ABSTRACT
To understand and evaluate the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), it is crucial to understand its origin and identity. It emerged as result of a negotiated settlement between black and white, within which neither side won or lost. The conflict began with a fragile white Portuguese presence in the Cape in the latter part of the fifteenth century. It endured Dutch and English colonialism from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. It persisted through generations of institutionalized racism and culminated in a thirty-year race war.
