Introduction

KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE AND SOUTH AFRICA’S SCENARIOS OF FORGIVENESS1 (Submitted to Radical History Review 97) Alejandro Castillejo-Cuéllar2 [email protected] (...) [T]he law selects among these voices, silencing some and transforming others to conform to legal categories and conventions. Most voices are silenced; those that do survive do so in a barely recognizable form” (John Conley and W O’Barr, Rules versus Relationships: an Ethnography of legal Discourse) Introduction In the early hours of Monday March 3rd 1986, seven young activists from Old Crossroads and Gugulethu Townships in Cape Town were led by askaris into an ambush where members of South Africa’s security branch and covert operations forces killed them during a joint operation.3 Official reports maintained that they died as a result of “multiple bullet wounds sustained in the course of S.A [South African] Police activities for the purpose of combating terrorism.”4 The Gugulethu Seven incident, as it came to be known, has been since surrounded by controversy and debate about the specific circumstances that led to the assassination of these youths. 5 For more than a decade, this incident was engulfed in an atmosphere of permanent denial.6 During that time, one of the most controversial issues was the circulation of two different versions. The first one, elaborated by the policemen who were involved, presented the incident as a legitimate anti-terrorist operation. They maintained that the shootout started as a direct response to “terrorists” who, finding themselves surrounded by the police, reacted by shooting at members of the Murder and Robbery Unit. This version contradicts an eyewitness testimony, which reports seeing “a white man shooting one of the men in the head while he was lying motionless on the ground.”7 Another eyewitness, from a nearby hostel, maintained that a group of policemen threw a man onto the ground and shot him three times at point blank range, execution style. The police version differed from these testimonies that attested to the brutality and callousness of the security personnel. Ten years later, during the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a clearer, less blurred picture emerged. The investigative unit presented old “facts” in a new light and found inconsistencies and contradictions in police statements. They also found that certain policemen not only had fabricated “evidence” (planting weapons on the dead, for instance) but also had circumvented standard police procedures with respect to the handling and retrieval of “evidence” from the “crime scene,” such as submitting ammunition for ballistic testing. As the TRC team found out, there were other reasons for such a cover-up. Zenzile Khoisan, TRC officer in charge of the investigation, writes in his report to the head of the Western Cape Investigation Unit in 1996 that “it is our view that these young men were led into an ambush by the security forces after they had been infiltrated by askaris from Vlakplaas, who participated in the training of these men and provided them with weapons.”8 If the police created the scenario for the killing, then the TRC 1 inscribed it on the history of the struggle against apartheid as an icon, as a location in Cape Town’s cartography of memory. Unlike many other cases of assassination during the 1980s, such as the “Trojan Horse Incident” in Athlone on October 15 1985, the Gugulethu Seven has had a political currency and a relative visibility that other events have not. In this regard, the Gugulethu Seven stands as case that interconnects in interesting ways most of the fundamental debates around “memory work” in South Africa. This centrality placed it on the center stage of a series of public debates over the last two decades: at one point during the TRC process for instance, it became an example of apartheid- generated covert operations, linking several of South Africa’s security forces with death squads such as Vlakplaas. In 1986 it was also the subject of a state-sponsored commission of inquiry, a court case in 1987 against independent journalist Tony Weaver, and two TRC hearings in 1997-98 (a Human Rights Violations and an Amnesty Hearing). The shooting of these seven young men was also the subject of two documentaries (Gugulethu Seven by Lindy Wilson and A Long Night’s Journey into Day by Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffman, both of which have won international recognition), and two memorial stones unveiled one on March 21st 2000 by Cape Town’s mayor and the other on March 3rd 2005. In other words, the path of the Gugulethu Seven has unfolded along two decades of South Africa’s political process. In this paper I explore how, after more than ten years of virtual silence, the Gugulethu Seven “resurfaced” through the process of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In the same way that the TRC was, among other things, a major attempt to rewrite an authoritative history of South Africa between 1960 and 1994, it also indexed certain incidents as part of the history of the struggle against apartheid. The TRC was simultaneously a technology that rendered visible certain forms of violence while obliterating others. Of the twenty-two thousand official victims, the Gugulethu Seven were a case of “human rights violation” that was given special attention by the commission. In this way, the Gugulethu Seven became an institutionalized, yet contested site of remembrance in Cape Town. This institutionalization, and the particular discourses in which Gugulethu Seven were embedded during the mid-1990s, came as a consequence of their inscription into the TRC’s general goal of promoting reconciliation and revealing the truth of the past. The question that I intend posing now is how was the Gugulethu incident framed by the commission’s institutional discourses so that, by the year 2000, it had become an emblem of reconciliation and forgiveness?9 In other words, discourses that not only framed the manner in which the Gugulethu Seven were “represented” and “codified” (as an example of human rights violations, for instance) but also “remembered” by the society at large. It is precisely this “codification” that set the stage for different memorial practices to be performed in contemporary South Africa. The iconic capacity of the Gugulethu incident was crystallized and reinforced in a well- known documentary directed by Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffmann, Long Night’s Journey into Day (2000), produced under the auspices – at least from an institutional point of view – of the TRC. In this text, I explore the political assumptions underlying this film which depicts and represents a series of “scenarios of forgiveness,” some of them failed and others more promising, and the ways they interconnect with the commission’s general goals.10 In trying to understand this particular documentary, my intention is not so much to view the commission as a “media event” by studying the ways it was broadcasted live and presented to the general South African viewer at the time, an exercise that other authors concerned with mass media have pursued, but to investigate the sort of meta-narratives in which it was inscribed.11 What kind of political arti-fact is this documentary, and what kind of narrative do the images and texts weave? What kind of “Gugulethu Seven” is produced 2 and articulated in this narrative? And finally, what kind of historical artifact was this “scenario of forgiveness”? I pursue these questions for mainly two reasons. One has to do with the transnational circulation of ideas and concepts regarding political transitions, and the prospect of reconciliation and forgiveness in societies characterized by political violence and war. Over the last year or so, while writing this text, I had the opportunity of being invited to participate in several conferences on issues of “collective memory,” “transitional justice,” “reconciliation,” and “post-conflict situations,” as an academic who has worked on Colombia and South Africa, in different academic scenarios, from Argentina and Colombia, to the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, among others. The remark noted elsewhere, that in the circuits of transitional justice theorizing, South Africa had a particularly important status as a reference point, became all too obvious in the context of these conferences and workshops.12 Aside from the idea of the country’s “peaceful transition,” a notion in any case debated at grass-roots level in South Africa, the TRC and its discourse on social and individual reconciliation always came up as an example. I found it rather interesting how, in many of these conferences, Reid and Hoffmann’s documentary was screened, always sparking a handful of hopeful, sometimes even naive assessments of the future in other war-turn countries, such as Colombia. One of the reasons it was screened was that its ending apparently opened a door. While looking at the complexities of “forgiveness” it established a moral ending, showing that, despite differences, there was a light at the end of the tunnel: the prospect of forgiveness. The Gugulethu Seven, one of the cases presented by the documentary, was that light. I found particularly revealing the fact that the film circulated more abroad than in South Africa, and the many international prizes awarded to the directors is proof of that. I wondered, on the one hand, what the conditions for such circulation were, and what gave these images so much momentum, on the other. Proof of this power of circulation can be demonstrated by the fact that few days ago (November 2005) the Gugulethu Seven and the Amy Biehl cases, the later also part of the documentary, were part of a special television report entitled “Can South Africa Be an Example to Follow?” and broadcasted by a local Colombian powerful television network.

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