by Brent Meersman
It is dawning on South Africa that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) set up to heal the country’s divisions after apartheid collapsed has ultimately failed. For the light it threw on the murky past, South Africans are indebted. But the TRC uncovered more in the way of Truth than it accomplished in Reconciliation. The impression is growing that the country has passed the window of forgiveness. Such a prospect is terrifying and one hesitates even to articulate it, as if by simply writing such a sentence invites doom. Most South Africans, especially those that wholeheartedly embraced the “Mandela vision” of the country appear now to have been living in denial.
The TRC was extraordinary in conception, setting a world precedent. Truth would set the nation free, forgiveness end the cycle of violence. Encouraged by the miracle of a peaceful transition to democracy, it too attempted to defy the history of man, which has always been a history of bloody revenge, retribution and victor’s justice.
As time puts distance between the euphoria of the immediate post-apartheid period and the harsh reality of today, reconciliation is increasingly felt to be at the expense of justice, and the TRC seen as one more element in an elite compromise that has not benefited the majority.
That Mandela and De Klerk’s conciliatory gestures saved everyone from civil war and chaos, from plunging the country into the anarchy of a Somalia, has unfortunately lost its persuasive power. After what are now historical concessions, the nation is not at peace with itself.
Whether it’s land, equity or social commitment, the intransigence of many whites, who without any doubt benefited by far the most from the demise of apartheid, is partly to blame. Mandela was scrupulous about singing Die Stem, while most of the national teams’ white sportsmen couldn’t sing Nksoi Sikelel’ iAfrika. There is even vituperative opposition to such minor matters as a few name changes. Business never owned up to their complicity in apartheid at the TRC. Their submission was insensitive and insincere – an insulting sham. No restitution tax was paid. The Business Trust and the President’s Fund were spurned and the Reconstruction and Development Programme was quickly sabotaged. The current government when not actively opposing attempts in the United States courts at corporate redress are obstructing them. The apartheid military generals and former senior politicians did no better. That some of the TRC’s findings, notably around the National Party, were excised from the final report did not bode well.
Those who had subscribed to “and let live” are struggling to live themselves. The status quo would be tolerable if it were not for the desperation that arises from a daily struggle for survival and the life and death competition for scant resources. There are many in the land who have not agreed to forget. As we have seen, unscrupulous politicians do not have to work hard to rise to power in such a climate.
Who are among the malcontents of forgiveness? The victims of gross human rights violations who have never received sufficient compensation, while they watched as amnesty was granted to the perpetrators who did not confess fully or even lied. Many who never made submissions were neither pursued nor prosecuted, while too many members of the liberation movements were denied amnesty or left in jail awaiting a Presidential pardon. A belief exists among these that only those comrades who far from telling the truth but lied convincingly at the TRC obtained amnesty.
Recent attacks on democratic institutions cast the upholders of the Constitution as protectors of white privilege or as counter-revolutionary forces. The Bill of Rights, once referred to as the Bill of Whites by the more Stalinist elements in the liberation struggle, remains popular and supported by the majority. That the Constitution shares the same popularity is unproven. Abolition of the death penalty, gay marriage, evolution in schools and other unpopular measures are associated with it. The judiciary – a cornerstone of the whole Constitutional edifice – is spurned and derided when it finds against populist leaders.
The impunity with which the party leaders abuse the institutions of the Constitution to wide applause from a vocal sector of the otherwise voiceless masses signals that as a country South Africa does not subscribe to the values in the Constitution. Many don’t understand that the same law that protects the homosexual today will protect a religious minority, such as Muslims, when prejudice turns against them tomorrow. Or that the death penalty once reinstituted could some day be extended to include other crimes such as spying or political dissent dressed up as treason. (That ought to give some of those pro-death white opposition supporters pause for thought.)
Whereas the liberation movement united its resistance through Pan-Africanism and non-racialism against apartheid’s race and tribal homeland strategy of divide and rule, the ANC is increasingly falling prey to militant ethnic factionalism and playing the “Zulu” card.
Unfortunately, the time for healing gestures has been squandered. It is too late to say sorry now. Only a serious attempt at demonstrable action will suffice. As the nation faces a general election, tumultuous changes in the ruling ANC party and transition in the presidency, the situation appears precarious and the backlash is mounting.
It is against this background that one can look at the exploration of forgiveness in South African theatre. Two things need to be borne in mind regarding the nature of forgiveness. Someone may forgive another without knowing the whole truth, but forgiveness as a concept can only truly be achieved on the basis of the victim knowing the whole truth. The perpetrator must face the victim and confess all. Second, forgiveness is a public act. The victim must face the perpetrator.
In Lara Foot Newton’s play Reach (2007) a young black man Solomon Xaba asks “Why should I care about a white woman?”. He answers his own question later: “She runs through me.” The ‘she’ he’s referring to is Marion Banning, an older, white woman.
Marion is a lonely figure, still in grief for her son. He was killed in a hijacking. Details in the reporting are upsettingly familiar. The murderers have never been brought to justice due to police incompetence and an intimidated local community. The mystery that unfolds is why Solomon has come to her home and why he has watched her secretly for months.
Through her relationship with Solomon, the despondent Marion slowly comes to life. The play charts the subtle negotiation between these two individuals from radically different backgrounds as they reach out towards each other. Solomon knows how Marion’s son died. He was there. In the climax to the play he confesses all.
Marion and Solomon eventually achieve mutual affection and understanding.
The story has faint echoes in the real life incident of the murder of the American exchange student Amy Biehl in an act of random political violence in 1993. Since then the Biehl Foundation has been working in the black communities continuing the work Amy had set out to do when she met her untimely death. Her mother Linda Biehl even has on her staff her daughter’s killers. She writes, “I’ve grown fond of these boys. I enjoy them. They’re like my own kids. It may sound strange, but I tend to think there’s a little bit of Amy’s spirit in them.”
The play reconciles the nation through the private act of forgiveness and understanding.
REwind: A Cantata (2006) by composer Philip Miller, known for his music for the Handspring Puppet Company collaborations with artist William Kentridge, commemorated 10 years of the first TRC hearings. The work was performed in Cape Town and the United States.
Miller had to defend himself against attacks that there is something ethically wrong with producing art from the pain of the testimony. “Was Picasso wrong to paint Guernica?” he asked when I interviewed him. Great art is pain; art is one of the ways humanity deals with it.
What Miller did do was talk to every one of the survivors whose recorded testimony “given in a very different context” forms part of the cantata, replayed in rhythmic repetitions. They all gave their permission, freely and gladly. Eunice Miya (a mother of one of the Guguletu 7) asked at her hearing, more than ten years before, that something be done to commemorate her son. Nothing materialized. Miller said she was glad to hear that the cantata commemorated him.
The work opens with a powerful choral version of the protest song Siyaya. A particularly chilling section uses apartheid interrogator Jeff Benzien’s voice, methodically describing – “as if he were baking a cake” as Miller puts it – how he tortured people with the wet bag method.
The cantata concludes with a bitterly ironical piece, Who’s laughing?, using the voice of PW Botha. Miller’s idea originally came from a Chilean cantata about their national reconciliation. As it happened Augusto Pinochet, another president who got away with a brutally repressive regime and never apologised, died shortly before the first performance of REwind.
In Truth in Translation (2007), director Michael Lessac astutely chose the perspective of the interpreters for the TRC as his principle protagonists to deconstruct South Africa’s response to those gruesome public hearings. Looking at “the beast” as Archbishop Tutu described it.
Using the translators provides a cunning dramatic conceit; the translators become actors, speaking words not authored by themselves. “Traduttore, traditore,” say the Italians, meaning ‘translator, traitor’. In the opening lines, the interpreters and through them the audience is instructed not to feel or become emotionally overwhelmed by the testimony we will hear.
Possibly the best indigenous debate theatre I’ve seen, it succeeds as a realistic recounting of how a wide range of individual South Africans struggle to come to grips with the atrocities committed under apartheid. The dialogue is pithy and provocative, but the play is a mixed success with far too many narratives, the repetitive bathos of crass humour – that of the journalist’s barroom shtick, manufactured scuffles and some faux rôle playing that defies our suspension of disbelief, has a strangely dulling effect.
Yet Truth in Translation was a valuable contribution to South Africa’s on-going soul searching. The subject matter was of such a nature that it overwhelmed the critics’ numerous objections born from a more formal, aesthetic and theatrical sensibility. It would have been better staged outside of a proscenium arch. The production went on a world tour and was performed in other hot spots for reconciliation such as Northern Ireland and Rwanda.
It is vital that theatre makers confront the horrors of the past and that producers do not shrink from the obvious commercial negatives of mounting disturbing work.
Now that the TRC concluded its work and the window for forgiveness is closing, theatre may be one of the few public platforms where the process of forgiveness may persevere.
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