Shane Moran - Alternation Journal
Shane Moran - Alternation Journal
Shane Moran - Alternation Journal
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urrent lrends in the Prodzdction ofSozlth Afi~cnn Histoo)<br />
The TRC thus constitutes a moment and a space where the field of history appears to be<br />
open to reinterpretation and meaning. Clearly the TRC has many different parts with<br />
different meanings and implications for history production. Giving testimony and<br />
participating in the public space of the hearings does provide a profound sense of<br />
'giving voice' to previously marginal and silenced accounts of the apartheid past. In<br />
important respects these activities elevate subaltern accounts into those of society as a<br />
whole. These accounts then have the potential to break down divisions between<br />
subaltern and elite accounts, particularly where those divisions are drawn in racial<br />
terms. 111 this sense the TRC served to directly open up public historical discourse to<br />
members of formally oppressed communities in ways that also move beyond the<br />
institutional sites ofprofessional historical production.<br />
The official collection of personal testimony within the TRC also provides for<br />
the construction of a national archive of subaltern experience on a scale that is<br />
enormously significant for the future production of history. Here people have spoken<br />
about their own historical initiatives and meanings as active historical agents in a past<br />
that will potentially attain the fullness of a national history. official, public *and<br />
academic relationships to this archive and understandings of this national history will<br />
however vary.<br />
At the outset of the TRC, the media depicted the TRC as performing the larger<br />
role of new national and subaltern historian. 'From the outset, the principal aim of the<br />
commission has been to unearth South Africa's hidden history during the three decades<br />
which followed the banning of the liberation movements', said Busii?ess Day. Other<br />
newspapers produced similar interpretations. The TRC, they claimed would now 'tell<br />
the whole sto~y' in the 'search for truth' by incorporating previously 'silenced voices'.<br />
This would open up the rewriting of South Afiican history in ways which will 'set<br />
[ordinary black people] free from the prisons of uncertainty in which the ghastly events<br />
of the past have confined them for too long'. The TRC at the outset, then, was seen to<br />
represent<br />
South Africa's real history ... it's most important look at the past painful 50<br />
years ... [tlor the first time, ail South Africa has the opportunity to learn the<br />
uncensored truth about itshistoryi'.<br />
Through its collection of testimony at the various hearings around the country, history<br />
was being primarily rewritten through 'devastating testimony', 'police brutality tales',<br />
Business DOJJ 12141 1996. 6/51 1996: CiOi Press 6/51 1996; h4ail and G1,nrtliarz 10-<br />
161511 996: ,-fi~z~,s 4-5/51 1996: Szlndq~ Tiines 51511 996: SII~~CIJJ Indepencierzf 5/5/1996;<br />
.Yoivetciil 10- I 6151l 996. for exam~>le. fiadio broadcasts on SA12M provided cvtensive covcsagc<br />
oftlie I'RC:, using a broadly siniilar Si-aiiicwoi-k of Iiidde~i. ordina~y. rcal and new. often with<br />
insc~.lcd voices to givc thc kc1 of th~s register--one whicll is 1.cprocfrrczt1 as well in thc daily live<br />
broadcasts on Radio 2000.<br />
Muvtzn Legcrsslck and (;111.1) i~znklej~<br />
'speaking the unspeakable', through ordinary words. The range of codes and moods is<br />
unusually explicit and connective in these accounts: hidden, ordinary, oral, marginal,<br />
real, objective and 'new'--told and heard for the first time. There is more than an ironic<br />
echo here to the explanations of social history 'from below', but in a way which<br />
simultaneously ignores the existing contributions of this social historiography to<br />
having already detailed important aspects of this so-called hidden history. Instead the<br />
public and official spaces of the TRC are represented as the key sites for the emergence<br />
of this new history at this time.<br />
This early representation of the TRC hearings and activities as the new 'real'<br />
and 'hidden' history, though, also needs to be qualified in various ways. The TRC itself,<br />
has explicitly argued it will be 'writing a history ofa certain kind' which was to 'capture<br />
the perspectival nuances of the drama [of human rights violations]' in as<br />
'comprehensive an account as possible"3. The TRC's framework is the period 1960-<br />
1994 and its focus, then, is not simply the entire past of this period, but to obtain<br />
as complete a picture as possible of the nature, causes and extent of gross<br />
violations of human rights committed during the pel-iod ... emanating torn<br />
the conflicts of the past-".<br />
This 'history of a certain kind' is also influenced by the concern to 'promote national<br />
unity and reconciliation in a spirit of understanding which transcends the conflicts and<br />
divisions of the past"'This meant that the TRC accounts of the past would need to<br />
acknowledge '... some kind of compromise between those who want amnesia-to<br />
forget the past-and those who are saying "let us have revenge, retribution""! All thesc<br />
are constraints on the TRC's mode of representation of the past.<br />
Over the period of the TRC's existence there have been a range of further<br />
contests which have influenced a range of changingfocuses of attention from within the<br />
TRC, imposing further such constraints. These have involved families of victims,<br />
perpetrators, political parties, legal andjudicial challenges and 'outsider' cr~tiques and<br />
refusals of active participation in the process. The shift of TRC and public attention<br />
from victim to amnesty hearings, recently highlighted by the Winnie Mandela and PW<br />
Botha cases, has also meant a shift fi-om ordinary narratives of the past to more legal,<br />
interrogative and statist 'top-down' accounts which are increasingly concerned with<br />
conspiracy, silence and evasion about the past. This seems a far call from the initial<br />
media conceptions which celebrated hidden histories of ordinary people telling the<br />
whole story.<br />
More particularly for our concell1 here, this means that the potential oEcial<br />
I'<br />
Cl~arles Villa-Vicencio, Director of Research at TRC Workshop, ULVC, 3 April 1996.<br />
"<br />
Pro~notion ofNational Unity and Reconciliation Act, Government Gazette 26 July (1995) 2.<br />
'' TRC Regiorzcrl T64orkshop.s Docu~zent nd: I.<br />
'\rchbishop DesmondcTutu. WeekendArgzl.~ 2012 1 January (1 996).