Disappointed Remains: Trauma, Testimony, and Reconciliation in Post-apartheid South Africa

Trauma Survivors ◽

National Unity ◽

Apartheid Regime ◽

Democratic Elections

The apartheid regime in South Africa and the fight against the same, followed by the reconciliation is the crux of this article. The first democratic elections held on April 27, 1994, were surprisingly free of violence. Then, in one of its first pieces of legislation, the new democratic parliament passed the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995, which created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. At the outset, the South African TRC promised to “uncover the truth” about past atrocities, and forge reconciliation across a divided country. As oral historians, we should consider the oral testimonies that were given at the Human Rights Victim hearings and reflect on the reconciliation process and what it means to ask trauma survivors to forgive and reconcile with perpetrators. This article cites several real life examples to explain the trauma and testimony of apartheid and post-apartheid Africa with a hint on the still prevailing disappointments and blurred memories.

Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Jewish Voices and Perspectives

Verbum et Ecclesia ◽

10.4102/ve.v25i2.288 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 25 (2) ◽

pp. 546-567

Author(s):

P G J Meiring

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

South African ◽

Jewish Community ◽

Social Action ◽

Jewish Experience ◽

Apartheid Regime

The author who served on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) focuses on the Jewish experience in South Africa during the apartheid years. At a special TRC Hearing for Faith Communities (East London, 17-19 November 1997) Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris submitted a statement on behalf of his community. Two earlier documents were also put at the TRC’s disposal: a statement on Reconciliation presented by Gesher (a Jewish movement for social action) as a well as a comprehensive volume containing 27 interviews with Jewish activists (Cutting Through the Mountain). Taking his cue from both the Chief Rabbi’s presentation and the earlier documents, the author discusses the role of the Jewish community in overtly and covertly supporting the apartheid regime, as well the experiences of many Jews in struggling against apartheid. Finally the contribution of the Jewish community towards healing and reconciliation in South Africa comes under the spotlight.

Truth and reconciliation in South Africa: Hindu experiences and concerns

HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies ◽

10.4102/hts.v60i4.633 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 60 (4) ◽

Author(s):

P.G.J. Meiring

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

South African ◽

Faith Communities ◽

The South ◽

Hindu Community ◽

The Way

The author who served on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), focuses on the Hindu experience in South Africa during the apartheid years. At a special TRC Hearing for Faith Communities (East London, 17-19 November 1997) two submissions by local Hindu leaders were tabled. Taking his cues from those submissions, the author discusses four issues: the way the Hindu community suffered during these years, the way in which some members of the Hindu community supported the system of apartheid, the role of Hindus in the struggle against apartheid, and finally the contribution of the Hindu community towards reconciliation in South Africa. In conclusion some notes on how Hindus and Christians may work together in th

The knowledge and perceptions of history students of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)

The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa ◽

10.4102/td.v10i1.23 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

Author(s):

M Oelofse ◽

A Oosthuysen

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

South African ◽

Research Method ◽

Mixed Method Research ◽

Group Interviews ◽

The University

Using the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC) and the concept of reconciliation as a case study, the article attempts to assess the knowledge and understanding of the registered undergraduate history students at the University of the Free State’s main campus about the TRC and the concept and process of reconciliation in the country at large. The research will firstly assess whether the younger generation of students, specifically students taking history as a subject, have any knowledge of such a significant and contemporary event in South African historiography as the TRC process. Secondly, in relation to the aims and recommendations of the TRC and against the background of reconciliation efforts in the country, to perceive the views and thoughts of undergraduate history students on the progress in reconciliation endeavours in South Africa. As a result, a sample of 128 undergraduate history students was randomly selected to complete a quantitative questionnaire. The questionnaire consisted of both closed and open-ended questions. Group interviews, as a qualitative research method, were added and used to conduct interviews with 16 undergraduate history students selected randomly and answers were recorded. Accordingly, an explanatory mixed- method research method approach was employed by implementing both the qualitative and quantitative method.

Discourses of Order and Their Disruption: The Texts of the South African Truth & Reconciliation Commission

South African Journal of Psychology ◽

10.1177/008124630003000104 ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 30 (1) ◽

pp. 14-22 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Derek Hook ◽

Bronwyn Harris

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

South African ◽

Political Efficacy ◽

The South ◽

Political Discourses ◽

Special Power ◽

Social Orders

This paper asserts that selected texts of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission possess a powerful political potential in their ability to challenge and refute historical relations of racialised power in South Africa. The prospective political efficacy of these texts is seen as residing in their critical ability to subvert and challenge the predominant understandings, discourses and representations of Apartheid, or the ‘old’, South Africa. Three overlapping routes of enquiry are explored in this regard. Firstly, the political efficacy of such texts is seen as arising from their role in terms of the recovery of previously repressed histories. This recovery enlarges the archive of South Africa's past and contributes to the constitution of a new body of knowledge, from which credible standpoints of resistance and opposition may be articulated. A second explanation highlights the fact these texts are able to exert a form of discursive critique upon the predominant practices and representations of both former and reigning social orders. This level of critique enables us, in Foucautt's (1981) terms to restore to political discourses their nature as contextual and discontinuous practices of construction as opposed to naturally-occurring, seamlessly-unified, purely significatory instances of language. The last account engages more directly with the radical and transgressive nature of these texts, with their affective and ultimately symptomatic qualities. It is here suggested that these texts have earned their extraordinary visceral charge, their special power and horror, for many South Africans, precisely because they have exposed and stretched to the limit the boundaries of the past discursive order, of what had been known, what was understood and what could be represented in the Apartheid State.

Lydia’s silence: Representation of trauma from an ex-centric position in Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit

10.53034/transcript.2021.v01.n02.005 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 1 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Vipasha Bhardwa

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

The Novel ◽

Personal Experiences ◽

Familial Bonds ◽

Apartheid Regime ◽

In The Beginning ◽

Bitter Fruit

South Africa, a place long caught in the crosshairs of hegemonic violence and racism, provides a fitting case study for the imbalance and marginalization of the traumatized individuals who lived through the fascist apartheid regime. Achmat Dangor’s celebrated novel Bitter Fruit (2001) is a tragic story of the coloured family of Silas Ali set during 1998; when Nelson Mandela’s presidency was gaining momentum in South Africa. It was a period when the violent and discriminatory apartheid regime was coming to an end and a fledgling democracy was still testing its wings in South Africa. The narrative of Bitter Fruit is centred around the silenced memory of Lydia’s rape, Silas’s wife, by a white security policeman called Francois du Boise. The novel begins with Lydia’s suppressed traumatic past erupting into the post-apartheid present when Silas accidentally encounters his wife’s rapist at a mall in Johannesburg thereby bringing back the traumatic memories of the past. Nineteen-year-old Mikey Ali, who is a child conceived in shame and terror, is the figurative ‘bitter fruit’ in the novel born of miscegenation and apartheid abuse. Lydia’s trauma haunts the family in complex ways ultimately leading to the disintegration of familial bonds. These personal experiences of trauma take place against the backdrop of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a famous but controversial reparative model of justice. The proposed research article aims to understand trauma from the ex-centric position of a coloured woman who refuses to allow her personal experiences of trauma to be undermined and defined as merely wartime ‘collateral damage’. Lydia resists the reductionist approach that the members of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) had adopted while dealing with cases related to violence and human rights abuses. In the beginning, dialogue and discourses on trauma centred mainly around extremely unusual events but now trauma theories have infiltrated co

Reconciliation and psychiatry in South Africa

BJPsych International ◽

10.1192/s2056474000000441 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 12 (3) ◽

pp. 62-64

Author(s):

Bernard Janse van Rensburg

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

Human Rights ◽

South African ◽

African Society ◽

The South ◽

South African Society ◽

Form Part

Although psychiatrists did not form part of the structures of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the Society of Psychiatrists of South Africa (SPSA) at the time did make a submission. Since then, the local association of psychiatrists has been reconstituted as the South African Society of Psychiatrists (SASOP). Psychiatry and psychiatrists may have to extend their activities beyond rehabilitation and restoration, to include endeavours to prevent future violations of human rights.

Seeking Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa

International Social Work ◽

10.1177/0020872804041410 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 47 (2) ◽

pp. 157-167 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Therese Sacco ◽

Wilma Hoffmann

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

Social Work ◽

South African ◽

Social Work Educators ◽

To Come

South Africa’s attempt to come to terms with its horrific past; mechanisms and responsibilities of countries endeavoring to deal with such pasts; objectives of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and critiques of it are identified. A public acknowledgement submitted by some South African social work educators is included.

"We Never Did Return": Migration, Materiality and Time in Penny Siopis' Post-Apartheid Art

Contemporaneity Historical Presence in Visual Culture ◽

10.5195/contemp.2015.131 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 4 ◽

pp. 45-70 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Allison K. Young

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

South African ◽

Contemporary Art ◽

Return Migration ◽

Medium Specificity ◽

The Past ◽

Related Object

This article explores “migration” as both theme and operation in two works by the South African artist Penny Siopis, each created in the year 1997: the artist’s first film, My Lovely Day, and a related object installation entitled Reconnaissance (1900-1997). In each work, Siopis traces the course of her grandmother’s emigration from Europe to Africa through a variety of found, collected, or inherited components that bore witness to the longue durée of imperialism and Apartheid. Mediating between national, cultural, and familial narratives, these works are inherently archaeological in nature, and allowed viewers at the time to reflect on the multiple entangled histories that comprised the post-Apartheid condition. The late nineties in South Africa were defined by the conclusion of Apartheid, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and two major biennale exhibitions of contemporary art. The decade thusly saw a stream of collective efforts to both unearth the past and envision the future, marking a time of great cultural, artistic, political, and discursive transition. Mapping questions of medium-specificity and affect over this larger context, I investigate Siopis’ use and manipulation of historical traces as well as notions of contemporaneity and temporality in her art.

Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, 1995 (South Africa)

Journal of African Law ◽

10.1017/s0021855300006409 ◽

1995 ◽

Vol 39 (2) ◽

pp. 231-231 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

Human Rights ◽

National Unity ◽

Full Disclosure ◽

The Past ◽

The Republic ◽

Political Objective

In July 1995 this long-awaited Act was signed into law. Its Preamble states that it is: “To provide for the investigation and establishment of as complete a picture as possible of the nature, causes and extent of gross violations of human rights committed during the period from 1 March 1960 to the cut-off date contemplated in the Constitution, within or without the Republic, emanating from the conflicts of the past, and the fate or whereabouts of the victims of such violations; the granting of amnesty to persons who make full disclosure of acts associated with a political objective committed in the course of the conflicts of the past during the said period; affording victims an opportunity to relate the violations they suffered; the taking of measures aimed at the granting of reparation to, and the rehabilitation and the restoration of the human and civil dignity of, victims of violations of human rights; reporting to the Nation about such violations and victims; the making of recommendations aimed at the prevention of the commission of gross violations of human rights; and for the said purposes to provide for the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a Committee on Human Rights Violations, a Committee on Amnesty and a Committee on Reparation and Rehabilitation…”

Performing the Rainbow Nation: The Limitations of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Inquiry@Queen's Undergraduate Research Conference Proceedings ◽

10.24908/iqurcp.8589 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Lauren Sampson

Keyword(s):

South African ◽

Rule Of Law ◽

Social Transformation ◽

The Rule Of Law ◽

Apartheid Regime ◽

Developmental Policies ◽

State Infrastructure

After the dismantling of the apartheid regime in 1994, South Africa was charged with acknowledging the sufferings of its populace while democratizing and de-racializing state infrastructure. Instead of pursuing the politically expedient path of collective amnesia, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was formed in 1995. It has since been heralded as the most ambitious and organized socio-political endeavour to confront a troubled and divisive history. The Commission attempted to initiate South African into a new future predicated upon the principles of social justice, the rule of law and reconciliation; however, this paper will argue that in practice, these ideals were not sufficient to combat extant political pressure and were not politically supported by any concrete mechanism capable of catalyzing social transformation. Through an analysis of the Commission’s provision of amnesty, dismissal of institutional responsibility for apartheid and crime and the reluctance to pursue reparative and developmental policies, this paper will suggest South Africa’s attempts to bridge its racial divides were chiefly symbolic and restricted. Finally, it will consider whether the TRC’s performance of “truth” occurred at the price of reconciliation and the ramifications for restorative justice as a tool of social healing.