The Ambiguous Role of Religion in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The Ambiguous Role of Religion in the South African TRC 309

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The Ambiguous Role of Religion in theSouth African Truth and ReconciliationCommission

by Megan Shore and Scott Kline

This article examines the ambiguous role that religion, particularly Christian-ity, played in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)and in South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy. On the onehand, religious-symbolic discourse was an empowered truth-telling discourseused by victims and survivors in recounting their stories of apartheid abuse.Moreover, it was a discourse publicly affirmed and encouraged by TRCleaders such as Desmond Tutu. On the other hand, religious discourse wasprohibited for perpetrators who came forward seeking amnesty; for amnestyapplicants, only a legal-forensic mode of truth-telling was authorized bycommissioners. We argue that this tension between religious and legal dis-course in the TRC has contributed to the establishment of a democraticpolitical culture in South Africa; yet, at the same time, it has also contributedto delays in social and economic justice for victims and survivors.

Historically, international conflict resolution theories have largely ex-cluded religion as a source of peacemaking. Following the Enlighten-ment suspicion of religion, these theories have instead viewed religionessentially as a source of violence that should be superceded by a secularconception of society, politics, and the rule of law. Recently, however,scholars such as Marc Gopin, Scott Appleby, Douglas Johnston, andCynthia Sampson have begun to ask whether religion can contributeto conflict resolution processes, transitional justice theories, and thepractice of diplomacy.1 Their general thesis is that, if religion played asignificant part in people’s lives, and if religion were instrumentalin fuelling a conflict, then resolving the conflict must consider religion,for without that vital component, peacekeepers, politicians, NGOs,diplomats, and conflict-resolution mediators simply fail to deal with thepostconflict reality.

An example of a conflict resolution process in which a dimension ofreligion, specifically Christianity, played a vital role was South Africa’s

PEACE & CHANGE, Vol. 31, No. 3, July 2006© 2006 Peace History Society andPeace and Justice Studies Association

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Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In fact, Christianity playedsuch a large role in the TRC that some observers have criticized theTRC leadership for adopting a religious-redemptive understandingof their mandate and, as Tinyiko Sam Maluleke boldly charged, foradvancing a “theology based on some political and legal hijacking ofnotions such as truth, reconciliation, and forgiveness.”2 Despite theseand other legitimate critiques, the relative success of the Commission asa component of transitional justice in South Africa has led a number ofscholars, most notably Lyn Graybill, to ask whether the TRC is a modelfor future conflict resolution processes or a unique miracle performedthrough the charismatic leadership of President Nelson Mandela andTRC Chair Archbishop Desmond Tutu.3

In this essay, we do not seek to answer the model or miracle ques-tion. Rather, we use the question as an interpretive spectrum to examinethe role that religion played in the TRC and the transformation of SouthAfrican politics and society. As Graybill, John de Gruchy, RichardElphick, and others have clearly demonstrated,4 religion in South Africawas never a private institution solely concerned with the spiritual well-being of individuals. On the one hand, the Dutch Reformed Church wasan institution that promoted the idea that South Africa was a promisedland for the Dutch settlers and, after 1948, legitimately ruled by apart-heid policies. On the other hand, the Black churches and the so-called“prophetic church”5 often advocated for democracy and provided insti-tutional protection for opponents of the apartheid regime. Accordingly,the question we pose in this essay is twofold: How was religion, as a keycomponent of South African civil society, incorporated into the TRC;and how has its inclusion affected the transition from apartheid to ademocratic political culture? To organize this discussion, we start bysituating the TRC in the larger context of previous truth commissionsand their respective mandates. We then examine the ambiguous rolethat religious discourse played in the two public hearings of the TRC.And in the third section, we identify three areas where religion hascontributed to the transformation of South Africa—namely, the dis-covery of moral community, the restructuring of civil society, and thestruggle for socioeconomic justice.6

THE NATURE OF TRUTH COMMISSIONS AND THE TRC

In metaphorical terms, the options that South Africa had for dealingwith its history of apartheid ranged from burying the past to exhuming


it. Not wanting to bury its past, which would have allowed gross hu-man rights abusers to walk away with impunity, South Africa chose toconfront its history by establishing a truth commission. Priscilla Hayner,one of the leading theorists in the burgeoning field of transitionaljustice, defines truth commissions generally as “temporary mechanismsthat are established to investigate a pattern of past human rights abusesor violations of international humanitarian law [and are] tasked withinvestigating, reporting, and recommending reforms, and in the processserve to formally acknowledge past wrongs that were silenced anddenied.”7 Furthermore, she notes that truth commissions typically consistof four characteristics: (1) They focus on the past. (2) They investigate apattern of abuses over a specified period of time. (3) They are temporarybodies that tend to operate for six months to two years and completetheir work with a publication of their findings. And (4) they are offi-cially sanctioned, authorized, or empowered by the state.8 Based onHayner’s criteria, there have been more than 21 truth commissionsaround the world since 1974, including the South African TRC.9

As mechanisms for negotiating justice and national stability in timesof transition, truth commissions have become popular for at least threereasons: First, truth commissions provide an alternative to the post–World War II practice of confronting the past through costly Nuremburg-style trials. Countries that survive civil conflict often find their economiesdestabilized due to export reductions, hyperinflation, unreliable financialmarkets, and, as in the case of South Africa, foreign boycotts andembargos. Also, the cost of obtaining testimonies, vetting witnesses,maintaining a pool of lawyers and judges, and providing infrastructurefor trials on a scale that could handle the volume of South Africa’sabuses would have been exorbitant by any standard. Second, ad hocwar-crime trials too often betray a sense of “victor’s justice.” In SouthAfrica, as in many countries that have survived civil conflict, there wasno apparent victor, but only a collective past full of animosity, abuse,and unhealed wounds. And third, because truth commissions tend to bestructurally flexible and thus more able to adapt their structures to ac-commodate the complexities of internal conflict, they often include othermechanisms for dealing with the past, namely, lustration policies orpurges, financial compensation, blanket amnesty, and symbolic gesturessuch as building monuments or creating memorial days.10

As a strategy to encourage perpetrators to come forward, NelsonMandela’s African National Congress (ANC) struck a compromise withF. W. de Klerk’s National Party (NP) in 1993—South Africa would


establish a truth commission that granted individual amnesty to per-petrators who applied and qualified. As a strategy to include victims’experiences in the TRC, the negotiators planned to gather statementsabout human rights violations and hold public hearings, where storiesrepresentative of apartheid violence would become part of the offi-cial record. To achieve these wide-ranging objectives, the ANC andNP negotiators decided that three committees would constitute theTRC: (1) a Human Rights Violations Committee (HRVC) that collectedstatements from victims and witnesses, and recorded human rightsviolations; (2) an Amnesty Committee (AC) that processed and decidedupon individual applications for amnesty; and (3) a Reparations andRehabilitation Committee (RRC) that was responsible for makingrecommendations for reparation. The HRVC and AC hearings wereintended to be public events, which included live television and radiobroadcasts of the proceedings, while the RRC hearings and delibera-tions were to be closed to the public.

On December 16, 1995, President Mandela appointed 17 com-missioners to the TRC. Seven commissioners were from the legal pro-fession, four were ordained ministers who had been leaders in Christiandenominations, and the rest were from the medical and NGO com-munities. The two most prominent Christian leaders were also the twomost prominent leaders in the TRC: Archbishop Desmond Tutu waschair, while Dr. Alex Boraine was deputy chair.11 Commenting on thereligious makeup of the commissioners, Archbishop Tutu muses, “it isinteresting that the President appointed an Archbishop as Chairpersonof the Commission and not, for instance, a judge, since we were tosome extent a quasi-judicial body.”12 Indeed, Tutu’s ironic musing ex-presses, perhaps unwittingly, an unsettling tension between a religious-redemptive and a legal-political understanding of truth and reconciliationthat remained unresolved throughout the life of the TRC.13

TRUTH-TELLING AND RELIGIOUS DISCOURSE IN THEPUBLIC HEARINGS

The tension between the religious-redemptive and the legal-politicalperspectives had not been planned by the TRC negotiators. As Johnnyde Lange, an ANC parliamentarian involved in the creation of theTRC, has recalled: “During the negotiations that established the TRC,religion was not part of the equation. The TRC was not intended to bea religious process.”14 In retrospect, de Lange thinks that it was the


manner in which the commissioners and staff members implemented themandate that resulted in the incorporation of religion. De Lange’s recol-lection supports Priscilla Hayner’s findings in other commissions; thatis, while a truth commission is a legislated creation, those directing theprocess have the power to shape the mandate and provide interpretationfor its particular form and tone.15

This interpretive latitude had a profound effect on one of the cen-tral tenets of the TRC, namely, the definition of “truth.” Remarkably, itwas not until the TRC final report was published in 1999 that theCommission publicly acknowledged that it had in fact been operatingwith four different meanings of “truth”: (1) factual or forensic truth, (2)personal and narrative truth, (3) social truth, and (4) healing and re-storative truth.16 The first, factual or forensic truth, had been used tocarry out the mandate of compiling “a comprehensive report which setsout its activities and findings, based on factual and objective informa-tion and evidence collected or received by it or placed at its disposal.”17

The second notion of truth, personal and narrative, was employed as anopportunity for victims and perpetrators to tell their own personal sto-ries, in whatever terms they wished. These “narrative truths” helpedfulfill a TRC objective of recording and creating a national memory ofSouth Africa’s experience under apartheid.18 The third truth, social truth,was involved in recording the type of truth that emerges through socialinteraction, discussion, and debate, what Judge Albie Sachs, a framerof the TRC, called “dialogue truth.”19 The fourth truth, healing andrestorative truth, was, the Final Report states, the “kind of truth thatplaces facts and what they mean within the context of human relation-ships.”20 This notion of truth went beyond the recording of mere factualand objective truth to deal with truth that heals and repairs the damageof the past.

In the case of the TRC, the mandate of uncovering the truth ofSouth Africa’s past took on not only different forms, but also differenttones in the two public hearings. In effect, the public HRVC and the AChearings, which became the face of the TRC, not only operated withtwo different concepts of truth, but they also authorized, whether byinformal prompting or by threatening criminal prosecution, legitimatetruth-telling discourses. Although proponents of the TRC, such as Tutu,have been quick to note that these different meanings of truth were notmutually exclusive,21 in practice, the HRVC hearings did become theplace where a personal, religious-redemptive discourse was authorized,while the AC hearings were restricted to legal-forensic discourse.


Truth and the HRVC Hearings

The HRVC had a mandate to collect accounts of human rightsabuses. Based on 21,000 victim statements, the TRC identified 37,000human rights violations. After collecting victim accounts and verifyingas many as possible, the TRC brought 1,819 of them forward forpresentation at the HRVC public hearings. Over the life of the TRC,143 public hearings took place in 61 towns across South Africa. Ineffect, the HRVC hearings provided a forum for South Africans tocome together and express their experiences of apartheid. As a result,the setting for these hearings often took on a quality of sacred space.Recalling her experience of attending the HRVC hearings, Lyn Graybillwrites, “The hearings resemble a church service more than a judiciaryproceeding ...”22 As the TRC Final report points out, this resemblancewas no coincidence, for the TRC administration had intentionallycreated an environment that fostered practices that bore a resemblanceto recognizable ceremonial practices.23 From the outset, the HRVC hear-ings were geared to be victim-centered. They were intended as a safe, ifnot sacred, space in which ceremonial movements and verbal expres-sions of truth were able to take place, with the HRVC committee play-ing the role of chief facilitator.

The ceremony convening the HRVC hearings set the tone for the restof the committee’s work. Archbishop Tutu opened the proceedings bylighting a candle in memory of those who had died under the apartheidregime—Tutu’s candle lighting was accompanied by a recitation of thesenames. Everyone attending the hearing joined in singing the Xhosa hymn“Lizalis’ indinga lakho” (“Let your will be done”). Then Tutu prayed:

Oh God of justice, mercy and peace, we long to put behind us allthe pain and division of apartheid together with all the violencewhich ravaged our communities in its name. And we ask you tobless this Truth and Reconciliation Commission with your wisdomand guidance as it commences its important work of redressing themany wrongs done both here and throughout our land ... We askthat the Holy Spirit pour out its gifts of justice, mercy and compas-sion upon the Commissioners and their colleagues in every sphere,that the truth may be recognized and brought to light during thehearings; and that the end may bring about that reconciliation andlove for our neighbor which our Lord himself commended. We askthis in the holy name of Jesus Christ our Savior.24


Tutu’s prayer for the Holy Spirit to help South Africa reach the truthwas not an American-style act of civil religion—that is, a discourse inwhich God’s name is invoked ceremonially in the public sphere, but isthen generally excluded from political debate. Rather, Tutu’s prayerwas a political act that validated religious discourse as a legitimate modeof truth-telling.

Tutu’s authorization of truth-telling via religious discourse was fur-ther legitimated in his opening remarks. He stated:

We are charged to unearth the truth about our dark past, to lay theghosts of the past so they will not return to haunt us and that willthereby contribute to the healing of the traumatized and woundedpeople ... in this manner to promote national unity and reconcilia-tion. For Christians it is a significant thing. Now the first hearinghappened at Easter time, when we commemorate the victory of lifeover death, of light over darkness, of goodness over evil, of justiceover injustice, of truth over lies, of laughter, of joy, of peace ofcompassion over their ghastly counterparts in the glorious resurrec-tion of our Savior Jesus Christ.25

The overt use of Christian language was an empowering mechanism formany of the victims and survivors. In telling their stories of humanrights violations in their own words, as the TRC encouraged them todo, they were free, if not at times prompted, to use a religious narrativeto tell their truth.

In his examination of religious discourse in the TRC, the SouthAfrican theologian John de Gruchy observes, “For many victims theirstories related to the Christian narrative of salvation history. In otherwords, through story-telling primary and secondary expressions of recon-ciliation made connections. Their stories were personalized cameos oflives shaped by faith, forgiveness, and hope derived from the gospel butlived out amidst the social and political traumas of our time.”26 Thecase of William Henry Little, who was injured in a bomb explosion,supports de Gruchy’s observation that redemptive suffering was acommon trope used by victims who appealed to Christian narratives.Little stated:

Before I commence with my story I would like to take this opportu-nity of thanking God for his saving and sustaining grace, for havingkept me, to enable me this morning to tell my story. You might


observe that I am wearing white, I have not been chosen to repre-sent the South Africa cricket side, but I represent the resurrection ofmy Lord in whom I believe. It shows that notwithstanding pain,notwithstanding sorrow, and suffering, that there can be hope, thatthere can be reconciliation and that there can be life.27

Indeed, the redemptive-suffering narrative was an empowering, eman-cipatory discourse with both personal and political meaning. On thepersonal–spiritual–psychological level, this discourse provided strength tovictims by assuring them that their suffering had transcendent meaning.This discourse also provided many victims’ family members, of whommany were mothers of murdered sons, the opportunity to speak aboutthe injustice of losing their children to a corrupt political system—amotif that is central to the Christian tradition. On the political level, theHRVC not only provided a space for religious language, but it alsoencouraged victims and their surviving family members to tell the truththrough their personal narratives as a means of healing South Africa. Inthe end, the HRVC hearings broke ground that no other truth commis-sion or transitional process had dared to disturb: they sanctioned reli-gious discourse as a legitimate mode of truth-telling that had bothpersonal and political meaning.

Truth and the AC Hearings

In contrast to the HRVC hearings, which were victim-centered, theAC’s sole mandate was to uncover the truth of apartheid’s violencethrough the voices of the perpetrators. During negotiations between theANC and the NP, it became clear that without an amnesty incentive,the NP would have balked at a quick handover of power. This wouldhave spelled even further civil conflict, a situation neither side desired.Moreover, the ANC wanted access to perpetrators’ stories of humanrights abuses to generate a holistic picture of the violence and abuse underapartheid. With no prototype on which to model the TRC’s policy ofindividual amnesty, the framers decided on a process that would grantindividual criminal amnesty in exchange for truth. The only stipulationswere that perpetrators told the truth, that the crime was politically mo-tivated, and that it occurred between the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960and the first democratic elections in 1994. With this quasilegal mandatein mind, President Mandela initially appointed three judges to run theAC. Unlike the HRVC, which involved both Tutu and Boraine, the AC


was directed exclusively by the legal profession and operated autono-mously within the TRC. By law, no commissioner outside the AC hadany input in the amnesty decision-making process. As the TRC FinalReport shows, this leadership arrangement led to certain unexpectedconsequences. The Report states, “Due to the adjudicative nature of itsfunctions, the Committee’s procedures soon started to resemble a judi-cial process. This stood in complete contrast to the nonadversarial hear-ings of the other two committees of the Commission.”28

To be sure, the AC judges were not solely responsible for the toneof the AC hearings. Lawyers also played a key part. As the Final Reportindicates with some regret, “lawyers tended to treat hearings as criminaltrials.”29 Lawyers represented the applicants, the victims, and the Com-mission. At the hearings, the applicant’s lawyer usually began with anopening address, which was followed by the applicant’s testimony. Anywitnesses that the applicant wished to call would then testify. Once theapplicant and the applicant’s witness had testified, the victims and sur-vivors of the human rights violations in question were allowed to giveevidence. Then the Committee could call witnesses and anyone they felthad information that was of interest to the proceedings. Following this,anyone who had been implicated could rebut the allegations. Cross-examination by the legal representation of anyone who gave evidencewas then allowed. After all the evidence had been presented, the appli-cant or a legal representative would conclude the hearing by addressingthe Committee.

Due to the austere courtroom conditions created by the legal pro-fession, and given the amnesty-for-truth incentive, perpetrator truth-telling in the AC hearings was typically devoid of both emotion andreligious language. As a condition for amnesty, applicants were requiredto list the facts of the event that was in question—remorse was never arequirement for amnesty. The first amnesty hearing provides an exam-ple of this fact-finding process. It involved the case of Boy Diale, whohad applied for amnesty for a murder he had committed in the mid-1980s. In the following exchange, Judge Mgoepe, the Committee mem-ber representing the TRC, had grown frustrated by Diale’s testimony,which had focused primary on his intentions:

Judge Mgoepe: It may be that the question was not put across toyou, as I put it. My question was not why you assaulted him. Myquestion was how did you assault him. What did you do? We needto know that. Did you chop him with a panga? Then go and pick


up a stone and hit him on his head and he tried to run, you trippedhim and then held him down and so on, et cetera? These are,however, unpleasant it may be for you to say that, I’m afraid this iswhat should be done.

Mr. Diale: If it is a request from the Committee, I will have to stateit clearly. I kicked him and I hit him with my fists and I strangledhis neck. That’s the part I took in the killing.30

In other words, Diale had to disclose just the details of the murder, the“truth” of the murder.

The Diale case and the subsequent hearings established a precedentthat the AC judges were uninterested in why many of the murders werecommitted, sometimes not even whether the killings were politicallymotivated, which was one of the AC’s mandates. From the AC commit-tee’s perspective, any explanation only obscured the facts, which couldspeak for themselves. In the formal proceedings, then, the AC commis-sioners remained aloof to the psychological and spiritual struggles of anapplicant. Informally, however, perpetrators were often encouraged tomeet with consenting victims and survivors outside the hearings, with amember of the TRC present, at which time perpetrators would occa-sionally invoke a religious-redemptive narrative.31 Despite a number ofcases in which individual reconciliation took place during these ad hocmeetings, the formal proceedings maintained the principle that religiousdiscourse was not for perpetrators.

A Paradoxical Understanding of Truth

Mahmood Mamdani, a Ugandan-born political scientist and arespected critic of the TRC, has argued that “the real power of the Com-mission was exercised through the work of its main body [the HumanRights Violations Committee]. That was the power to define the termsof the social debate, and in doing so, define the parameters of truth-seeking.”32 While Mamdani’s point is well taken, it is overstated. TheHRVC did exert a tremendous amount of power in defining the terms ofthe debate, but the HRVC hearings were not solely responsible for theparameters of truth-seeking or, by extension, truth-telling. Both halvesof the Commission’s public hearings, the AC and the HRVC, worked toestablish modes of truth-seeking and truth-telling. While the record isclear that these separate hearings were not intentionally created to stand


in dialectical tension with each other as a means to propel South Africaforward into a democratic era, the upshot of these two committees hasbeen that their two modes, along with the less public social and therestorative notions of truth in the other TRC hearings, have contributedto the reformation of South Africa’s political culture.

Remarkably, the tension between these different notions of truthhas often gone unanalyzed even in the most respected discussions of theTRC. In their 1997 defense of the TRC, Kader Asmal, Louise Asmal,and Ronald Suresh Roberts set out to confront critics who charged thatthe hearings were little more than futile exercises that would lead tohistorical relativism. To counter these critics, they argued that the mainfunction of the Commission was to expose the truth about the apartheidregime as a means to win support for the new regime as somethingpatently different. They write, “In these early years of consolidatingdemocracy, there must be a galvanizing and self-critical vision of thegoal of our society. And such a vision in turn requires a clear-sightedand constantly debated grasp of what was wrong with the past.”33 Theyfurther argue, “An important goal of the commission is to act as acatalyst for swift and thorough disclosure of past horrors, in order toaccelerate—and eventually end—the steady and corrosive drip of pastpathologies into the new order.”34 As a result, Asmal and his coauthorshave little regard for those academics and ideologues who live in “thelollipop world of superficial and childish evenhandedness” with its “play-ground relativism.”35 In their view, there is no moral equivalence be-tween the atrocities of the apartheid regime and the Black South Africanresistance movement—the apartheid regime was evil, it was a crimeagainst humanity, and blacks often felt they had to resort to violence tofree themselves. Accordingly, if the new South Africa is going to bedifferent, the oppressed should not have to wait on postmodernists,academics, and ideologues to rehash tired debates about whether writ-ing, or this case acknowledging, a history is or ought to be objective andthus somehow free from moral and political judgments. Instead, to makethe transition to a democratic society, the victims and survivors requirehard facts that are recognized and protected by legal and politicalbodies. However, despite their demands for hard truth, Asmal and hiscolleagues acknowledge that contesting the truth is a vital activity indemocratic societies. Engaging the work of Jacques Derrida and MichelFoucault, they argue that the TRC was not created to establish an ANCideology or to promulgate an “official” history. Rather, the TRC’s in-tended purpose was to generate a “shared and ceaselessly debated


memory” of the past, or “a complex, perhaps contradictory, set of nar-ratives about the past.”36

As the British scholar Nigel Biggar rightly observes, Asmal and hiscoauthors do not seem to be aware of an internal contradiction in theirargument; that is, how can “ceaseless debate” resulting in conflictingnarratives achieve the public establishment of “the truth” about theapartheid past? To Biggar’s credit, he says that it could: “If debate isceaseless, then the past must indeed remain contested. But this need notbe true about all of the past, only some of it. Ceaseless debate mightrage over an ever-narrowing range of topics, while consensus expandsover the remainder ... But for consensus to grow at all, there must becertain realities—facts—to which conflicting stories are accountable,against which their veracity can be measured, and to which those whotell them (if they are honest) must yield.”37 Indeed, the TRC, with itsseparate public hearings and its practical authorization of separate dis-courses, contributed both to the ongoing debate around South Africa’shistory—with the inclusion of victims, survivors, and perpetrators—aswell as to the reformation of South Africa’s political, social, and eco-nomic structures.

The questions we must now address are where in South Africansociety has religion made a contribution, and to what extent has reli-gion been an effective participant in the building of a just society.

THE STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS OF RELIGION INSOUTH AFRICA’S TRANSITION

While the TRC had many flaws, which should be taken with the utmostseriousness, we cannot overlook the revolutionary work the Commis-sion did in contributing to the creation of a new, democratic SouthAfrica. To be sure, divisions remain in South Africa: the country re-mains radically divided along racial and class lines, and high crime ratesand rampant unemployment, especially in the townships, still threatento destabilize the country. Yet, as the 2004 elections would seem toindicate, South Africa has firmly entrenched democratic structures aswell as relatively secure social spaces, from churches to football clubs,in which civil society can operate. As a transitional mechanism, theTRC should be credited with fostering much of this success. Moreover,religion, as a part of this transitional process, should be examined forthe contribution it has made in varying degrees to the formation of anew South Africa. Because an extended examination is not possible in


this forum, we want to highlight three areas where the inclusion ofreligion in the TRC aided in the transition to a new South Africa: (1) thefounding of a “moral community,” (2) the reforming of civil society,and (3) the ongoing demands for socioeconomic justice in South Africa.

Founding a Moral Community

On a moral–political level, the TRC provided a mechanism in whichboth victims and perpetrators could become subjects. In his analysis oftruth commissions in general, Michael Ignatieff states, “The past is anargument and the function of truth commissions, like the function ofhonest historians, is simply to purify the argument, to narrow the rangeof permissible lies.”38 If Ignatieff is correct, and if Biggar has properlycaptured the paradox of truth within the TRC, then we should under-stand truth as an ongoing argument among various interlocutors. Withthis perspective, contestations about the truth are more than mere aca-demic debates about historical facts. Rather, they are rich moral conver-sations or arguments that take place among subjects or interpreters, andconstitute, for however long a period, common moral agreement. Forinstance, in their most basic form, conversations and arguments requireresponses from participants. A conversation that begins to excluderesponses from a participant may either continue as a series of mono-logues or with a participant walking away. In either case, conversationceases. By contrast, continuing in conversation always requires the con-sent of the interlocutors. In this way, interlocutors are responsible toeach other insofar as they always respond in ways that make the other’sresponse possible—even if the response is a proposal to end conversa-tion based on a mutual decision. In short, conversation-arguments cantake place only on the foundation of the mutual recognition of parti-cipants as equal subjects and as bearers of human dignity.

In the case of the TRC and South Africa, another “official” historyfrom the government, in this instance the ANC’s version, would havesilenced a number of South Africans, including those who had commit-ted human rights abuses for political reasons. Likewise, any transitionaljustice process, whether a truth commission or a Nuremburg-style trial,that sought only facts from and about perpetrators would have ex-cluded the voices of the victims and the survivors. As a means to includevictims, survivors, and perpetrators in the gathering of South Africa’shistory, the TRC chose to hold both the HRVC and AC hearings. As wehave noted, in the HRVC hearings, victims could tell their stories, often


in religious terms, and yet have their “truths” politically affirmed. TheCommittee validated their mode of personal truth-telling not just aspersonal truth but also as political truth.

By contrast, in the AC hearings, perpetrators seeking amnesty wereoften confronted by the lawyers as the “evil other,”39 and thus beyondthe scope of subjecthood or reconciliation. Some applicants exacer-bated this moral problem by lying about their actions. Other applicantsopenly acknowledged that they were motivated to come forward onlybecause of possible prosecution—again, the TRC never required remorseas a condition of amnesty. Of course, these responses do not suggest anintersubjective encounter. As Kant’s categorical imperatives made evi-dent, lying and willing an exception for individual gain are indicative ofan unjust relationship rooted in a subject–object dichotomy, in whichcase a subject refuses to acknowledge the other as a subject to whom heor she must respond truthfully, if at all. Despite these challenges, the AChearings did enable some perpetrators to reenter post-apartheid societywith a fresh start, which has had a profound effect on the constitutionof a new South African moral community.

While no one should expect any one institution to create anintersubjective moral community out of a violent past, the TRC’s deci-sion to make both the HRVC and the AC hearings public went a longway in establishing the conditions for new moral relationships in SouthAfrica. On the one hand, the HRVC hearings empowered victims andsurvivors by legitimizing their personal, and in many cases religious,narratives. It enabled their voices to become part of South Africa’scollective memory. On the other hand, the AC hearings not onlyfunctioned as a means of granting legal amnesty and a new status toperpetrators, but it also helped restore a number of perpetrators to moralcommunity and thus to the moral debate about the future of SouthAfrica.40 Indeed, this new relationship is indicative of the African con-cept of ubuntu, a Xhosa and Zulu term that may be loosely translated,“a person is a person through other persons.”41 This new relationship isalso at the heart of what is often referred to as “restorative justice.”Both ubuntu and restorative justice, with their emphasis on extendingthe bounds of the moral community, could conceivably form the basisof a still sought after “national” reconciliation between the two SouthAfricas. In effect, exhuming the past and arguing about it from differentperspectives is not simply remembering what happened. Rather, debat-ing the past is the establishing, or perhaps “re-membering,” of a moralcommunity based on the universal dignity of human beings.


Reforming Civil Society

Under apartheid, religious institutions, both the pro-apartheid DutchReformed churches and the Black churches, maintained relative au-tonomy from the state. Perhaps more than any other single institution inapartheid South Africa, the South African Council of Churches (SACC),which consisted of 20 member churches, including the large Presbyte-rian, Methodist, and Anglican churches, wielded tremendous social andpolitical power. With some 12 to 15 million members (of whom 80percent were black) in the 1970s, SACC became an outspoken oppon-ent of apartheid during the tenure of its general-secretary DesmondTutu (1978–1985). Under Tutu’s leadership, SACC became moreAfricanized, and with that, found itself open to charges that it hadbecome a haven for black power and resistance. Indeed, during the early1980s, SACC had strengthened contacts with the ANC and other exiledanti-apartheid groups in Africa, Europe, and North America. Yet, dueto the churches’ international ties, along with growing pressures fromthe international political community, church leaders often found thatthe apartheid regime had to maintain a free space in which open andfrank dialogue about the regime could occur. By 1985, and following adeclared state of emergency, a group of mainly black theologianspublished the now-famous Kairos Document, which spelled out in theo-logical language the injustices of apartheid.42 Because of the popularityof the Kairos Document, SACC, which had always been a moderateorganization, was compelled to affirm its general ideas, which did notrule out violence.

Because the churches had been such a potent force in civil societyunder apartheid, they were one of the few institutions that had both theorganizational capability and the infrastructure to assist in establishingand conducting a truth commission. At the outset, the appointment ofTutu as chair and Boraine as deputy chair of the TRC gave a clear signalthat the new government required the input of religious organizations.As the TRC proceeded, the churches typically offered their services inconducting interviews with victims and survivors, transcribing state-ments, and acting as translators. In the more remote areas of SouthAfrica, the involvement of the churches was a necessity, for withouttheir inclusion, there would have been insufficient infrastructure, equip-ment, and staffing to support statement collection and public hearings.As a structural issue, then, the involvement of religious organizationswas crucial to the work of the TRC.


A more complex issue was how religious organizations were goingto transition from apartheid to democracy and, on an even larger scale,how civil society as a whole would respond to the social and politicaltransformations. There were at least five possible responses. First, non-Christian organizations, including the smaller Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist,and indigenous communities, could have boycotted the Commissionbecause of its overtly Christian character. Second, the black Christianchurches and other groups critical of apartheid could have thrown theirsupport behind the ANC and become an arm of the state, much as theDutch Reform churches had become under the NP. Third, the theolo-gically conservative Christian churches could have balked at the idea thatthe churches were mixing in politics. At the time of transition, a numberof conservatives feared that the churches were going to be co-opted intoa debased secular government that used theological language only forlegitimacy. Fourth, some influential black theologians and pastors couldhave dismissed the TRC as a liberal-elitist process that disavowed blackAfrican values and excluded such responses as vengeance; likewise,Afrikaners could have dismissed the process as a witch-hunt. And fifth,the churches and other religious organizations could have adopted aprinciple of critical solidarity, which would have meant they generallyaccepted the democratic principles introduced by the ANC, but refusedto extend a blanket endorsement of the governing party or their poli-cies. To varying degrees, this fifth response was the most popular.

Despite a number of public denunciations from certain blacktheologians and Afrikaner churchmen, the vast majority of churchesand other religious communities chose to participate in the TRC processby offering statements in the Faith Communities Hearings in 1997. TheFinal Report, prepared by the Research Institute on Christianity in SouthAfrica (RICSA), indicated that the Commission recognized the importanceof transitioning religious institutions into a new political reality by pro-viding them the public space to air their own experiences under apartheid.The RICSA report was especially appreciative of those groups who hadthe courage to apologize for supporting, often through their silence, theoppressive regime. Yet, it also lamented that, for a number of organiza-tions, the transition since 1994 had resulted in a disengagement fromthe democratic process. The report states that “it must be observed thatfaith communities seem to have gone the way of the business sector inclaiming that ‘now that society has changed’ they can go on building-uptheir own institutions. Another reason for having faith communities aspart of the TRC process, therefore, is to remind them that, like the


business sector, they have a moral obligation to be involved in the trans-formation of a society they so profoundly affected.”43 In other words,the TRC had hoped that the religious communities would have adopteda more engaged approach to critical solidarity, which is unsurprising,given the influence that critical theologians such as John de Gruchy(RICSA), Charles Villa-Vicencio (TRC Research Director), and Tutu(TRC Chair) had on the process.

As an element of a transitional justice strategy, the inclusion ofreligion as a part of civil society transition can be a key component inbuilding a sustainable peace and creating a democratic culture. To besure, this process does require some reassessment of current thinking onthe role of civil society. For instance, scholars such as Jürgen Habermasand Iris Marion Young have argued that civil society is defined bythe associative activities that take place apart from state and marketintrusion. In Habermas’s terms, they are activities structured in the so-called “lifeworld” and created primarily through voluntary commun-icative interaction rather than by systemic imperatives from the stateor economic entities. In her book Inclusion and Democracy (2000),Young examines the ways excluded communities are handled in already-existing democracies. She writes, “... where there are structural socialand economic injustices, many of those who suffer such injustices arelikely to be excluded, silenced, or marginalized in the formal democraticpolitical process as well. This political inequality tends to create condi-tions in which the social and economic injustice or marginalization isnot likely to be addressed as a problem by legislators and other publicofficials.” She concludes, “Civil society offers a way out of this circle,one of the only ways.”44

While Young fails in this book to treat adequately the role that civilsociety plays in fostering justice in situations such as East Germany,East Timor, South Africa, and other countries that have made transi-tions to democracies, her analysis is consistent with the role that reli-gion played in pre-1994 South Africa—that is, it enabled many blacksto counter the dehumanizing effects of apartheid ideology by articulat-ing a self-affirmative and politically robust conception of blackness. Thetension created in South Africa was that the civil society associationsthat had been critical of the NP and apartheid were now in a position ofstrength. By becoming involved in the government-backed TRC process,then, these groups ran the risk of becoming instruments of the newstate. For the TRC framers, though, this risk had to be taken in order topromote democratic debate in various sectors of South African society.


Undoubtedly, some critics will charge that this was a top-down, pater-nalistic move on the part of the new government and an unnecessaryintervention into civil society. While such accusations are generallylegitimate, and should always be taken seriously in the construction oftransitional justice mechanisms, the TRC had the foresight to provide amechanism and a venue for faith communities, as an essential part ofSouth African civil society, to redefine themselves in relation to the newpolitical situation. As a result, the black churches and the “propheticchurches” have affirmed the ANC’s democratic and human-rights-basedapproach to governance, yet they remain free to criticize the ANC’seconomic, labor, health, and other policies they see adversely affectingSouth Africans.

Seeking Socioeconomic Justice

Alex Boraine suggests that one advantage of the TRC was that itattempted to facilitate “inclusive truth-telling.” He explains that despitethe specific and limited mandate of the TRC, “its attempt to help restorethe moral order must be seen in the context of social and economictransformation. These are two sides of a single coin. Truth-telling is acritical part of this transformation which challenges myths, half-truths,denials and lies.”45 Assuming that Boraine is correct, and we contendthat he is, then we can see seen how the HRVC fostered personal-narrative truth and the AC fostered factual-forensic truth. We can alsosee that the factual-forensic truth from perpetrators was exchanged foramnesty. What remains to be seen is the recompense that victims andsurvivors were to receive for telling their stories—namely social andeconomic justice through reparations.

The third, and least public, committee of the TRC, the Reparationand Rehabilitation Committee (RRC), was given the mandate to makerecommendations regarding reparations to victims and survivors of grossviolations of human rights, all in an attempt to restore their human andcivil dignity.46 Once the TRC had suspended its work in October 1998,the RRC soon became the most controversial aspect of the TRC processbecause reparations had not been fully accorded. The RRC could onlyrecommend reparations; the President’s Fund, which was run by thepresident and parliament, was responsible for implementing the recom-mendations and making payments to the victims and survivors of grossviolations of human rights. One of the most provocative claims againstthe RRC has been that it has basically re-victimized the victims by not


offering reparations in a timely fashion. In contrast to the amnestyapplicants, who knew almost immediately whether they receivedamnesty, victims waited, and continue to wait, with little hope foradequate compensation. Meanwhile, a number of perpetrators walkthe streets with amnesty. As Wendy Orr, a former commissioner, hasremarked, a thorough healing for victims will in all likelihood not occuruntil there have been some economic reparations. In fact, the delaycould spell a “deepening perception of justice denied.”47

What is holding up the recommendations of the RRC? To be sure,there are a number of barriers, including economic pressure from bigbusiness and the irrational fears of inciting the kind of conflict that hasplagued Robert Mugabi’s land reform projects in Zimbabwe. Perhapsthe greatest barrier, though, is the modern proclivity to radicalize thepublic/private, secular/religious distinction of truth-telling in the TRC.To be clear, we have already argued in this essay that formal recogni-tion of a group’s religious worldview by transitional structures can becrucial to the transitional justice process, both as a means of affirmingthe political truth of one’s personal experience and as a means oftransitioning institutions within civil society. Yet, there is a lingeringambiguity concerning the role of religion in the TRC. Though it wentlargely unnoticed at the time, and it is still not yet well-theorized in themost recent conflict resolution literature, the HRVC’s authorization ofpersonal, religious narratives had actually fostered the idea that reli-gious discourse was exclusively a victim’s discourse. By the end of theTRC, the unintended fusion of the religious-victim discourse(s) fit alltoo well into the modern dichotomies of the public versus private spheres,the rational (objective) versus the emotional (subjective), reason (thefactual) versus faith (the symbolic), the political versus the personal, andeven national reconciliation versus individual reconciliation.

In real terms, although truth-telling via religious discourse in theHRVC hearings assisted some of the victims and survivors, insofar as itgave meaning to their suffering and helped them move toward indi-vidual forgiveness and reconciliation, this mode of truth telling has notreadily translated into real economic or social justice. Rather, the pri-vate, religious symbolic language used by the victims and survivors inthe HRVC has been good only for symbolic reparations—a monument,a small conference, or perhaps a mention in parliament.48 By contrast,those perpetrators seeking amnesty were obligated to use objective,legal language, which “silenced the more complex personal dimensionsof their actions in favor of the political.”49 The often bitter reality for


survivors and victims is that perpetrators who were granted amnestyreceived immediate legal and political reward for their truth-telling, whilevictims and survivors have been forced to wait for their compensation.

While symbolic reparations can be valuable political acts, the realityis that, when they stand alone, they can too often be used by those inpower to silence and marginalize voices seeking social and economicjustice. As a lesson for future truth commissions, if religion is to beincluded in them, then the challenge of translating religious discourseinto financial reparations must become a priority. Given the authorita-tive, highly empowered modern discourses of law and economics, it ismuch easier for the legal-judicial version of truth-telling to translate intoamnesty as well as financial and political reparations than it is for areligious-personal version of truth-telling. The TRC’s mandate to focusonly on specific acts of human rights violations, which deterred anyassessment of the structural injustices of apartheid, both past and present,and its ability to offer recommendations for retribution has failed manyvictims and survivors. While religion may have a positive effect in tran-sitional justice mechanisms, the TRC highlights the risk that victims, inparticular, incur when their religious narratives are disregarded and theirreal political and economic concerns are dismissed as private matters.As a way forward, truth commissions need to ensure that religious dis-course is not limited to victims and survivors, nor limited to individualforgiveness and symbolic reparation, but extended to all who wish toinvoke such language with the knowledge that their actions will havereal social, political, and economic effects.

CONCLUSION

In this essay, we argued that the inclusion of religion in the TRC was animportant element in enabling victims and survivors to tell the truthabout their life under apartheid. We also argued that the inclusion ofreligious organizations in the faith committee hearings contributed tothe transition of a key component of South African civil society, namely,the churches. However, we noted that religious truth-telling was tooeasily dismissed as a private concern when issues such as amnesty, re-parations, and even national reconciliation came to the fore. The role ofreligion in the TRC was undeniably ambiguous. In our estimation,though, the inclusion of religion in the process was a necessary step ina peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy. Though neither amiracle nor a model, the TRC stands as an example, however flawed, of


a transitional justice body that found a religious dimension of a peoplevital to a successful transition. Indeed, religion need not be a “conver-sation stopper,” as the pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty onceasserted.50 Rather, religion can and in some cases should be understoodas a conversation facilitator. The challenge for conflict resolution theor-ists and practitioners is to determine, on a case-by-case basis, boththe extent to which religion frames a people’s reality and the extentto which modern-liberal mechanisms such as truth commissions canembrace religion as a truth-telling discourse.

NOTES

1. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, andReconciliation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); Marc Gopin, HolyWar, Holy Peace: How Religion Can Bring Peace to the Middle East (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2002); Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson,eds., Religion: The Missing Dimension of Statecraft (New York: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1994); Douglas Johnston, ed., Faith-Based Diplomacy: TrumpingRealpolitik (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

2. Richard Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in SouthAfrica: Legitimising the Post-Apartheid State (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2001); Carl Niehaus, “Reconciliation in South Africa: Is Religion Rel-evant?” in Facing the Truth: South Africa Faith Communities and the Truth andReconciliation Commission, eds. James Cochrane, John de Gruchy, and StephenMartin (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1999), 81–90; and Piet Meiring,“The Baruti Versus the Lawyers: The Role of Religion in the TRC Process,”in Looking Back Reaching Forward: Reflections on the Truth and Reconcilia-tion Commission of South Africa, eds. Charles Villa-Vicencio and WilhelmVerwoerd (Cape Town, South Africa: University of Cape Town Press, 2000),123–31; Tinyiko Sam Maluleke, “Dealing Lightly with the Wound of My Peo-ple,” Missionalia 25 (1997), http://www.geocities.com/missionalia/maluleke.htm(accessed March 20, 2005).

3. Lyn S. Graybill, Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Miracleor Model? (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002); also Russell Daye,Political Forgiveness: Lessons from South Africa (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press,2004).

4. Lyn S. Grabill, Religion and Resistance Politics in South Africa (Westport,CT: Praeger, 1995); John de Gruchy, Theology and Ministry in Context andCrisis: A South African Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing,


1987); Richard Elphick and Rodney Davenport, eds., Christianity in SouthAfrica: A Political, Social and Cultural History (Berkeley: University of Califor-nia Press, 1997).

5. The “prophetic church” is a designation used to identify theologiansand churches (e.g., the South African Council of Churches, SACC) that drew onEuropean political theology, various liberation theologies, and critical socialtheory to engage in political critique. This perspective is sometimes referred toas “contextual theology.” See, for example, Willa Boesak, God’s WrathfulChildren (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1995); John W. de Gruchyand Charles Villa-Vicencio, eds., Doing Theology in Context: South AfricanPerspectives (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis; Cape Town: David Phillip, 1994).

6. The first two sections of this essay are based on Megan Shore’s doctoralresearch on the role of religion in the TRC (University of Leeds). The third partstems from Scott Kline’s work in religious–political ethics. Both authors wish tothank Nigel Biggar, Kevin Ward, David Seljak, and the anonymous reviewers fortheir valuable comments.

7. Priscilla Hayner, “Past Truths, Present Dangers: The Role of OfficialTruth Seeking in Conflict Resolution and Prevention,” in International ConflictResolution After the Cold War, eds. Paul C. Stern and Daniel Druckman (Wash-ington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2003), 339.

8. Priscilla Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Facing the Challenge of TruthCommissions (New York: Routledge, 2002), 14.

9. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, 14.10. See Hayner, “Past Truths, Present Dangers,” 341; Alexandra Barahona

de Brito, Carmen Gonzalez-Enriquez, and Paloma Aguilar eds., Politics ofMemory: Transitional Justice in Democratizing Societies (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2001).

11. Tutu had been the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town and a NobelPeace Prize winner in 1984. Boraine had been President of the South AfricanMethodist Church and, from 1980 to 1986, a member of South Africa’sparliament.

12. Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday,1999), 80.

13. Cf. TRC Final Report, vol. 5, chs. 1 and 3.14. Personal interview with Johnny de Lange, Cape Town, South Africa

(November 27, 2002).15. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, 213.16. TRC Final Report, vol. 1, ch. 5, 110–14.17. TRC Final Report, vol. 1, ch. 5, 111.18. Boraine, Country Unmasked, 289.


19. TRC Final Report, vol. 1, ch. 5, 113.20. TRC Final Report, vol. 1, ch. 5, 114.21. Tutu, No Future, 26.22. Graybill, “South Africa’s TRC,” 46.23. The final report noted that “all hearings were to have a ceremonial

aspect.” TRC Final Report vol. 5, chs. 1 and 3.24. Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness, 113 (emphasis added).25. Case: EC0007/96 East London, Name: Nohle Mohape, Date: April 15,

1996, http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/hrvtrans/hrvel1/mohape.htm (accessed March 21,2005).

26. John de Gruchy, Reconciliation: Restoring Justice (Minneapolis:Fortress Press, 2002), 23.

27. Case: CT00802 Cape Town, Name: William Henry Little, Date: April22, 1996, http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/hrvtrans/heide/ct00802.htm (accessed March21, 2005).

28. TRC Final Report, vol. 6,29. TRC Final Report, vol. 6, sec. 1, chs.1 and 35.30. Case: 0081/96 Phokeng, Name: Boy Diale, Date: May 20, 1996.

http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/amntrans/phokeng/phokeng.htm (March 21, 2005).31. See Brandon Hamber, “The Burdens of Truth: An Evaluation of the

Psychological Support Services and Initiatives Undertaken by the South AfricanTruth and Reconciliation Commission,” American Imago 55 (1998): 9–28. Fora visual example, see the documentary Long Night’s Journey into Day (2000),produced by Iris Films. The emphasis on informal reconciliation was an ad hocmechanism that the “National Unity and Reconciliation Act” (1994) pitched inthe early days of the transitional process.

32. Mahmood Mamdani, “The Truth According to the TRC,” Ifi andAbdullahi A. An-Na’im, eds., The Politics of Memory: Truth, Healing and SocialJustice (London: Zed Books, 2000), 177.

33. Kader Asmal, Louise Asmal, and Ronald Suresh Roberts, Reconcili-ation Through Truth: A Reckoning of Apartheid’s Criminal Governance, 2nded. (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 6.

34. Ibid., 26.35. Ibid., 7.36. Ibid., 9, 215.37. Nigel Biggar, “Conclusion,” in Burying the Past: Making Peace and

Doing Justice after Civil Conflict, ed. Nigel Biggar (Washington, D.C.:Georgetown University Press, 2003), 311.

38. Michael Ignatieff, “Articles of Faith,” Index on Censorship 5 (1998):110.


39. For example, Eugene de Kock, head of South Africa’s death squads,became known through the media as “Prime Evil.” For a discussion of thepsychological aspects of this naming, see Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, A HumanBeing Died That Night: A South African Story of Forgiveness (New York:Houghton Mifflin, 2002).

40. Take, for example, the case of Amy Biehl, a Fulbright student who wasmurdered in 1993 by Vusumzi Ntamo, Ntobeko Peni, Easy Nofemela, andMongezi Manqina. Since applying for and receiving amnesty in 1998, EasyNofemela and Ntobeko Peni have worked for the Amy Biehl Foundation inSouth Africa. See http://www.amybiehl.org (accessed March 22, 2005).

41. The concept of ubuntu is not well defined. Indeed, Richard Wilson, inThe Politics of Truth and Reconciliation, often questions Tutu’s appropriationof the concept to suit his vision of reconciliation. While a discussion of thisdebate would help us understand the interconnection between truth and recon-ciliation, it will have to remain a topic for future consideration.

42. For the Kairos Document (1985), see http://www.bethel.edu/~letnie/AfricanChristianity/SAKairos.html (accessed March 24, 2005).

43. Research on Christianity in South Africa, “Faith Communities andApartheid: A Report for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” March1998, http://web.uct.ac.za/depts/ricsa/commiss/trc/trcout.htm (accessed March 24,2004).

44. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2000), 165.

45. Boraine, Country Unmasked, 291.46. From the National Unity and Reconciliation Act, http://www.doj.gov.za/

trc/legal/act9534.htm (accessed March 24, 2004).47. Wendy Orr, “Reparations Delayed Is Healing Retarded,” Looking Back

Reaching Forward, 249.48. A telling indicator of the work yet to be done in land distribution is

that the percentage of South African farmland owned by whites in 1994 was 87percent, while in 2004 it was still 84 percent. See Harper’s Magazine vol. 310,no. 1856 (January 2005), 13.

49. Madeline Fullard and Nicky Rousseau, “Truth, Evidence, and History:A Critical Review of Aspects of the Amnesty Process,” in The Provocations ofAmnesty: Memory, Justice, and Impunity, eds. Charles Villa-Vicencio and ErikDoxtader (Claremont, South Africa: David Philip Publishers, 2003), 210.

50. Richard Rorty, “Religion as a Conversation Stopper,” in Philosophyand Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 168–74.

The Ambiguous Role of Religion in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

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