ABSTRACT
South Africa is at a crossroads. Its post-apartheid achievements have been extraordinary (democracy, peace), but on the dark side of transition lies a more problematic reality, partly informed by the legacy of apartheid: poverty and inequality, social and criminal violence, an HIV/AIDS pandemic, and xenophobia. As such, South Africa constitutes a powerful case study of the enduring structural legacies of a troubled past, and of both the potential and limitations of transitional justice and human rights as agents of transformation in the contemporary era. South Africa’s story has broader relevance because it helped to launch constitutional human rights and transitional justice as global discourses; its own legacy is to some extent writ large in post-authoritarian and post-conflict contexts across the world. Transitional justice, a set of tools designed to address the legacies of a troubled
past, is a creature of compromise; as such, truth commissions are its emblematic intervention. The ideal makes way for the possible, although it never stops asking the possible for more. In South Africa the compromises were of a kind familiar to peace processes in many parts of the world, as it became the exemplar of a new global compact that both facilitates and places constraints upon the changes associated with political transition. A negotiated settlement paved the way for majoritarian democracy and elections; a truth commission and an amnesty provision eased the passage; past gross violations of human rights received attention while enduring structural violence (poverty and inequality, violent crime) became the most enduring legacy of the past; and neo-liberalism trumped more redistributive economic policies. These compromises can be defended as necessary and midwives to the birth of something verging on the miraculous, or as midwives to a still-birth, as majority hopes for a better future were betrayed and the extraordinary all too swiftly became ordinary. Compromises have to be made, but which compromises, who is compromised, and what is the role of transitional justice and human rights in facilitating or contesting compromise?
