I spent most of the summer of 1996 in South Africa, living in a small cottage, doing research, participating in a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar, and talking to as many South Africans as I could. Aside from my five-year-old son telling me that he had eaten “poodle” for lunch at the Zulu preschool he was attending, my most memorable experience was attending hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
These hearings are highly structured in a liturgical fashion. Each hearing is opened with a prayer—sometimes Christian, sometimes Muslim, sometimes Jewish—and a large, white candle representing truth is solemnly lit. The audience is then asked to rise out of respect for the victims and their families when they file in. In typical court settings, spectators would rise when the judge comes in; here we rose for the victims. The seven commissioners in attendance then came down from their white linen-clad tables to welcome the victims—by shaking hands, embracing, kissing. Many of the victims were already sobbing, overcome by the mere fact that an official government representative was showing them respect.
As each victim, often accompanied by two or three family members, went up to testify, a psychotherapist sat by his or her side. Before the testimony began, one commissioner asked about the victim’s family—parents, spouse, children, siblings—their names, ages, where they lived, how they were employed. This was more than a strategic ploy to put the victim at ease; rather, this ritual grounded or located the victim as a person in the fullest African sense—with a family, a community, a place.
Then the story was told. I sat for two long days, spellbound, horrified yet mesmerized by riveting accounts of intimidation, assault, abduction, rape, torture, and murder. Since this was not a trial, there was no cross-examination. But the commissioners did ask questions at the end of each story, and during these question periods they often attempted to elicit the names of perpetrators and corroborating witnesses. At the conclusion of the testimony, the commissioners always asked what kind of reparation the victim was requesting. This was for legal purposes, in order to get these claims on record, but the final reparations will probably be more symbolic than sizable, given South Africa’s depressed economy.
I was astonished that the victims’ requests for reparations were so minimal: one woman wanted a plaque put up where her husband died; a young man, confined to a wheelchair because of a bullet in his spine, asked for financial assistance to attend college; a weeping mother said, “I have no particular request, I just wish to know who killed my son.” A woman about my age testified about the assassination of her husband, an African National Congress (anc) community leader, who was shot while driving on the beautiful road that stretches through the valleys between Pietermaritzburg and Ixhopo, the town that Alan Paton describes so lyrically in Cry, the Beloved Country. She was left with five young children. “I wanted to kill all my children and myself,” she said. “Sometimes, I still do.”
With one exception, every victim I heard testify during two days in Pietermaritzburg understood his or her life as part of the Christian story and described suffering and endurance with Christian rhetoric. Biblical citations, references to impassioned prayer, narrow escapes attributed to God’s miraculous intervention were commonly heard. “When I think of the things that have happened,” one matronly woman said with great dignity, “I just open the Bible and pray Psalm 71.”
When each victim finished, one of the commissioners responded with a formal statement, summing up the story that had been told, affirming and thanking the witness, pronouncing on the evil that had been done. “We have a system that needs overhauling, a system that needs to re-earn your trust,” one said in thanks to the witness. “Testimony such as yours will assist in the process of creating a just system.” “May the Lord help you through these hardships,” concluded another.
The Truth and Reconciliation Human Rights hearings are an unusual instance in which the “hard-to-see” have been made visible. Apartheid South Africa was deliberately structured in numerous legal, social, cultural, and economic ways to silence those who were demonized as “other.” The TRC process, in response, was designed to restore “the human and civil dignity” of the victims of apartheid by giving them a collective opportunity to tell their stories, to fashion new public narratives and identities.
Given the significant role that the Christian church played in both the creation of and struggle against apartheid, it is fitting that this attempt to exorcise the past draw on the Christian tradition. South African theologian John De Gruchy says, “The Christian understanding of repentance, forgiveness, and reparation is of fundamental importance in shaping a national consciousness that can heal the land, achieve genuine reconciliation, and build a moral and democratic culture.” In this public, communal act of confession, South Africa is beginning to create a new national identity.
Susan VanZanten Gallagher is professor of English at Seattle Pacific University.
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