ABSTRACT
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), presided over by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, was South Africa’s ‘massive public reckoning with a legacy of political violence’ (Sanders 2001: 242) and has had immense repercussions both within South Africa and around the world. It was a crucial process in the transition from apartheid to post-apartheid South Africa and has provided a model of ‘coming to terms’ that has since been adopted worldwide. In outlining the reasons for its particular approach, Tutu emphasised the dual need to acknowledge the past and deal with it adequately so that it would not ‘blight our future’ (Tutu 1999: 32). Rejecting the ‘notion of national amnesia’ (Tutu 1999: 32), the TRC instead would empower victims of apartheid violence to ‘tell their stories, [be] allowed to remember and in this public recounting their individuality and inalienable humanity would be acknowledged’ (Tutu 1999: 33). The granting of amnesty for full disclosure by perpetrators represented the ‘carrot of possible freedom in exchange for truth’ (Tutu 1999: 34). Thus, the idea that the truth could set one free was a literal and figurative lynchpin of the TRC. The Truth Commission’s hearings gripped South Africa and the world providing both a controversial model for dealing with political violence, flawed in the opinion of some by its failure to deal out justice by instead providing therapy, and, at the same time, a ‘beacon of hope’ (Tutu 1999: 229) for dealing with reconciliation of past conflict so that South Africans could become a new ‘rainbow’ nation.
