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Burton Mary Ingouville. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017. Ohio Short Histories of Africa. Introduction. Notes. Selected Bibliography. Acknowledgments. Index. 162 pp. $11.96. Paper. ISBN: 978-0-8214-2278-6.
This pocket history of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is an easy, informative, and quick read. In its subtext, it is a book about the limitations of TRCs and the concept of Transitional Justice. In its text, it offers a factual account and reflections by one of South Africa’s veteran anti-apartheid activists, who manages to give a balanced view from an insider perspective. Mary Ingouville Burton was a Truth Commissioner and is a prominent anti-apartheid veteran.
After nearly two decades, one nuanced fact emerges starkly about TRCs, as rightfully stated by the author in her concluding chapter: TRCs cannot deliver reconciliation “even if they help to lay a foundation of widely acknowledged truth” (137). On the one hand, TRCs acknowledge a truth that victims already knew and/or suspected with regard to its detail, and they provide a degree of catharsis for those who have narrowly been defined as victims. On the other hand, truth in this context serves to disrupt blanket denial by perpetrators and beneficiaries, while offering them the gift of relationship-level reconciliation, to add to their compounded privilege in a global market democracy that continues to favor them structurally. So essentially, TRCs cannot deliver transhistorical justice unless mandated to do so by the state.
The first sentence in the introduction makes a review of the book on its own merits an almost impossible task. The author begins by stating, “It is not difficult to find reasons to criticise the TRC and its outcomes, but such criticism should be based on a clear understanding of what it was established to do, and the limitations of its mandate.” She then goes on to reveal her own “anger and disillusionment” with herself, with “all of us and the process itself,” and concludes that “we had failed to live up to the grand vision that had inspired us at the outset” (8–9). Yet, when she lists what those shortcomings were (8), she reveals that the “grand vision” itself fell short. The vision failed to recognize the intersection of racially skewed transhistorical and transnational inequality, and...