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Performance, Transitional Justice, and the Law: South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Abstract
The word "performance" is often on the lips of scholars who write about truth commissions and international human rights law, yet performance and theatre studies scholars have not yet been central interlocutors in this discourse. The author charts a point of entry by examining a unique and defining feature of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC): its public, embodied, and performed dimensions. How did the TRC's performative conventions, modes of address, and expressive embodiment shape the experience for both participants and spectators? The author argues that the "completeness" of the vision of the apartheid past that the TRC was mandated to achieve can be discerned as vividly—if not more so—through detailed analyses of moments of performed testimony as it can through the macro-narratives and quantitative analyses that have so far dominated scholarship on the commission.
... 45 According to Cole, transitional justice results from "a convergence of the human rights movement and international law" (Cole 2007) and can be defined as a way to cope with the aftermath of systemic and large scale violations of human rights … to grapple with the ultimate failure of traditional jurisprudence on the face of contending demands for justice, reparation, acknowledgements, mourning, healing, reconciliation, and the promulgation of public memory; [while] its attendant notion of "restorative justice" … focuses on restoring humanity to both perpetrator and victim (Cole 2010). ...
Since the late 1990s, major claims addressed to the Indian state by, or on behalf of, the underprivileged, have been formulated in terms of rights (right to work, to food, etc.). Collective action increasingly addresses the courts as much as governments or legislative assemblies. This paper aims to show, through an analysis of public hearings (jan sunwai in Hindi), that such “legalism” of Indian progressive social movements is at work not only in the language, but also in the form of mobilizations. In order to interpret public hearings as social performance, I compare them with two modes of judiciary intervention that depart from the ordinary—the PIL in India, Truth commissions in other countries—and thereby highlight a series of affinities, both substantive and procedural, between the three dispositives. This interpretive analysis points at the deep originality of public hearings as a form of collective action, and at their political significance insofar as they can, in the best of cases, restore citizenship.
... Writing about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Catherine Cole has effectively argued that the commission "embraced performance as a central feature of its operations." 11 As a prolonged and highly staged performance, the TRC drew in a vast number of differently situated audiences to bring once hidden abuses into the public view. 12 Moreover, Cole contends that the particular uses of courtrooms and hearings that helped sustain the TRC had a prior history in the political show trials carried out by the apartheid state in the 1950s and 1960s, when people like Nelson Mandela used the courtroom to introduce counterpolitical discourses. ...
I still thought [Biko] was shamming. I had had experience before with this tendency.
—Colonel Goosen, 1977 inquestThere was also a BBC reconstruction of the inquest with a well-known actor who played Sydney Kentridge—which I said that he wasn't as good as Sydney Kentridge, they should have had Sydney play himself.
—George Bizos, 13 May 2008
... And how does this production fit within a broader movement of using artistic forms, such as theatrical forms, as tools of transitional justice (e.g. Cole 2007;Rush and Simić 2014)? While this short reflection on the Pka Sla Krom Angkar dance does not seek to answer those larger questions, we hope that it does provide some food for thought. ...
The Khmer Rouge’s crimes of forced marriage and sexual violence have been commemorated in a dance production, entitled Pka Sla Krom Angkar. It is one of several artworks that were recognised in 2018 as “reparations” by the United Nations-backed Khmer Rouge Tribunal, known officially as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). In this article, researchers from Australia and Cambodia reflect on the production’s significance from multiple perspectives. It is a catalyst for discussing human rights; a tool for promoting psychological healing; and a part of the ECCC’s legal process.
... In the absence, or perhaps in face of the contentiousness, of an overarching institutional framework, the task of dealing with the so-called 'legacy of the past' has been largely devolved to independent initiatives, community projects as well as media and culture: with community-based restorative justice schemes; televised reconciliations encounters; 8 Several critics have commented on the performative dimensions of restorative justice practices, such as truth commissions, specifically in the South African context. 10 Furthermore, as John Harrington and Elizabeth Mitchell contend, the Northern Irish context is seen to encourage 'a considerable amount of dramatic political performance within, and about, its borders'. 11 Yet it is notable that the majority of literature on Northern Ireland and transitional justice mechanisms has remained remarkably gender-blind; but these performances must always, at the same time, be understood as gender performances. ...
... The willingness to engage in discussions about pressing social topics may partly be viewed as a legacy of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which involved different levels of society and initiated a cross-societal debate about politics in their most traumatising form. This is not to romanticise the TRC as it has been subject to critiques questioning its lack of clarity of its findings, 83 its ambiguous use of the concept of reconciliation 84 its limits in terms of wider impact, 85 its inability to deliver reparations to most people adversely affected by apartheid policies 86 , as well as its tendencies to over-privilege white and previously powerful people. 87 At the same time, the TRC may have laid the institutional grounding for cooperation across sets of actors and thus the formation of dynamic vertical imagined communities. ...
With specific reference to Bosnia-Herzegovina and South Africa, this article looks at how peacebuilding actors constantly recreate public space and the discourses within it. The formation of imagined political communities reflects the extent to which peacebuilding interactions can be rather horizontal or vertical in nature, producing different types of friction in the encounter between peacebuilding actors. In Bosnia, the predominantly horizontal nature of international peacebuilding processes has resulted in the emergence of fragmented local sub-spaces. Those are often in conflict with international and national political communities, with frictions emerging between local, national and international actor networks. The article will contrast those processes with the mosaic developing in South Africa, where boundaries between actors are more blurred. Due to strong vertical cooperation, sporadic frictions tend to emerge within those spaces rather than exclusively at their boundaries. The article will analyse the extent to which different patterns of peacebuilding interaction impact upon the constructive and destructive frictions that those produce.
... Research on the ritualistic and ceremonial elements of punishment often focuses on the main stage where punishment and judgment are expressed, the criminal trial (Sontag 1966;Cole 2007). The precise moment of confrontation between offender and community is directly linked with many of the main emotional responses related to punishment, such as denunciation, censure, and blaming, and has particular symbolic appeal due to its representation as a moment of resolution. ...
The argument advanced in this paper is that the motivation to punish relies on punishment producing a kind of solidarity that allows individuals to pursue emotional release together with a sense of belonging, without having to question or address why it is that they felt alienated and insecure in the first place. This raises the possibility that the reason why we believe punishment to be useful, and why we are motivated to punish, is because we derive pleasure from the utility of punishment. Simply stated, punishment pleases. It then analyses the relationship between punishment and solidarity to investigate why and how punishment pleases. We argue that the pleasure of punishment is directly linked to the specific kind of solidarity that punishment produces, which we call hostile solidarity. The paper explores the links between punishment and identity in order to examine the allure of hostile solidarity and then draws implications from this perspective and sets out an agenda for future research.
This paper examines Molora, an adaptation of the Orestes story by South African playwright Yael Farber set in the context of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It considers the play’s engagement with restorative justice in relation to the exploration of different forms of justice by Aeschylus in his Oresteia. It also examines Farber’s play in light of the ideas of the influential Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal, noting how the relationship with the classical past has changed in the three decades between the publication of Boal’s Teatro del oprimido y otras poeticas politicas in 1974 and the premiere of Farber’s Molora in 2003.
Partly informed by Homi Bhabha’s injunction for a postcolonial critique that animates the past, this article problematizes the British government’s recent gesture of reconciliation with victims of its torture practices in the Kenya liberation struggle in the 1950s. Illuminating the disjuncture between the gesture of reconciliation—and its official archival monument—and the British government’s delegitimization of the same struggle in the 1950s, I read the texts of songs that unmask the colonial history of exploitation and dehumanization of the colonized. I probe the ways the colonized talked back and destabilized European hegemony through song, which was a fundamental binding force in the anticolonial struggle. After sifting this politics of resistance I re-inscribe its dissonance into the textuality of the present moment of installing official monuments and paying token compensations. As I conclude, the official texts that would enable a full accounting for those who were “disappeared” in the struggle are still missing and the available witness testimony is therefore incomplete.
The creation and transfer of cultural history and truths through the arts (including oral, written, visual and performative practices) pre-dates the development of transitional justice as a field. However, the connection between cultural expression and transitional justice is inherent given that a central tenet of transitional justice is to give voice to the victims of trauma and human rights violations. But what of contexts in which transitional justice processes are not forthcoming, conflict is ongoing and cultural practice and transmission of any kind has broken down because of decades of violations? This chapter seeks to examine the role of artists in transitioning contexts where there is still conflict and will focus specifically on the case of Afghanistan where over three decades of conflict have eroded infrastructure, civic trust, and normal cultural production. The chapter will provide specific examples of how arts have been used to deal with themes of conflict and justice in the Afghan context, including the participatory theatre work of the Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organization (AHRDO), in an effort to shed light on the cultural implications of transitional justice and the role artists and arts practices play in helping shift societies towards human rights and accountability.
This article aims to make an approach to the concept of memory, and in particular to the historical memory in the framework of transitional processes. In this exploration, diverse problems for its definition and development, especially those arising from the perspective of the persons involved in the preparation, support and dissemination of memory in the context of armed conflict are evident. This subjective view evidences various challenges for the so-called Victims Act in Colombia, which seeks precisely to generate a policy to protect the rights of victims.
Taking a performance studies approach to understanding Asian American racial subjectivity, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson argues that the law influences racial formation by compelling Asian Americans to embody and perform recognizable identities in both popular aesthetic forms (such as theater, opera, or rock music) and in the rituals of everyday life. Tracing the production of Asian American selfhood from the era of Asian Exclusion through the Global War on Terror, A Race So Different explores the legal paradox whereby U.S. law apprehends the Asian American body as simultaneously excluded from and included within the national body politic. Bringing together broadly defined forms of performance, from artistic works such as Madame Butterfly to the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in the Cambodian American deportation cases of the twenty-first century, this book invites conversation about how Asian American performance uses the stage to document, interrogate, and complicate the processes of racialization in U.S. law. Through his impressive use of a rich legal and cultural archive, Chambers-Letson articulates a robust understanding of the construction of social and racial realities in the contemporary United States.
This article examines the complex, inherently political, and often contradictory processes of truth-finding, history-telling, and formation of collective memory through transitional justice. It explores tensions between history-telling and the normative goals of truth commissions and international criminal courts, taking into account the increasing importance attributed to victims as witnesses of history. The legal space these instruments of transitional justice offer is determined by both their historical and political roots, and specific goals and procedures. Because the legal space that truth commissions offer for history-telling is more flexible and their report open to public debate, they may open up alternative public spaces and enable civil society to contest the master narrative. The legal truth laid down in the rulings of an international criminal court is by definition closed. The verdict of a court is definite and authoritative; closure, not continued debate about what it has established as the truth, is its one and only purpose. In conclusion, the article calls for a critical appraisal of transitional justice as acclaimed mediator of collective memories in post-conflict societies.
In this paper I explore the spaces and relationships created by the implementation of "laws of nationalunity and reconciliation". In deals with one of the officialinvestigative procedures carried out by the Public Prosecution Authority during the implementation of Colombia's Ley 975 del2005 (the legalframework charged with facilitating the demobilization of members of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), also known, simply, as paramilitaries). This paper is the product of my involvement as an observer of a group of investigators' during a process that, together with former members of paramilitary groups, sought to "reconstruct" the "historicalmemory" of a number of massacres that the Autodefensas Campesinas delMeta y Vichada has carried out a decade ago. The paper explores a number of mediations and translations that were part of the process (narrative, visual, cartographicaland testimonial) as a way to show the complexities in "localizing" collective pain, harm and injury.
This article focuses on the challenging intertextual phenomenology characterising the play Molora by South African playwright and director of international acclaim Yäel Farber. Premiered in Grahamstown in 2003, and published in 2008 after award-winning national and international tours, Molora is a radical adaptation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia . It dramatises the challenges faced by South Africa in the highly-charged post-Apartheid aftermath, through dramatic confrontations between Klytemnestra, Elektra, and Orestes echoing the testimonies delivered by perpetrators and victims on the TRC’s ‘stage’, and through a chorus made up of seven Xhosa matriarchs belonging to the Ngquoko split-tone singers, who witness, comment on and significantly participate in the play’s action. Molora ’s complex intertextual construction and dynamic are shown to call for a hermeneutical approach careful to avoid simplifying presentifications, as well as any possible fracture with extratextuality. Intertextuality, in fact, is here given the task to creatively and syncretically combine the ancient Greek text with the indigenous Xhosa text through a process of transcultural imbrication that, from beginning to end, exudes the tragedies of all-too-present history while instantiating a revolutionary use of memory.
Using the courtroom scenes in Octavia Butler’s last novel, Fledgling, this essay traces the often obscured imbrications of law and performance. Through an analysis of the performative aspects of legal proceedings, I insist that the ritual theatricality of the legal system cannot be thought of in opposition to ‘truth.’ Foregrounding performative aspects of the law can move us away from the law as an individualized remedy for limited, state prohibited wrongs. Instead it points towards an understanding of the law as both a necessity and the necessary failure of legal remedy for large scale injustices such as slavery that have been inherited and that exist in the present.
Political historians often described the civil war in Sudan as a 'theatre of proliferating conflicts'. While independence for South Sudan may have closed the curtain on one act, it has given rise to a new spectacle, depicted through a narrative of internal conflict and extreme underdevelopment, and directed predominantly by the state and its international development partners. This article seeks to counter the official discourse about post-conflict reparation by considering ways in which peace and reconciliation are imagined at the local level. In particular, it considers the agentive role of Dinka songs, analyzing the ways in which they bare witness to the memories and aspirations of one group within the diverse cultural spread of South Sudan society. In so doing, it explores how the infusion of old poetic forms and structures with new actors, roles and imaginaries gives force within a culturally sanctioned framework of legitimacy, thus offering a potentially meaningful arena for the narration of a locally relevant national script.
In spring of 2011, Peter King (R-NY) convened a hearing titled ‘The Extent of Radicalization among American Muslims’ in the US House of Representatives. Democratic participants critiqued the hearings and contextualized the proceedings within the long history of institutionalized racism in the USA. They argued that the hearings were a threat to the Constitution itself, a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause and the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of religion. Republican participants shared concerns about threats to the Constitution but suggested that the hearings were part of a strategy to combat this threat. Numerous Republican participants identified forms of Islamic law, or sharia law, as the primary threat to the integrity of the rule of law (ROL). Despite opposing positions, all actors agreed that the ‘ROL’ is that which will save the nation from threats posed from both outside and inside the nation and, as such, it is the ROL itself that must be protected. In this sense, the ‘ROL’ ensured by the Constitution inadvertently became the primary object of the hearings. In this essay, we bring analytical approaches from performance studies and anthropology to argue that the hearings impel a re-examination of the concept of ‘ROL’ itself. Rather than simply addressing the legislative effects of the hearings, we are interested in what they reveal about the performative and cultural dimensions of the law and the lawmaking process. While critics of the hearings derisively referred to them as ‘political theater’, we suggest that it is the nature of the King Hearings as staged public spectacle that imbue them with a politically performative power. We also identify the specific effects of sharia panic in contemporary US American political and legal discourse.
Mediante un intercambio entre los miembros de organizaciones comunitarias que documentan violaciones de derechos humanos en el noroeste de Colombia y en el norte de Uganda, este artículo examina estrategias de construcción de memoria en las que un individuo o un colectivo crea un espacio social seguro para dar testimonio y re-historiar hechos de violencia o de resistencia. En escenarios de inseguridad crónica, tales actos constituyen un reservorio de documentos vivos que preservan los recuerdos, dan testimonio, combaten la impunidad y transmiten el sentido o la "veracidad" de los supervivientes. El archivo viviente trastorna las suposiciones convencionales en torno a qué es documentación o testimonio en el ámbito de la justicia transicional e introduce nuevas herramientas interdisciplinarias con las cuales aprender de y escuchar a los supervivientes en forma diferente.
Aeschylus based his Oresteia, the only full trilogy of Greek tragedies known to us today, on the ancient myth of the house of Atreus and set it in the aftermath of the Trojan War. Nonetheless, the trilogy arguably held great contemporary relevance when it was first performed at the Dionysia festival in 458BCE, as it marked the transition of Athens from a tribal culture to a democratic society governed by constitutional law (Ziolkowski 1977: 20). Throughout the Oresteia Aeschylus dramatizes the meaning and political deployment of justice, concluding his trilogy positively with the transformation of justice as vengeance into the legal justice of Athens’ new democracy. In this paper, I discuss two dramatic texts that draw on the Oresteia within another context of transitional justice: that of post-apartheid South Africa. The first is Mark Fleishman’s In the City of Paradise, which premiered at the University of Cape Town in 1998. The second is Yael Farber’s MoLoRa (Sesotho for 'ash'), first performed in Germany in 2004. In both plays, the distorted family relations within the house of Atreus come to represent the distorted relations within South Africa, a nation that was haunted by a similar cycle of vengeance.
Legal practitioners at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) are exercised by the question of whether their endeavour should seek to intentionally create an “historical record.” Their views are framed by a supposed distinction between Truth Commissions and Trials and by the assumption that the practice and method of law and historiography are distinct. Such distinctions are, however, unsustainable given that both trials and Truth Commissions require coercive, enticed remembering and that both the lawyer and historian vicariously re-enact the past in the search for meaning. Similarly, the methodology of the oral historian is not distinct from that employed in a trial. And yet, the apparent celebration of orality at the ICTR is matched by a desire to instantaneously convert mutable speech into immutable text. While the ultimate mutable text, the judgement, declares a legal finality, it intentionally directs the reader to the process of fact discovery preserved in a globally accessible, digital database. While there remains a tension between the digital archive and its physical shadow, an historical record awaits consumption. The question, however, remains who will the consumers be and to what purpose will this record be put?
This essay offers a transnational exploration of Suzan-Lori Parks's dis(re)memberment of Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman, a Khoisan woman from South Africa who was displayed in Europe in the 1800s under the appellation "The Hottentot Venus." Juxtaposing two simultaneous events—post-apartheid south Africa's efforts to repatriate baartman's remains, and the volatile American reception of Parks's play Venus—reveals the ways in which Parks's aesthetic, defined here as a "drama of disinterment," calls into question the notion that historical trauma is a wound that must be healed in the name of unity, the idea that reconciliation necessarily entails the establishment of an objective truth, and the assumption that the restoration of dignity is the goal of the recovery process.
1 Through an exchange between members of community-based organizations that docu-ment human rights violations in northwest Colombia and northern Uganda, this article examines multiple strategies of memory making in which an individual or a collective creates a safe social space to give testimony and re-story past events of violence or resistance. In settings of chronic insecurity, such acts constitute a reservoir of living documents to preserve memories, give testimony, contest impunity and convey the meaning, or the 'truthfulness,' of survivors. The living archive disrupts conventional assumptions about what is documentation or witnessing in the field of transitional justice and introduces new interdisciplinary tools to the field with which to learn from and listen differently to survivors.
Taking a socio-historical approach, this chapter traces history from World War II (WWII) and illustrates the various instances in which economics and politics intersect with theological themes. After WWII the dominant paradigm in theology tilted towards a moral economy by focusing on issues of fairness, justice and peace. This chapter argues that, in view of the triumph of global capitalism since 1989, the future and relevance of theology is located within spaces that provide ethical and moral influence towards fairness and justice, thus agreeing with the central message of Jesus of Nazareth.
This book investigates peacebuilding in post-conflict scenarios by analysing the link between peace, space and place. By focusing on the case studies of Cyprus, Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Northern Ireland and South Africa, the book provides a spatial reading of agency in peacebuilding contexts. It conceptualises peacebuilding agency in post-conflict landscapes as situated between place (material locality) and space (the imaginary counterpart of place), analysing the ways in which peacebuilding agency can be read as a spatial practice. Investigating a number of post-conflict cases, this book outlines infrastructures of power and agency as they are manifested in spatial practice. It demonstrates how spatial agency can take the form of conflict and exclusion on the one hand, but also of transformation towards peace over time on the other hand. Against this background, the book argues that agency drives place-making and space-making processes. Therefore, transformative processes in post-conflict societies can be understood as materialising through the active use and transformation of space and place. This book will be of interest to students of peacebuilding, peace and conflict studies, human geography and IR in general.
This chapter reflects on the challenges facing the implementation of land restitution mechanisms in Colombia in a post-agreement scenario with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia—Ejercito del Pueblo (FARC—EP). It discusses the issue of the dispossession and concentration of rural assets, and how this is connected to violence and the failure/absence of state institutions. The chapter undertakes a critical reading of a specific transitional justice mechanism that has been implemented in Colombia (the Victims and Land Restitution Law) and the limitations it faces. It presents some lessons from the Victims and Land Restitution Law that might be useful to consider in the implementation of transitional justice agreements between the FARC—EP and the Colombian Government. In the case of Colombia, this inequality in the provision of rights and land is a consequence of the design of the system that regulates property rights in the country.
The neo-liberal economic policies, which were instituted in Uganda in the late 1980s, opened up the creative economy centered on urban artistry and cultural innovation. As a result of free flow of global cultural ideas, local inter-ethnic human migration, and movements of dance traditions, urban youth creatives have carved out creative spaces in urban areas to create a metropolitan dance aesthetic, which is neither national or ethnic. This essay will provide a critical reflection of “urban meets traditional” dance workshops as space where urban youth in Kampala city in Uganda have sought to engage their bodies as intersections of complex local ethnic dance traditions and global dance forms such as dancehall, hip-hop, and Afro-house to create a metropolitan aesthetic that is neither national nor ethnic. Urban meets traditional are months dance workshops that are conducted in some venues in the city where the youth learn ethnic dances from local master teachers of these dances. The youth then fuse this dance material with techniques and movements of dance forms such as hip-hop, dancehall and Afro-house to create new kinesthetic fabric as individuals and a community. My deconstruction of this phenomenon will frame the metropolitan aesthetics that emerge from these processes as ‘third space’ (Bhabha 2004, 55-56). I will critically discuss the processes of “urban meets traditional’ workshops and frame them as a framework of re/production through which the youth negotiate local dance traditions and global dance forms to create an embodied aesthetic within the locales of urbanity. I will also examine how the spaces where ‘urban meets traditional’ dance activities take place act as an extension of the embodied aesthetics and urban character.
Testimony has featured as a defining framework for post-Apartheid South Africa in traditional courts of law and under the guise of Truth and Reconciliation. Yet South Africa’s effort to transition to postviolence must be read as partial, with rates of gender-based violence amongst some of the highest in the world. The article traces the convergence between performance and testimony. It examines creative efforts to respond to South Africa’s cult of masculinity, which positions women as “fair game,” and judicial ambivalence to perpetrators of violence. I turn to the testimonial-come-documentary dance Slavery to examine the critical and creative possibilities of dance performance to testify to the absent presence of this national crisis, rhetorically probe dancers, and audiences alike to find opportunities for its contestation, whilst questioning how and even if the arts are best placed to respond to judicial failings. The article introduces three distinct dance spatialities—esthetic, ethical and political space—through which offstage enactments of gender-based violence are upstaged and contested. Nonetheless, these are presented as deeply contentious spaces, in which new silences and violences of the body can be enabled, and where performance risks operating as a “third assailant.” The article calls for greater critical conceptual attention to thinking intimate geopolitics through creative performance.
Cambridge Core - Human Rights - Genocide Never Sleeps - by Nigel Eltringham
Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull, the first major retrospective on the TRC, has, on the one hand, been praised for its deeply passionate, literary take on a subject entangled in the discourses of politics and social science. On the other, the book has been the site of fierce controversy: Krog, a privileged Afrikaner, engages directly with her beneficiary status while simultaneously appropriating the voices of victims in her narrative. Since the book's publication, debate about the relationships between identity, voice, memory, and truth, has only become more heated. In this article, I return to Krog's seminal text as a case study of such struggles over voice, analysing Krog's engagement with multiple voices through the lenses of narrative theory and memory studies. Particularly, I apply Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of “heteroglossia” and “polyphony” and Michael Rothberg's concept of “multidirectional memory” in order to reframe the scholarly debate over the book and its ethics of memory. I contend that, though Krog tests ethical boundaries, Country's ability to confound standards of genre with a diverse set of voices and styles is both a major aesthetic feat and an act of democratisation.
Cambridge Core - Humanitarian Law - Performances of Injustice - by Gabrielle Lynch
This article considers truth commission public hearings as a genre of public memory. Building on transitional justice, public memory, public deliberation and meetings, and trauma and witnessing research, it examines how public hearings of truth commissions engage in public memorializing about mass violence. Drawing on ethnographic observation and textual analysis of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia Diaspora Project public hearings, this article elaborates three characteristics of the public hearing genre: they are ritual performance events that engage audiences and are focused on representations of violence in first-person testimony. Understanding these events communicatively provides insight into how to create inclusive, representative responses to mass violence and extends our understanding of public memory, deliberation, and meetings to post-conflict contexts.
This chapter examined the concept of �Ecodomy� � life in its fullness � as it unfolds in the Book of Ruth. The book is dated to the post-exilic period in the history of Israel, and is read as narrative critique against the Moabite paragraph in Deuteronomy 23:3�5, and against the way that this text is interpreted and implemented in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Naomi, Ruth and Boaz, the protagonists in the narrative, become paradigmatic of the situation in post-exilic Israel. Their stories, dealing with loss and the actions they take in order to heal the brokenness become indicative for the post-exilic community. As the narrative plot develops, the chapter aims to indicate how �life in its emptiness� is changed into �life in its fullness� by the courage and creative initiative of individuals, even if it meant overstepping boundaries and challenging the social conventions of the time. Against the exclusivist policy of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Book of Ruth argues that foreigners may be included in the community of YHWH and that their solidarity with Israel is to the benefit of all the people. The point that the chapter wishes to make, is that life in its fullness cannot be taken for granted, but requires effort.
Ecodomy studies need heuristic models to inform Christians how to cope with their world. The Bible presents different appropriate models. These models are to be read in conjunction with each other. The models presented by the sapiential literature in Proverbs and the apocalyptic literature in Daniel are studied in this chapter. The Books of Proverbs and Daniel seem to present opposite viewpoints on what life should be. Proverbs propagates a life of faith, wisdom and participation in the orderly world God created. Daniel�s advice is to wait upon God in this chaotic world. It is proposed that these seemingly opposing viewpoints are to be read in dialogue with each other. Their juxtaposition presents a lifestyle that is optimistic as well as realistic, trusting God�s superior reign.
This contribution is a political-theological and hermeneutical reflection on the origin, nature, intention and contribution of a research theme identified within the dynamics of an institutional space, by taking a critical look at the ‘rules’ and the ‘game’ of university academia. Specific reference is made to institutional and faculty research themes, namely ‘reconciling diversity’ and ‘Ecodomy, life in its fullness’. The institutional academic space is compared to a Hunger Games-style panopticon, with its rules and ‘play’ It is argued that these research themes can only make an authentic contribution if the �play� and �game�of the space in which these themes originate, are deconstructed. If this deconstruction can take place, there might be an authentic chance for unhindered dialogue towards the transformation of the academic space and the greater community it serves.
This examination of ubuntu is engaged in a conversation with the speculative philosophy of organism (�process�) to acquire an extended tool by which to engage within its ontology the widest possible range of human interaction. The engagement by ubuntu�s relational doctrine of the speculative philosophical cosmology of A.N. Whitehead placed portions of the latter�s constructs at the service of ubuntu�s transversal capacity to examine and apply the deepest understanding of its own etymology. It has been a challenge to understand occasions of injustice and suffering which have manifested within the same African culture which has given to the world the language and concept of ubuntu. It has been commonplace to isolate the utopian relational ontology implicit in the aphorism from occasions of the worst of human nature. It was the premise of this study that an understanding of an ubuntu which excludes dystopian occasions has done a disservice to the breadth, depth and height of what is to be fully human � including occasions of suffering and anti-social behaviours.
The aim of this chapter is twofold. Firstly, the chapter presents a comprehensive study of the meaning of the term ἀναίδειαν in extant papyrological evidence. The conclusion reached is that the term, as is the case in early Jewish and patristic writings, the LXX, Graeco-Roman literature and in early Christian writings, always carries a negative and pejorative meaning. This meaning of the term is then used to interpret the occurrence of ἀναίδειαν in the parable of the Friend at Midnight. Secondly, as part of a publication that celebrates the centenary of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Pretoria, a few remarks are made with regard to the Faculty of Theology�s Faculty Research Theme (Oikodome � Life in its fullness) and the attitude of ἀναίδειαν as depicted in the parable.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer never visited South Africa, and he probably did not know a great deal about the country. But the relevance of the German theologian for South Africa was never in doubt. In the struggle against apartheid his message and his theology served to guide theologians, church leaders as well as lay Christians alike. His life and his death served to inspire many during their darkest hours. Theologians, with John de Gruchy in the lead, studied his works extensively. Heroes from the struggle against apartheid, Beyers Naud�, Desmond Tutu and Steve Biko, among others, were hailed as latter-day Bonhoeffers. Nelson Mandela�s famous �Speech from the dock� before his conviction and imprisonment at the Rivonia Trial was compared to Bonhoeffer�s essay on The structure of responsible life (1995). At ecumenical gatherings, his name and his teachings were often invoked, whenever protest was lodged against the injustices of apartheid. But it was especially in the aftermath of apartheid, when the very serious challenges of reconciliation and nation building, of healing and forgiveness, as well as of amnesty for perpetrators weighed against the demands of justice to the victims were at stake, that many turned to Bonhoeffer for guidance. The author who served with Archbishop Desmond Tutu on the TRC, discusses the prerequisites for reconciliation in South Africa against the backdrop of the TRC experience, emphasising the real need for South Africans, following in the footsteps of Bonhoeffer, to look for �costly reconciliation�.
Racism and xenophobia have become a worldwide issue and challenge. The recent flood of immigrants and refugees into Europe and America has put this matter on the world map. In South Africa racism and xenophobia have, in recent times, reached explosive proportions and have greatly intensified the need for the Church to get more deeply involved in the creation of racial harmony and peace as it works towards the fullness of life for all people. This chapter explored the challenges of racism and xenophobia in South Africa and concluded by discussing the role of the Church in combating these realities.
The Faculty of Theology at the University of Pretoria chose oikodome as a Faculty Research Theme (FRT) in 2014. This term refers to life in its fullness. The Dutch Reformed Church, as one of the partners of the Faculty, contributed to life in its fullness through the important role it played in the reconciliation in South Africa since 1986. One of the beacons on this road of reconciliation was the General Synod of 1994. It became known as the �Synod of reconciliation� as a result of the visits of Mr Nelson Mandela, Prof. B.J. Marais and Dr Beyers Naud�, and the important decisions that the meeting took. It was however, not only the visits of these important roleplayers in history which made the meeting a beacon on the road to reconciliation. This chapter shows that it was imbedded in a much larger context of reconciliation in South Africa in which the Dutch Reformed Church played an important role. By participating in the process of reconcilation in the country, the Dutch Reformed Church contributed to oikodome � life in its fullness for all.
The TRC re-enactment consultation18 afforded the opportunity to reflect on the leadership of religious leaders during the apartheid era, and in the years that followed. This chapter is particularly interested in the prophetic leadership provided by religious leaders during apartheid, and 20 years following the transition by engaging with some normative thoughts on prophetic dialogue. The findings on the leadership provided during the post-TRC are reflected upon in terms of reconciliation through the hermeneutical lens of the Belgian scholar Valarie Rosoux. Hereby, this chapter seeked to contribute to reconciliation and national unity in the current South African context with some strategic conclusions to ensure that the process of reconciliation becomes a priority for all faith communities across the nation.
Political violence is closely connected to identities. When perpetrators of such violence are put on trial, how are the identities that underpinned or resisted the violence discussed? This chapter uses three case studies - the Auschwitz Trial in Germany (1963-1965), the Argentine Trial of the Juntas (1985) and the German Politburo Trial (1995-1997) to show how identities shape trials, and are shaped by trials. How are perpetrators, their sense of belonging, and their ideologies represented? Which spaces are given to victims, and which parts of their stigmatized identities are discussed? And how is the nation - apparent spectator to both the violence and the trial - addressed, represented, and reconfigured?
This essay traces the history of the text/performance split against the emergence of literary modernism to reveal how the category of the literary bears within it an "anti-performative" bias. Walker shows how this bias not only informs the metaphor of culture-as-text, so important to twentieth-century thought, but persists in contemporary social and cultural theory. Analyzing the work of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, she demonstrates how this bias is being provisionally dismantled with the recent turn to the metaphor of performance.
This article uses an ethnographic description of a provincial public hearing in Sierra Leone to explore the paradoxical fact that in truth commissions, the truth is seldom told. It argues that the truth was not told for a variety of reasons, some of which are related to the special circumstances of the District, some to the problematic relationship of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission with the Special Court, some to organizational infirmities of the TRC itself, and some to the fact that public truth-telling lacks deep roots in the local cultures of Sierra Leone. By contrast, a staged ceremony of repentance and forgiveness on the final day struck resonant chords with the participants and succeeded in forging a reconciliatory moment. The implication, argues the article, is that in certain circumstances ritual may be more important to reconciliation than truth.
It is commonly accepted that war crimes trials should provide a space for victims to tell their stories. A close reading of the transcripts of victim-witnesses’ testimonies in the Krstic trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia suggests, however, that war crimes trials effectively silence, rather than hear, victims. In this particular trial, victim-witnesses predictably governed neither the agenda nor the pace of the hearings. More problematically, we argue that incongruously optimistic judicial remarks unnecessarily denied their suffering. On a different plane, victims’ testimonies were only vaguely connected to the person of the accused; they related to facts the relevance and proof of which are debatable. This article aims to generate a debate about victim-witnesses’ testimonies at war crimes trials. It seeks to identify both the demands that the legal process imposes on victim-witnesses and the tensions that arise out of their participation in it. In the light of the fact that legal proceedings cannot produce the definitive collective memory of the events with which they deal, the article finally stresses the need to foster a variety of collective memories outside the judicial platform. Silence: v.... 1 . Trans. To cause or compel (a person) to cease speaking... Shorter Oxford English Dictionary Hearing:... 2. The action of listening... 3. The listening to evidence and pleadings in a court of law... Shorter Oxford English Dictionary I hope your father will come back. (Judge Riad to Mr Husic, who testified in the Krstic trial)
La relation intellectuelle entre verite, memoire et amnistie, qui fonde l'etablissement et le fonctionnement de la Commission verite et reconciliation (TRC) en Afrique du Sud postapartheid, au-dela de la volonte de reconciliation, s'inscrit dans une configuration de rhetorique ethique dont les differents discours peuvent etre compris comme des strategies de legitimation politique, pour ou contre le regime. Ces enjeux d'ethique politique sont abordes dans les cinq ouvrages sur l'Afrique du Sud postapartheid commentes par l'A. : A. Boraine, 2000 ; W. Orr, 2000 ; W. James et L. van de Vijver, 2001 ; R. Rotberg et D. Thompson, 2000 ; R.A. Wilson, 2001.
South Africa’s truth and reconciliation process is perhaps the best-known example of an institutionalized attempt to build a more democratic future by confronting human rights atrocities from the past. Yet the South African case is often quite misunderstood, with many misconceptions widely accepted and asserted. This article addresses five facts about the South African experience. Using data from a large national survey of ordinary people, it demonstrates both that the truth and reconciliation process is viewed as effective by most people and that in fact systematic evidence indicates that the process achieved several of its primary goals. From the South African case we learn that, despite their various shortcomings and compromises, truth processes can attain legitimacy among ordinary people in transitional systems and that they can contribute to societal reconciliation.
One of the most important and visible elements of South Africa's transition to democracy has been the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Without mass media - particularly broadcast media - the TRC's much-heralded process of providing a public platform for victims of gross violations of human rights and forging a new national history would have been severely limited. This article teases out the relationship between mass media and the TRC, focusing primarily but not exclusively on broadcast media. It draws on two analytical frameworks from the field of media studies: Dayan and Katz's Media Events (1992) and Hayman and Tomaselli's `Broadcasting Technology as an Ideological Terrain' (1987). Particular attention is paid to the TRC's institutional hearings on the media. These explorations help us to better conceptualize how and why mass media have played such a unique and crucial role in South Africa, both under apartheid and throughout the TRC process.
Theatre Journal 49.1 (1997) 41-52
It is imperative that the first democratically elected government in South Africa enable South Africans to come to terms with the injustice of their past. Such is the enormity of the impact of apartheid policies that the present government cannot grant individual and specific compensation to all. Instead, its representatives have created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a site and a vehicle for bearing witness to the individual and collective acts of violence and suffering under apartheid. This witnessing has two functions. One is to encourage the confession of crimes by the perpetrators in order to make the truth public. This is essential in a country where press censorship and clandestine and unaccountable government operations withheld verifiable information about state violence and its antagonists from the public eye. This truth is reinforced by the testimony of the victims, which makes public and therefore legitimate the suffering formerly officially denied. The second function of the Commission is that of effecting reconciliation. The Commission hopes to bring about reconciliation through the public acknowledgment of a common humanity, which the apartheid state denied officially to blacks, thus compromising the humanity of all South Africans. In the words of the Commission's principal officer, former Anglican Archbishop and Nobel Prize winner, Desmond Tutu, "African jurisprudence is restorative, rather than retributive." This common humanity is publicly affirmed ideally (but not always in practice) through the ability of ordinary citizens to understand the sufferings of others. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission has chosen to make hearings public, thus accentuating its ritualistic aspect, but it may also grant amnesty to perpetrators who make a public confession of apartheid crimes. This choice has provoked controversy but affirms the belief of the government and many citizens that forgiveness and reconciliation are prerequisites for a united nation and that transparency is the basis for trust.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission illustrates for South Africans the significance of public, ritualistic, and symbolic representation of pressing social tensions in order to acknowledge their emotional consequences and to facilitate the understanding and analysis of their impact. Symbolic representation of social conflict is also what theatre does. Both processes can be described, in Victor Turner's terms, as "social drama." His identification of four phases in the evolution of social drama (namely: "breach of normal social relations"; "crisis"; "redressive action"; and "reintegration" or "irreparable schism") could indeed apply to the drama of apartheid and its demise. Turner's definition of the third phase, "redressive action," includes legal processes as well as the performance of public ritual "in order to resolve certain kinds of crisis or legitimate other modes of resolution." In favoring, for the moment at least, a restorative rather than retributive jurisprudence, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has mixed the conventions of a court of law with those of a ritual of collective cleansing.
Rather than vainly attempt to analyze the nationwide processes of the ongoing Commission, this article will focus on a particular but, I think, exemplary fusion of theatrical practice and the public ritual of confession and reconciliation: the performance of David Lan's play Desire by drama students at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg (UNP), in the heart of KwaZulu-Natal, the province most affected by civil war in recent years. The play uses scenes of legal and ritual enactment to represent the processes of truth-telling and reconciliation and in so doing it shows the theatrical nature of these processes. In particular, the dramatic climax of the play is effected through public confession, which makes possible the healing of Rosemary, the central character, her realization of her power, and the reunification and reconciliation of members of her village. Our production of Lan's play harnessed the subject matter of the drama as well as the processes of theatrical enactment and, through the process of rehearsal and public presentation, enabled students in our department to understand and affirm local practices of healing and reconciliation as well as to develop new skills of dramatic interpretation.
Desire is set in a village in the Zambezi valley immediately after the War of Liberation in Zimbabwe and focuses on the after-effects...
The success and prestige of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa can largely be attributed to the media attention. The extensive media coverage has been very positive for the TRC, especially with regard to the aspect of transparency. However, a drawback of such an elaborate media representation is that the media often tend to cover a phenomenon in a biased way. By studying the linguistic and visual aspects of the media discourse that represented the TRC, we will try to find out in which ways also this discourse was ideologically coloured. A brief overview of the relation between power and media discourse will be given, focusing mainly on theories from the domain of Critical Discourse Analysis. A number of important aspects inherent to the TRC media representation will be highlighted, distinguishing three features that seem to indicate an uncritical approach of some media towards the Commission. These features will then be applied to one particular TV programme that covered the TRC. The analysis will reveal that, although this programme tried to stand as an example of independent and critical journalism, it could not avoid the pitfalls of partiality and sensationalism. We will argue that there seems to be a link between the reconciliation-oriented discourse of this TV programme and the Commission's objective of promoting national reconciliation. Since this programme was quite successful in South Africa, we suggest that its discourse had a considerable amount of impact on society. Therefore, this television programme could be seen as one of the factors contributing to both the success of the TRC, and the reigning atmosphere of reconciliation in present day South Africa.