Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? By James L. Gibson

Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? By James L. Gibson. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004. Pp. 488. $47.50 cloth. Reviewed by John Hagan, Northwestern University and American Bar Foundation, and Sanja Kutnjak Ivkovic, Florida State University Gibson's ambitious goal is to assess the success of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) not only in reducing this nation's racial divide, but also in increasing South Africa's political tolerance, its support for human rights, and the legitimacy of its governing political institutions. He rises to this challenge by analyzing the results of a landmark 2000-2001 survey of nearly 4,000 South Africans. Gibson is cautious but not shy in delivering a bottom-line assessment. He finds that nearly one-half of the South African population entered the new millennium expressing some degree of reconciliation. Given the challenges of overcoming apartheid, the TRC, according to Gibson, has likely delivered as much as could be expected. The reader learns much across the chapters of this book: that reconciliation is a measurable construct, that interpretive truth is critical in creating a collective memory, that intense contact among members of conflicting subgroups can help achieve reconciliation, that the creation of a human rights culture-among the populace and the government-is both a backward- and forward-looking process, that intolerance is a social and not an individual-level characteristic, that amnesty can be a powerful source of perceived injustice, and that public institutions that serve as the backbone of a democracy must develop a substantial degree of legitimacy. Among the strengths of Gibson's accomplishment are the precision of his measurement approach and the cautiousness of his analytic judgments. For example, subdimensions of reconciliation are scaled in a manner that allows Gibson to estimate levels of reconciliation among national subgroups. When the analysis is taken to this level, he finds that reconciliation characterizes the attitudes of more than one-half of Whites (56%) and Colored people (59%) but only about one-third of Africans. When the variable of language is further introduced, over two-thirds of English-speaking Colored people (75%) and English-speaking Whites (64%) are found somewhat reconciled, compared to less than one-fifth (17%) of Sotho-speaking blacks. The latter nearly four-toone difference in reconciliation provides good reason for the cautious framing of Gibson's conclusions (p. 332). Gibson also develops measures of the "truth acceptance" he attributes to the TRC. Here he finds a surprising similarity in the acceptance of the TRC's depiction of apartheid across racial groups, and he attributes this to a complementary acknowledgment and moderation of views across these groups. He can further show that those who are more accepting of the TRC's version of the truth are more likely to be reconciled. He acknowledges that a more convincing demonstration of the causality involved in this relationship would require longitudinal data, which his survey does not provide. Nonetheless, Gibson's use of instrumental variables with his cross-sectional data supports that assumption that the causal flow is indeed from "truth" to "reconciliation." He can then again break this analysis down by subgroups, leading to the finding that the "truth effect" is 0.23 among Africans and 0.53 among Whites. This more than two-to-one difference is added reason for guardedness in Gibson's optimism (p. 334). A particularly intriguing part of Gibson's contribution involves his assessment of the contact hypothesis as an explanatory mechanism for the level of reconciliation that is evident in postapartheid South Africa. Gibson provides important evidence that the segregation, indeed isolation, especially social-psychological isolation, of Africans from Whites is pervasive in South Africa. …