Abstract
Focusing on the theme of trauma, this chapter investigates the limits of the TRC’s definition of and approach to gross human rights violations through close readings of Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit, Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela and Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light. Drawing on trauma and the work of anthropologists such as Fiona Ross, the chapter begins with a discussion on the TRC’s gendered approach to trauma by focusing on the presence (or lack) of women’s voices at the TRC’s victim hearings. The chapter examines how fiction, on the one hand, explores the challenges of articulating female trauma in the TRC’s public context and, on the other, how it expands the definition of trauma to comprise the quotidian, ordinary oppressions that non-white South Africans suffered during the apartheid era but that were overlooked by the Commission’s mandate.
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Notes
- 1.
Ms Khutwane’s testimony is fully transcribed in the official website dedicated to the work of the TRC, from which the extracts I discuss have been taken. See http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/hrvtrans/worcest/ct00530.htm. For further details, see Ross’s study (2003), with particular reference to chapter four “Narrative Threads”.
- 2.
- 3.
See Sanders (2007), in particular chapter 2 “Remembering Apartheid” and chapter 3 “Hearing Women”.
- 4.
- 5.
The CALS’s submission had in fact suggested that “the Commission should publicise section 38 of the Act which binds all members and employees of the TRC to the preservation of confidentiality. Women need to know that they can come forward without other people knowing about it, and can give their statement to a person in safe and private conditions. They should be informed that they do not have to repeat their statement in front of the whole Commission in public and under the glare of television cameras. […] Women should be able to request that their statements be taken by women and they be allowed to further elaborate on their statements in closed hearings, possibly only to women Commissioners ” (Goldblatt and Meintjes 1996, point G). However, the chapter on women in the 4th volume of the TRC’s final report does not make any reference to the section 38 of the Act, nor to some examples of women’s hearings that were held effectively in camera. This allows us to infer that the Commission did encourage women to describe their stories of sexual harm in a public context, rather than in a private one, for the sake of the healing national journey resulting from the public truth-telling process that the Commission promoted.
- 6.
Sorcha Gunne, in fact, depicts this confrontation as “itself indicative of the new possibilities of post-apartheid space” (2010, p. 169).
- 7.
See Miller (2008, p. 149).
- 8.
The tragedy that went down in history as the Sharpeville Massacre (21 March 1960) refers to an episode of violence occurring at the police station in the township of Sharpeville (in former Transvaal). A crowd of five thousand protesters against the pass laws was eventually attacked by the police, who later claimed that the marchers had begun to stone them. As a consequence, sixty-nine people were shot dead and about two hundred suffered injuries.
- 9.
See, for example, Boraine’s chapter “A South African Tragedy: Winnie Madikizela-Mandela” in A Country Unmasked (2000, pp. 221–257). Here Boraine describes the Mandela United Football Club’s nine-day public hearing (24 November–4 December 1997) and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s ambiguous involvement in the violent actions of her group of “bodyguards”. Madikizela-Mandela had started the Football Club to assist young people who were victims of the violent conflicts in the townships, but, in the course of time, they became a gang of thugs who terrorised people, abducting and killing those they regarded as “sell-outs”, those who were collaborating with the police. Winnie Mandela was particularly involved in the abduction of four youths from a Methodist mission house by members of her football club, and one of the abducted youths, Stompie Moeketsi Seipei, was subsequently found dead. This special hearing was highly contested, especially by the African community, for the Commission’s treatment of Winnie Mandela, who had come to be known as “the Mother of the Nation”.
- 10.
Liatsos argues that “In assuming the form of a historiographic metafiction, the novel challenges the stable boundaries separating fact from fiction to explore the potential of their cross-fertilization” (2006, p. 123).
- 11.
To view the full transcript of the hearing, see “Mandela United Football Club Hearings” at http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/special/mandela/mufc9.htm [accessed January 31, 2019]. See also Tutu ([1999] 2000, pp. 134–35).
- 12.
Michael Stegmann was the presiding judge at the 1991 trial investigating Winnie Mandela’s involvement in the abductions and beatings of four boys, one of whom, the already mentioned Stompie Moeketsi Seipei, was later found dead.
- 13.
Sara Baartman has become one of the most famous Khoikhoi women because she was exhibited as a freak show attraction in nineteenth-century Europe under the name Hottentot Venus. She was exhibited first in London in order to entertain people because of her “exotic” origin and show what were thought of as highly unusual bodily features, such as steatopygia (large buttocks) and elongated labia. She was finally laid to rest 187 years after she left Cape Town for London. Her remains were buried on Women’s Day, 9 August 2002, in the area of her birth, the Gamtoos River Valley in the Eastern Cape. See Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009). In this fascinating volume, Crais and Scully explore the life of Sara Baartman and her “transformation” into the almost mythological figure of the Hottentot Venus.
- 14.
South African Native Affairs Commission (1903–1905) was appointed to formulate a language for the state to talk about, for and on behalf of the natives, along with establishing general principles for governing the lives of the subaltern majority.
- 15.
Significantly, the Act defined a coloured person in a negative fashion with reference to other racial groups, namely, in terms of what it was not rather than asserting what it was. This also reflects the fluidity and ambivalence of coloured identity, suggesting that all racial categories are arbitrary constructs rather than reports of reality. For a more exhaustive analysis on the complex interplay between race, language and cultural difference, see “Race”, Writing, and Difference, ed. by Henry Louis Gates, Jr (1986).
- 16.
In Not White Enough. Not Black Enough, Adhikari provides a body of evidence that the living standards of Coloureds—especially the working classes—have suffered significantly since the establishment of the democratic government.
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Mussi, F. (2020). Trauma: Conflictual Interplay Between Voice and Silence. In: Literary Legacies of the South African TRC. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43055-9_2
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