Narrative and truth: a feminist critique of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Abstract

Prior to the establishment of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), ‘gender was seldom explicitly invoked as a lens into human rights abuse or an organizing principle for the commission’s work’ (Nesiah et al., 2006, p. 3). In this respect the TRC is a trailblazer, as subsequent truth commissions in other countries have been inspired to incorporate the gender component.

The study of the TRC, however, is relatively under‐theorized from the feminist perspective. This article argues that the feminist perspective offers a nuanced scrutiny of narrative and truth, two major themes of the TRC. The feminist inquiry helps resurrect ‘listening’, as a crucial component of narratives. In addition, the value of the feminist perspective lies in its ability to throw light on the experience of both women and men and to create an argument and language for the articulation of the needs of the powerless and dispossessed in society. A feminist critique of truth and reconciliation commissions has the potential to make the transitional justice mechanism more inclusive and democratic.

Keywords:

• truth
• feminism
• TRC
• listening
• narratives
• restorative justice

Notes

1. The transitional justice commissions, though ‘most united by having the word “truth” somewhere in the title, nevertheless demonstrate great diversity. They function in a wide variety of sociopolitical settings with varying levels of support (international, governmental, and popular), resources and constraints, and with varying degrees of success’. (Avruch & Vejarano, 2002, pp. 37–38)

2. The question of amnesty made the issue of ‘wages of truth’ a controversial aspect of the TRC debate. The amnesty clause was criticized for trading off justice in the process of accessing truth from the perpetrators. Slye (2000) defends the amnesty clause on the ground that it enabled the TRC to generate more quantity and quality of information regarding the past abuses. What is significant for Slye is the fact that it was not the case of blanket amnesties. The TRC offered amnesty only in exchange for full individual disclosure. Prior to the South African TRC, most amnesties were granted to a cohort, and without demanding testimony. Ntsebeza (2000) argues that the public nature of hearings gave the amnesty clause legitimacy; exposure itself is a form of punishment and, therefore, a powerful component of accountability.

3. Immarigeon and Daly (1997) trace the origin of restorative justice in the USA to civil rights and women’s movements of the 1960s. Both these movements raised questions about the justice system, particularly the prison. They identified problems in the incarceration of offenders and the under‐appreciation of victims’ experiences. Feminist engagement with restorative justice takes several forms – theories of justice, the role of retribution in criminal justice, the appropriateness of restorative justice for partner, sexual or family violence. The latter is the common context in which women come into contact with the justice system (see Daly & Stubbs 2007, p. 149).

4. Critical race feminists draw attention to the limitations of relying solely on the lens of sex and gender to study women’s circumstances. At the same time this school has also challenged movements for racial justice, which focus on racialized men and not women’s, circumstances (Daly & Stubbs, 2007, p. 151).

5. See Tickner (1992, 2001); Peterson and Runyan (1999); Enloe (2000, 2001); Elshtain (1987, 1990, 1997).

6. A recent study that applied the gender lens to truth and reconciliation commissions is the World Bank’s June 2006 report Gender, Justice, and Truth Commissions (World Bank, 2006).

7. Howard Zehr is called the ‘grandfather’ of the restorative justice movement in the United States of America. It is also significant that the metaphor of ‘lenses’ has a powerful resonance in feminist research and Zehr’s works.

8. A feminist ethic of care framework was applied to Family Group Conferences in domestic violence cases in Canada. In criminology, scholars have been both enthusiastic and skeptical of Gilligan’s framework (see Immarigeon & Daly 1997).

9. Daly and Stubbs (2007) and Immraigeon and Daly (1997) are useful in this regard.

10. ‘In the initial hearings, testimonies lasted from between 15 minutes to more than an hour‐and‐a‐half. Towards the end of the Commission’s work, most testimonies lasted approximately 30 minutes’. (Ross, 2003, p. 14).

11. In restorative justice, apology can be one of the ways of restitution by the offender (Zehr, 2002, p. 15; see also Zehr, 2005, chap.10).

12. This was the ground on which members of Griffith Mxenge’s family, Steve Biko’s family and other survivors of murdered activists joined to file a lawsuit challenging the TRC’s very existence. However, the Constitutional Court rejected their claim.

13. The TRC’s Investigative Unit worked less publicly to verify the claims made in the victim statements (Cobban, 2007, p. 100).

14. However, not all streams of feminism interrogate positivism’s links to hierarchical forms of knowledge. For example, feminist empiricists challenge mainly the incomplete practice of the scientific method without questioning the norms of science themselves (Harding, 1991, p. 113).

15. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1957) is one of the early feminist explorations of the connection between power and speech. Also, see Spender (1985).

16. Hartsock (1986) argues that women’s location within the sexual division of labor and their experience of oppression gives them a privileged insight as researchers into the lives of other women. Smith similarly asserts that a way of knowing must start from women’s lives, and stresses the importance of women’s own understanding and experience in creating knowledge (Smith, 1987, p. 107).

17. Minow reminds us that trauma recovery can occur only in a context of relationships (Minow, 2000, p. 243).

18. However, feminists do recognize that in some cases distance and not closeness may be more appropriate, that is, the setting rather than methodological ideology defines the appropriate strategy (Reinharz, 1992, p. 68).

19. For an interesting interrogation of the truth dimension of transitional justice commissions see Daly (2007). She argues that the transitional justice commissions can inquire into the past events but are less likely to be able to procure the truth.

20. Examples include postmodernism, post‐marxism, post‐structuralism, and post‐feminism.

21. It is crucial to recognize that in the context of gendered abuse the framework of forensic truth could be limiting. As Nesiah et al. state ‘For example, an investigation is unlikely to uncover a military memo commandeering that a culture of machismo be developed to use in convicting those responsible for creating a climate conducive to the abuse of women’ (2006, p. 22).

22. ‘One woman said that policewomen came in and burst into her shower wanting to know where her son was. But this was not the focus; it was said just in passing. She did not speak about how this made her feel. She’s not talking about how humiliated she felt’ (Owens, 1996, p. 69).

23. Driver explains this factor of acculturation further. She argues that there were two cultural lenses –‘women in community’ and ‘women in themselves’ through which women victims viewed themselves. In the former, a woman underplayed her individual selfhood and instead identified with her family and community and was, therefore, reluctant to talk about her own activism and the violence perpetrated on her. However, when a woman employed the latter lens she identified with her own body and implicitly constructed herself as an individual distinct from the family and community. In her opinion it is only when women spoke about sexual abuse to themselves, that they used the lens of ‘women in themselves’ (Driver, 2003, p. 221).

24. General Andrew Masondo, a former political commissar for the African National Congress (ANC) in exile, explained that since there were 22 women to 1000 men in camp, the ‘law of supply and demand spoke for itself’ (Graybill, 2001, p. 3).

25. Andrew Rigby commends the TRC precisely for individualization of crime. ‘TRC’s by individualizing guilt do not put the entire people in the category of perpetrators’ (Rigby, 2001, p. 4).

26. ‘A recent study by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in collaboration with James Gibson found that 55% of black South Africans believe themselves to be victims of land injustice and that land discontent appears to be growing. The study also found that just short of three quarters of black South Africans voiced support for forceful action against landowners’ (Leebaw, 2005, p. 41).

27. Wendy Orr said that certain commissioners (some but not all women) understood and embraced gender issues. For others, however, gender never really informed their approaches. Also the existence of women in powerful positions does not necessarily mean that they are gender aware or that they will be active in asserting these issues (Goldblatt, 2006, p. 77).

28. The South African TRC’s chapter on gender is ‘remarkably self critical about the commission’s limitations in addressing gender issues and highlights the gaps and underreporting that may have resulted’ (Nesiah et al., 2006, p. 33).

29. Stall’s arguments are relevant in this context: ‘If we utilize … feminist arguments that emphasize abstract and universal (simple) conceptions of equality as the basis for meaningful political activity for women, we may be oversimplifying our understanding of the roots of social resistance and innovation in the everyday experience of women. A politics of community promises to avoid the dangers of abstraction and simplicity by starting from the diverse forms of social change women already make to subvert the inequality of discrimination and exploitation‐forms that emphasize a different political agenda than the popular feminist arguments allow’ (Stall, 1995, p. 5).