1 Knowledge, Experience and South Africa's Scenarios Of

KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE AND SOUTH AFRICA’S SCENARIOS OF FORGIVENESS Alejandro Castillejo-Cuéllar Research Associate Direct Action center for Peace and Memory, South Africa Assistant Professor Universidad de los Andes, Colombia [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” (Conley and O’Barr, 1990: 198) Thus far, this paper has dealt, firstly, with the constellation of socio-historical events that led to the fabrication, in the most literal sense, of the Gugulethu Seven, and secondly, with the ways in which notions such as “terrorist,” “space,” “borders” and “bodies” informed the police’s uses of violence during the early stages of the state of emergency. In this chapter 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, to counteract apartheid racial historicizing, in which certain incidents were indexed as part of the history of the struggle against apartheid. Of the 22,000 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, as I will explore in chapters four and five, 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 of 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?1 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 1 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 chapter, 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 (Derrida, 2001). 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 (Krabill, 2001; Becker, 1995; Scannell, 1995). 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 and articulated in this narrative? And finally, what kind of historical artifact was this “scenario of forgiveness”? Certainly, the Gugulethu Seven of the TRC is dramatically different from the Gugulethu Seven of the police investigative unit studied in the previous chapter. 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 at the beginning of this paper, 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. Aside from the idea of the country’s “peaceful transition,” a notion fiercely 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 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 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 2 conditions for such circulation were, and what gave these images so much momentum, on the other. The second element is concerned with the historical claims of communities of apartheid survivors in South Africa being recognized – not excluding the suffering they endured – as agents in history. This was brought to the fore during long interviews with friends closely related to the Gugulethu families and with the meeting between the mothers and one of the Askaris, Reid and Hoffmann’s film depiction of this face-to-face encounter in particular. The general opinion, contrary to what I heard at the conferences mentioned above, was that Long Night’s Journey into Day, rather than being a hopeful comment on South Africa’s transition, was “reconciliation propaganda,” a phrase so straight forward, so loaded – and a narrative gesture so complex – that it certainly required further unpacking to make it intelligible. It was felt that too much attention on the light at the end of the tunnel trivialized and abstracted the suffering and the occluded historical conditions of such encounters. Again, this chapter is an attempt to understand the semantic density of this gesture as a way to pose the question regarding the historicity of these “scenarios of forgiveness.” This chapter is, then, divided in three main sections. Part one is an overview of the commission’s institutional discourses about truth, voice, and dignity as they played out during the Gugulethu Seven hearings and the role testimonies play in the general aim of producing knowledge about the past. In part two I will comment on Reid and Hoffmann’s documentary, the assumptions that can be drawn from it as well as the manner in which the representation of the killing of these seven youths in 1986 played a pivotal role in the development of the documentary’s main thematic thrust. The general argument in this chapter is that the Gugulethu Seven were framed by the TRC’s discourse of national unity and reconciliation and, in doing so, informed the different meanings the Gugulethu Seven have come to have in contemporary South Africa. These different meanings have, to some extent, produced different memorial practices that have come to shape the textures of memory in Cape Town nowadays. The TRC and the Circulation of the Gugulethu After its brief burst of publicity in the local newspapers in 1986, particularly the Cape Times and the Argus, as well as on national television newscasts (SABC1) the Gugulethu Seven incident disappeared from a more general “public view” for a decade, at least until 1996.2 Despite the fact that there were, as I have already mentioned, two inquests, one in 1986 right after the killing, and another one in 1989, and a court case in 1987, the incident never made any headlines. And the reasons seem to be rather obvious, given the fabrication of the shooting by the security forces in collusion with death squads, the planting of evidence, the particular socio-historical context, and the many irregularities during the forensic process that helped cover up the killings. It was only in the families that the killings remained a part of their lives as their sons’ absences became the most overwhelming form of their presence.3 Submissions to the TRC 3 Human Rights Violations Hearings demonstrate the extent of these absences, and the fractures and dislocations that the relatives endured over the years as a result of the killings. Of the 1986 official inquest, sworn affidavits remained, and are now available, provided permission is granted, at the TRC archive in Pretoria.4 However, as Taphelo Mbelo, one of the Askaris involved in the shooting, recognized during his amnesty application in 1997, at that inquest “everyone lied.” The affidavits were artifacts that allowed, first, to give the investigation an aura of clarity, accountability, and rule of law, as there were pressures at the time from different political sectors as to the security forces’ behavior in the townships. Members of parliament, for instance, followed up the incident, as well as the subsequent inquest, during a sitting of the House of Assembly in 1986 (House of Assembly, 1986: 588; 926; 1994).

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