Knowledge, experience, and South Africa's scenarios of forgiveness

Radical History Review

Volumn , Issue 97, 2007, Pages 11-42

  Castillejo Cuéllar, Alejandro ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES   (Colombia)

^b Direct Action Center for Peace and Memory   (South Africa)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34249828966     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2006-011     Document Type: Article

References (65)

1. In South Africa, the use of the political term askari became widespread during the 1980s to describe guerrillas turned into police informers. The askaris from the Gugulethu operation came from Vlakplaas, a notorious apartheid covert-operations death squad located near Pretoria. The seven youths killed were Mandla Simon Mxinwa (age twenty-three), Zanisile Zenith Mjobo (age twenty-one), Zola Alfred Swelani (age twenty-two), Godfrey Jabulani Miya (age twenty-one), Christopher Piet (age twenty-three), Themba Mlifi (age thirty), and Zabouke John Konile (age twenty-eight). Official information comes from G. Hoffmann, "Kennis van Geregtelike doodsondergoek (14/86/7)" ("Notice of Inquest [14/86/7]"), Truth and Reconciliation Commission Archive, Pretoria.
2. Zenzile Khoisan, Time of the Jacaranda (Cape Town: Garib Communications, 1996), 12.
3. Report on the Investigation into the Guguletbu Seven, internal written memo presented by Zenzile Khoisan to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission~s Western Cape Investigation Unit, September 19, 1996.
4. Truth and Reconciliation Commission South Africa Final Report, 7 vols. (Cape Town: Juta, 1998-2003), 1:148; hereafter TRC Final Report.
5. The historical narrative finally crystallized in the commission's final report. Critics of the report have pointed out its lack of a coherent, integrated historical narrative that connects and accounts for apartheid as a systemic phenomenon, looking into its complexities and fractures. The report is, as they have suggested, an aggregation of typologies of human rights violations organized around local, regional, and national findings regarding abuses, with very little insight into apartheid as a whole. In this regard, as Deborah Posel has suggested, the only possible narrative was a moral-theological one in which the explanation of apartheid as a systemic phenomenon is its evil nature and the moral wrongness of those who supported it. See Deborah Posel, "The TRC Report: What Kind of History, What Kind of Truth?" in Commissioning the Past, ed. Posel and Graeme Simpson (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2002), 148;
6. Richard Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 58.
7. It is important to note from the outset of this article that the measure of reconciliation and forgiveness that one of the mothers embodied during her encounter with one of the askaris involved in the killings seems to be exceptional when compared to the defilement and humiliation that the bodies of the dead were subjected to by the police. The more gruesome and callous the violation of the community and the body by the security forces, the more remarkable the potential for scenarios of forgiveness.
8. Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001), 70.
9. Alejandro Castillejo-Cuéllar, "The Textures of Silence: On the Limits of Anthropology's Craft," Dialectical Anthropology 29 (2005): 159-80.
10. The interconnections between "intimate" and "personal" articulations of the past with broader forms of remembering are an avenue of research I am aware of. Looking into how these two are in fact mutually constituent problematizes the dichotomies between collective forms of remembering as opposed to supposedly individual forms of remembering. As much as I found this a potentially fertile ground for inquiries, at the intersection of the mothers' experiences of historical dislocation and the commission's language of restoration, I was - for practical as well as ethical reasons - unable and unwilling to explore this complex interface. In any case, this essay gives a sense of such interconnectivity.
11. Republic of South Africa, Office of the President, "Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, Act 34 of 1995," July 26, 1995, 1; emphasis added.
12. Ibid.
13. Wilson, The Politics of Truth, 33.
14. Belinda Bozzoli, "Public Ritual and Private Transition: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Alexandra Township, 1996," African Studies 57 (1998): 167-95.
15. Laars Buur, "Monumental Historical Memory: Managing Truth in the Everyday Work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission," in Posel and Simpson, Commissioning the Past, 66-93.
16. Quoted in Wilson, The Politics of Truth, 43; emphasis added.
17. Philip Bonner and Noor Nieftagodien, "The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Pursuit of 'Social Truth,'" in Posel and Simpson, Commissioning the Past, 173.
18. Graeme Simpson, "'Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories': A Brief Evaluation of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission," in Posel and Simpson, Commissioning the Past, 221.
19. TRC Final Report, 5:15-23.
20. Wilson, The Politics of Truth, 33;
21. Buur, "Monumental," 66.
22. Quoted in Wilson, The Politics of Truth, 45;
23. see also Buur, "Monumental," 66.
24. Wilson, The Politics of Truth, 48.
25. TRC Final Report, 1:110.
26. By the time I did fieldwork in 2003, I only had the opportunity to interact, interview, and assist three of the Gugulethu mothers. I am aware of the impossibility of producing any kind of broad statement regarding the Gugulethu Seven on the basis of these connections to a few families, but they were the ones who took their plight to the commission and remained at the center of the process. The other four lived so far away, in other towns and townships difficult to access for me, that this distance made it very difficult to carry on any kind of sustained research with them. I did speak to these mothers on different occasions, but our relationship never went beyond those encounters. In some ways, my research was determined by the spatial arrangements set up by apartheid's distribution of space. I thus decided to work with the mothers that livediDthe vicinity of NY1 and NY111, the corner where the seven young men died, in Gugulethu. Of the three remaining mothers, Cynthia Ngewu was the most outspoken and usually played the role of the families' representative. With the other two mothers, interviews were more difficult for various reasons, primarily ethical ones. The lack of direct references to these interviews or the mothers'voices and more explicit opinions in this essay is a silence I purposefully decided to integrate into my work.
27. Truth and Reconciliation Commission, amnesty application, W. R. Bellingan and T. J. Mbelo, cases AM5283/97 and AM3785/96, respectively, December 19, 1996.
28. Premesh Lalu and Brent Harris, "Journeys from the Horizons of History: Text, Trial, and the Tales in the Construction of Narratives of Pain," Current Writing 8 (1996): 25.
29. TRC Final Report, 1:112; emphasis added.
30. Gugulethu Seven hearings transcriptions, TRC electronic archive, 1; emphasis added. All transcripts of the TRC's hearings may be found at www.trc.org.za.
31. Alejandro Castillejo-Cuéllar, "Entre los intersticios de las palabras: Memoria, posguerra y educación para la paz en la Sudáfrica contemporánea," ("Between the Interstices of Words: Memory, Postwar, and Peace Education in Contemporary South Africa") Estudios de Asia y África 41 (2006): 11-46.
32. As I said at the beginning of this article, my intention is not to propose a description or an exegesis of the mothers' testimonies. I am certainly aware of the complexity of these personal, multilayered historical narratives and the sources they display in order to articulate experience. But given the uses their testimonies have been put to, I find such an exegesis a futile exercise. This is probably the point where such an endeavor would prove appropriate, but this interpretation falls beyond the scope of this text. However, extensive comments dealing with women's testimonies in general, and with the Gugulethu Seven mothers in particular, have been produced over the years. See Fiona C. Ross, Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (London: Pluto, 2003);
33. Annalet Van Schalkyk, "A Gendered Truth: Women's Testimonies at the TRC and Reconciliation," Missionalia 27 (1999): 165-88;
34. Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston: Beacon, 1998), 82;
35. Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2000), 109;
36. Charles Villa-Vicencio and Wilhelm Verwoerd, eds., Looking Back, Reaching Forward: Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2001), 68.
37. TRC Final Report, 1:113.
38. Alex Boraine and Janet Levy, eds., The Heating of the Nation (Cape Town: Justice in Transition, 1995).
39. The four cases it deals with are, first, the killing of Amy Biehl in 1993, a U.S. Fulbright student working in South Africa at the time; second, the killing of the Cradock Four, Matthew Goniwe, Fort Calata, Sparrow Mkonto, and Sicelo Mhlauli, in 1985; third, the amnesty process of Robert McBride, a former Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation, or MK) operative responsible for the bombing of the Why Not bar in Durban in the mid-1980s; and fourth, the Gugulethu Seven saga.
40. Amy Biehl was a U.S. student conducting research in South Africa during the early 1990s. She was killed in the streets of Gugulethu in 1993 by a group of Pan-Africanist members who perceived her as a white settler. The killers were granted amnesty by the TRC.
41. In this context, I use the term story somewhat reluctantly (together with the contrasting word history), not to qualify what in fact were personal or collective histories of harm, oppression, or violence, but to highlight the fact that, out of a number of different sources, a single visual and textual narrative has been constructed in the video, with a beginning, a climax and tension, and a resolution. Histories of harm were translated into stories of reconciliation, according to the terminology used by the directors, and in this way, they became arti-facts.
42. Over the years, the Biehl family has run the Amy Biehl Foundation in Gugulethu, where Manqina and others participate in the development of sustainable programs.
43. Interview with Rev. George Molebatsi, conducted by the author, October 23, 2003, Cape Town.
44. I am not using the terms successful or failed as a qualification of these encounters. An uncritical use of them would certainly fail to see that failure and success represent overtly simplistic characterizations of what encountering the other may be about. I use the terms only to point out that this is how they are categorized and qualified in the film.
45. Interview with Cynthia Ngewu, conducted by the author, June 12, 2003, Cape Town.
46. TRC Final Report, 1:293, 3:451, 5:196-97, 5:304, 6:200, 6:444.
47. Ibid., 6:263. See also Alejandro Castillejo-Cuéllar, "The Archives of Pain: Essays on Terror, Violence, and Memory in Contemporary South Africa" (manuscript in preparation).
48. Desmond Tutu, HRV hearing transcript, Gugulethu Seven transcripts, 1996: 2. Available at www.trc.org.za.
49. The "subject," writes the philosopher Paul Smith, "on the other hand, is not self-contained, as it were, but immediately cast into a conflict with forces that dominate it in some way or another - social formations, language, political apparatuses, and so on. The 'subject,' then, is determined - the object of determinant forces." Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), xxxiv. See also Alejandro Castillejo-Cuéllar, Poética de lo otro: Hacia una antropología de la violencia, la soledad y el exilio interno en Colombia (Poetics of Otherness: Toward an Anthropology of Violence, Solitude, and Internal Displacement in Colombia) (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología, 2000), 173.
50. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 71.
51. Allen Feldman, "From Desert Storm to Rodney King via Ex-Yugoslavia: On Cultural Anesthesia," in Nidia Serematakis, ed., The Senses Still (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 87.
52. Veena Das, Critical Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 37.
53. The notions of truth and knowledge conveyed by the public victims' hearings differed qualitatively from the notions instrumentalized by the commission's investigative unit. The latter were, as the commission's report actually stated, forensic and factual, and the "knowledge" the report produced was inferred from "methodological rigor" and a "scientifically valid process." TRC Final Report, 1:103. In the system of classification established by the commission's information system (infocomm), after a process of examination, only certain acts (defined by a number of coordinates) about the past could firmly be called knowledge. In the other case, victims' hearings, the idea of knowledge had more to do with encountering the other's experience in the past, with speaking what seemed to be unspeakable, as a window to that past, so that most South Africans knew what was happening then, a past that was occluded by power and silence. Knowledge here is not a technical term, but rather serves as a synonym for uncovering, unveiling, restoring voice, and bearing witness. In the context of the report, these notions of truth and knowledge remain unconnected, and they refer to qualitatively different processes: the first is a knowledge based on evidence and empirical research, in a positivist sense, on which the findings, the report, and an authoritative and official version of South Africa's recent past are grounded; the second is based on experience.
54. Mahmood Mamdani, "Reconciliation without Justice" South African Review 10 (1997): 22; emphasis added.
55. TRC Final Report, 6: 2003.
56. Quoted in Wilson, 2001, 41.
57. TRC Final Report, 5:366.
58. Ibid., 5:350.
59. I use the term storytelling in quotation marks because the word, it seems to me, gives the articulation of experience a misleading sense of fiction that fails to see the semantic and existential density of the voice. Whenever possible I shall use the term testimony instead.
60. Jacques Derrida, Mal d'archive: Une impression Freudienne (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1995).
61. TRC Final Report, 5:67;
62. for journalists and academics quoting the Gugulethu mothers, see also Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, 82;
63. Krog, Country of My Skull, 109.
64. TRC Final Report, 5:367.
65. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995).