Speaking Truth to Reconciliation: Political Transition, Recovery, and the Work of Time

Layers of BetrayalOver ten years passed between the disappearance of Charity Kondile's son, Sizwe, and her learning what had befallen him. One day she opened up a newspaper reporting on testimony at a commission put together to investigate a counterinsurgency unit of the South African police. In the report she discovered that her son had been apprehended, tortured to the point of having a brain hemorrhage, given poison - which didn't work - then transported to a remote farm and shot, and finally burnt in a fire. In her testimony before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, she said:Well, Dirk Coetzee goes on further to say that when he died, they put his body on a pile of wood with a tyre near the Komatiepoort River at night, where it took them nine hours to burn his body. Dirk Coetzee further states that twice they were burning his body, the flesh was smelling good, and they were having beers at the time. So it was like a [barbecue] to them.1Her testimony also addressed how the lives of her family had been transformed by their loss: Sizwe's sister suffering from depressive psychosis; a brother so depressed he could not take care of himself; a child left fatherless; and Mrs. Kondile herself, the mother who, instead of being supported by the surrounding community, was treated like a traitor when her son disappeared, because his comrades too quickly assumed he had betrayed his cause. Mrs. Kondile's case shows how complex the layers of betrayal, suspicion, and harm can be in a political struggle. A story will rarely be limited to a tale of good guys versus bad guys. Her anger and sadness were caused by not only the police who killed her son and the government that authorized that killing but also members of her community who believed that he was a traitor and by officials of the government and of community organizations who had not apologized for treating her family unjustly.It is a dynamic story of loss. Mrs. Kondile did not only lose a son. She lost the sense that she could expect that she and her loved ones would be protected from harm. She also lost the security of living in a community where she could trust that, if she were harmed, she would be helped and her harms recompensed. She lost a world, and so she lost some of the conditions necessary for coherent self-formation.If we do not take the time to understand that loss, we will not know how that world and that self might be rebuilt. In such conditions, justice will not be seen to be done. Justice, when we think of it as a response to wrongdoing, is engaged in the diachronic work of redressing a past for the sake of a future that isn't fully determined by past harms - it aims to help us view the past differently. In the past few decades we have seen an explosion of revisionary practices such as transitional justice, political reconciliation, and discourses of forgiveness and restoration. Also in that time, we have seen innumerable law journal and other scholarly articles, as well as newspaper reports, claim that these processes are healing or cathartic for survivors. Many of those assertions were authored anecdotally or hopefully, without the support of empirical data. I do not state that as an accusation, because such data largely did not exist. Empirical studies did not exist because interest in these forms of justice is relatively new, and because the experiences of witnesses have rarely been important to larger political debates.2 There now are some studies - using data from South Africa, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia - suggesting that testifying in institutional settings may be healing for some.3 But there is as much evidence that testifying can reawaken trauma or a sense of injustice rather than help victims find closure.4 For instance, one study showed that, in Rwanda, gacaca witnesses suffer from much higher levels of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder - up to 40 percent higher - than do nonwitnesses. …