ABSTRACT
The oft-repeated critique of the TRC’s mandate has been that its focus on the political repression of the apartheid state and on the resistance of opponents of the apartheid system occluded bureaucratized forms of systemic racial violence that pre-defined the horizons of possibility in everyday life. This directly impacted on the day-to-day life of ordinary people according to one’s categorization on a hierarchial continuum of humanity legally defined by “race.” From blood to burial these forms of state and systemic violence intruded into the most private and intimate realms of human activity, life-worlds and states of being. 1 As we have seen in previous chapters, the ways in which a collective discourse of “terms” of atrocity is set—and of course, its corollaries, responsibility and accountability—is bound to what is collectively recognized to be atrocity and its cause. The administrative, systemic and bureaucratized matrices of legality, procedure, planning, and policy of the apartheid system remain very much outside of the frames. Additionally, neoliberal prescriptions for state administrations in countries “in transition to democracy,” or “post-conflict,” or “developing” require that a temporal and spatial production of distance from the past must be cultivated. As the perception of distance is created, so historically embedded and socially reproduced mechanisms of structural violence, psychosocial affect, and material impact of what remains and continues are excised. The central concern of this chapter is to examine how the violence of historical erasure and the erasure of historical violence are actively disconnected from one another, and how, in being rendered invisible, are reproduced in the everyday.
