ABSTRACT

Transitional justice, as commonly understood, presupposes a reference to human rights. Although measures that taken in the name of transitional justice vary, human rights has functioned as a common legal code, its status sometimes underwritten by a bill of rights forming the core of constitution that, once the transition is complete, is to govern future relations between a state and its citizens. In 2009, Antjie Krog returned to the Truth Commission in a remarkable coauthored book, There Was This Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile. In this book, as in her subsequent book, Begging to Be Black, ubuntu emerges as the most profound challenge to assumptions about human being that have informed the "transition." The book, Country of My Skull, emphasizes how ubuntu began to inform the work of the Commission under Tutu's leadership, by "Africanizing" the concept of reconciliation through the idea that "'a person is not basically an independent, solitary entity.