Improvising Reconciliation Confession aer the Truth Commission • Ed Charlton First published 2021 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2021 Ed Charlton All rights reserved An Open Access edition of this book will be made available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library on publication. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-80034-926-1 paperback ISBN 978-1-80034-480-8 pdf ebook ISBN 978-1-80085-842-8 ePub Cover image: David Koloane, Three Women (2015). Courtesy Estate late David Koloane and Goodman Gallery. Photo by Anthea Pokroy. is book is published as part of the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot. With the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Pilot uses cutting-edge publishing technology to produce open access digital editions of high-quality, peer-reviewed monographs from leading university presses. 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For May and Georgine, and William, in memory. • Acknowledgements xi List of Illustrations xiii ‘is ing Called Reconciliation’ Apartheid Acting Out: Duma Kumalo and Reconciliation’s Melancholy Scene Risking Reconciliation: On Tragedy, Failure, and Transgression e Melodrama of Forgiveness: Propriety and Popular Film Telling Stories the Way We Like: Zulu Love Letter and Reconciliation’s Rites Notes Bibliography is study has beneted from the welcome advice and wisdom of many col- leagues. Principal thanks go to Chris Warnes who found a measure of coher- ence in my early eorts and bolstered progress whenever hesitation arose. His calm direction and reassurance helped stabilise the ground enough to complete the foundations for this study. I am also indebted to Andrew van der Vlies for helping to map out its initial potential. e enthusiasm with which he greeted those incipient thoughts provided a condence in the project unmerited at the time. Priya Gopal’s exceptionally keen eye has also passed over various iterations. Her comments always sharpened things immeasurably. Jane Taylor too oered careful guidance on the shape and scope of the argument. ose anonymous peer reviewers who commented in detail on more recent dras merit similar heartfelt thanks. Much of this study would not have been possible without the generosity of those theatre- and lmmakers at its heart. Yaël Farber was kind enough to speak to me at great length and in unvarnished terms about her practice. Mark Kaplan and Ingrid Gavshon were also quick to furnish me with copies of their lms, despite the logistical barriers. Ian Gabriel oered detailed replies to my inquiries. I am equally grateful to archivists at the National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown, the University of Cape Town Library Special Collections, the South African History Archive at the University of Witwatersrand, and the National Archives of South Africa in Pretoria. I also acknowledge the nancial assistance of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Smuts Memorial Fund, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the British Academy. Graham Riach has been a steadfast companion throughout this intellectual endeavour. I oer my thanks to him and the other members of our budding col- lective, who sought to sustain one another through the inevitable travails that come with extended research. Together, they helped set an example in rigorous academic practice and sympathetic critique. Lastly and most signicantly, Diana Leca delivered the erce advocacy and everyday nurture required to complete this study. I would have oundered without her. xi Figure . Duma Kumalo delivers his confession in Yaël Farber’s He Le Quietly (). Photo courtesy of John Hogg. Figure . Duma Kumalo, pictured in the opening shot of Facing Death . Facing Life (). Directed by Ingrid Gavshon and produced by Angel Films. Figure . Duma Kumalo and Young Duma, alongside each other in Yaël Farber’s He Le Quietly (). Photo courtesy of John Hogg. Figure . Klytemnestra bathing her daughter, Elektra, in Yaël Farber’s Molora (). Photo courtesy of Ruphin Coudyzer. Figure . Klytemnestra performing the ‘wet-bag method’ of torture on her daughter, Elektra, in Yaël Farber’s Molora (). Photo courtesy of Ruphin Coudyzer. Figure . e Chorus, performed by members of the Ngqoko Cultural Group, cradle Elektra in Yaël Farber’s Molora (). Photo courtesy of Ruphin Coudyzer. Figure . A police o cer named Van Deventer pleads with his victim’s young child for forgiveness. From In My Country (), directed by John Boorman and produced by Sony Pictures Classic. Figure . Tertius Coetzee is attacked by his victim’s brother, Ernest, while petitioning the family for forgiveness. From Forgiveness (), directed by Ian Gabriel and produced by Dv Film. Figure . Gideon Nieuwoudt sits with blood pouring from his skull following a sudden attack by his victim’s teenage son, Sikhumbuzo. From Between Joyce and Remembrance (), directed by Mark Kaplan and produced by Grey Matter Media. xiii xiv Illustrations Figure . andeka and her daughter, Simangaliso, enjoy a day out in Johannesburg. From Zulu Love Letter (), directed by Ramadan Suleman. Image courtesy of JBA Production. Figure . andeka and Me’Tau queue to give their statements to the Truth Commission. From Zulu Love Letter (), directed by Ramadan Suleman. Image courtesy of JBA Production. Figure . andeka dressed in traditional costume. From Zulu Love Letter (), directed by Ramadan Suleman. Image courtesy of JBA Production. Introduction ‘is ing Called Reconciliation’ As new facts emerge and new truths are brought to light; as old opinions disappear and others take their place; the image of an ideal and always eeting perfection presents itself. —Alexis de Tocqueville as decisive to the resolution of modern conict. For those places and people emerging from a history R of internal violence, it is understood to be a vital mechanism in their transition to a peaceable and more equitable future. Deployed in an uneven but broadly global fashion since around the middle of the twentieth century, from Germany ‘a er Auschwitz’ to Liberia’s more recent reckoning with the atrocities committed under Charles Taylor’s regime, reconciliation is now the principal language as well as the conceptual ideal through which post-conict societies are conceived. But as a goal as much as a method of transitional justice, what are the conditions required for reconciliation to proceed? e cessation of state violence rarely also means an end to the more fundamental structures of injustice and inequality that enable such abuse. Nor does it promise any alleviation to their combined e ects, whether traumatic or otherwise. But even more uncertain is the question of what precisely reconciliation constitutes. Early in reconciliation’s conceptual elaboration, Johan Galtung, founder of the Journal of Peace Research, sought to overcome this epistemic insecurity with the seeming certitude of an arithmetic equation: ‘reconciliation = closure + healing’. As coe cients, how- ever, both closure and healing suggest a decidedness that is rarely ever borne out by their solution, especially amid the competing priorities of state and society. More o en, the language of reconciliation is made to calculate a symbolic res- olution that runs in tension with the insecurity of its lived, demotic experience. In this, South Africa is exemplary. e vision of national unity conjured up in the dying days of the twentieth century still ickers on occasion across the Introduction contemporary democratic imaginary. New facts emerge, new truths are brought to light, and old opinions continue to be overhauled. And yet, even as the faint spirit of reconciliation remains, its wider reality does not. Indeed, the whole re- gime of transitional justice appears encumbered by disillusionment. Its ashes of non-racial perfectibility are now witnessed with such diminished regularity as to seem hubristic. To follow the words of Justice Albie Sachs, democracy appears to have consummated at the very same time as it has also extinguished one of South Africa’s most precious assets: its hope for the future. But whatever the intense disappointment that may now countermand images of the long, sanguine queues that amassed outside polling stations in anticipation of the country’s rst demo- cratic vote in April , there is perhaps no sharper bellwether (or more prom- inent target) for the regret that rolled in to dim this initial glow than the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Inaugurated in with a hopeful appeal by its chair, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for ‘light over darkness’, it now stands among the most discredited of the democratic regime’s early enterprises, a formal mechanism of the transition that in many critics eyes has done more to defer than enable ‘this thing called reconciliation’. ere are, of course, many reasons for the Truth Commission’s widely held miscarriage. And, certainly, the determined criticism it has received is only in part a consequence of reconciliation’s imprecise, regularly incongruous agenda. In actively measuring the terms of its own success, as John Borneman elsewhere describes, in terms of ‘the recuperation of losses that are almost impossible to recuperate’, however, the Commission did much to advance precisely those qui- etist and exculpatory ends that tend to discredit reconciliation’s other plausible achievements.