Shane Moran - Alternation Journal

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