a commission to frame its investigations and findings as objectively as possible, thus promoting consensus around its findings regarding human rights violations. José Zalaquett, a human rights activist and commissioner on the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, for example, suggests that truth commissions “should concentrate largely on facts, which may be proved, whereas differences about historical interpretation will always exist” (qtd. in Maier 265). Public intellectual and politician Michael Ignatieff similarly argues that “all that a truth commission can achieve is to reduce the number of lies that can be circulated unchallenged in public discourse,” that it “can only winnow out the solid core of facts upon which society’s arguments with itself should be conducted” (“Articles” 113). Legal scholar Henry Steiner posits, echoing Ignatieff,

      [p]erhaps truth commissions should have this same attitude, holding to the role of truth-tellers in the flat sense of doing their best to record who did what to whom and when, period. Were

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