ABSTRACT
The anthropologist Rosalind Shaw notes that, following violent conflict, “truth commissions have become fetish objects to which almost mystical powers of future making are attributed”. The term “truth” is, for a start, misleading, for, as anthropologist Fiona Ross notes, prior to the creation of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SATRC) in 1995 it was not that there was “silence about the apartheid past”; much was already known through “stories, songs, political rhetoric, magisterial orders, court cases, newspapers, scholarly work, parliamentary debates, at funerals and rallies and so on”. An indication that truth commissions serve an elite can be seen in the language employed in relation to such institutions that contributes to “psychologising the nation”. The need for the alternative approach suggested by Nevins is seen in the way that survivors demonstrate an expectation that truth commissions will provide social and economic support in order to tackle structural violence and associated deprivation.
