violence and truth

Hi everybody! Long no time no talk. Well I saw that we're posting short essays now, and I guess I figured I would signal my return with one of my own from a few months back. This is just an excerpt, but I don't know, I guess it came to mind because I've been thinking a lot lately about the utility of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions for the purpose of social justice. Plus, this piece mentions one of my favourite conceptions of violence, the 'violence continuum'. There are no ground-breaking ideas here, just a discussion of truth, social justice, and reconciliation. (sorry if it's too long!)


Mahmood Mamdani, a prominent African scholar, has likely been the fiercest critic of the TRC’s exclusive focus on gross human rights violations. Pointing to its necessary exclusion of common injustices of apartheid such as forced removals, pass laws, and broken families, he argues that this mandate has lead the TRC to produce “the founding myth of the new South Africa” as one based on a “compromised truth” that has “written the vast majority of victims out of history.”

Mamdani’s point is revelatory of his broader critique of the TRC as an attempt at reconciliation without justice. While proponents of the TRC’s approach are likely to defend its privileging of national unity and reconciliation over that of retributive justice, Mamdani’s point is that South African reconciliation is in fact impossible without social justice. Indeed, Hayner concurs in her assessment of societies emerging from past oppression with gross inequities, noting that in such cases reconciliation must be conceived as much more than a simple psychological or emotional process.

In the South African context, it is clear that the TRC’s reconciliatory effect has not done away with the socio-economic disparities that were fostered in the apartheid era. In this light, the TRC’s mandate should be critiqued not only for its exclusion of the everyday experience of suffering, but for its corresponding disinterest in the beneficiaries of the apartheid system. In Mamdani’s view, the TRC’s emphasis on perpetrators and victims of direct violence has resulted in a national narrative that privileges beneficiaries by essentially omitting their role in apartheid, and thus denying their responsibilities to the non-white majority. He argues that

“where the focus is on perpetrators, victims are necessarily defined as the minority of political activists; for the victimhood of the majority to be recognized, the focus has to shift from perpetrators to beneficiaries. The difference is this: whereas the focus on perpetrators fuels the demand for justice as criminal justice, that on beneficiaries shifts the focus to a notion of justice as social justice.”

Mamdani’s perspective as one that equates justice with social justice, and social justice with reconciliation, is illustrative of a deep respect for the ordinary experience of apartheid’s systemic injustices. This equation, and its corresponding emphasis on the lived experience of structural and systemic inequity, is perhaps best conceptualized by anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s elaboration of the “violence continuum.” In contrast to the TRC’s narrow definition of political violence, the violence continuum is premised on the blurring of such categories to include the symbolic and social structures that determine and legitimize all types of violence.

Comprised of “small wars and invisible genocides”, the continuum serves to illustrate how the everyday acts of routine, legitimate, and rationalized violence inhabit the “peaceful” spaces in between acts of gross violence, and thus operates in all the normative spaces in which a culture reproduces itself, like schools, hospitals, jails, and courtrooms. Ultimately, it is the interrelatedness of symbolic, structural, and direct violence that Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois articulate through this concept. More specifically however, its greatest contribution is its analytical emphasis on ”everyday violence” as legitimate and implicit forms of violence that are the ordinary outcomes of particular social, economic, and political structures.

Mamdani’s critique of the TRC’s rigid categorization and “compromised truth” is strengthened from this anthropological perspective that dismisses any interpretation of violence that does not recognize its multi-dimensionality. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois echo Mamdani’s disappointment in the TRC’s narrow definition of politically motivated violence. They note,

“the deep structures of apartheid violence that consigned 80 percent of the African population to rural bantustands and to squalid squatter camps and worker hostel barracks in urban areas – social institutions that resembled concentration camps – were left virtually unexamined by the South African TRC. The elderly victim of apartheid who stood before the TRC seeking restitution for the grove of fruit trees uprooted from his yard by security police was treated as a sweet distraction amidst the serious work of the Commission. But the old man spoke to the very heart of apartheid’s darkness.”

Indeed, apartheid is perhaps best understood as a systematized culture of structural, symbolic, and direct violence drawn on racial and ethnic lines. Thus, to exclude its systemic nature from the commission’s truth-seeking essentially constitutes an omission of all that was unique to apartheid and what Mamdani calls its “machinery of violence.” By shying away from the violence continuum, the TRC kept hidden the capacity, willingness, and perhaps even enthusiasm of ordinary people to enforce apartheid’s crimes. In this sense, “the practical technicians of the social consensus” at the heart of apartheid were ignored.

Although difficult to assess, the resulting impact of such overpowering silence within the public record is unlikely to be positive. As anthropologists are quick to point out, the ontics and the epistemology of violence are not separate. In the South African context, it is clear that the TRC’s output was much more than a final report. Indeed, the TRC’s broadly-aired and well-publicized proceedings are indicative of its discursive function in a society in search of a new identity based on an accurate portrait of its past. As such, the TRC acted as the country’s memory-keeper, building an institutionalized truth that would account for what was now past and what would hopefully never be repeated. Although the benefit of airing some of South Africa’s worst atrocities should not be undermined, the picture of truth that emerged from the TRC’s hearings could hardly be said to be representative of the vast majority of apartheid’s lived experience. In this light, it’s unlikely that its narrow mandate has not shaped collective memory in such a way that has benefited some, while alienating others.

In addition to its discursive impact, the long-term ramifications of the TRC’s limited conception of political violence, victim, and perpetrator on South Africa’s reconciliation are equally difficult to assess. Nevertheless, its obliviousness to the apartheid system’s victims and beneficiaries, and thus the pursuit of a more inclusive process, raises serious questions regarding the TRC’s relationship to social justice, and the sustainability of its reconciliatory impact.