In 1995, the Nelson Mandela-led African National Congress (ANC) government set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a court-like body tasked with investigating crimes committed by the apartheid regime between 1960 and 1994. Proponents of the Commission marketed it as a silver bullet that would deliver justice for the victims of the regime and help the country move forward. However, not everyone was convinced. Many argued that the TRC was simply a get-out-of-jail-free card for apartheid criminals, as it allowed them to avoid prosecution. Among those who were not in support of the TRC was Letlapa Mphahlele, a long-time member of the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania. He argued that the Commission was biased towards the oppressors and threw victims under the bus. He lays down his argument in this video from 1997.
Considering that, some thirty years after the end of the oppressive system, very few apartheid-era politicians and security operatives ever went to jail for their crimes against Black South Africans, it seems that Mphahlele’s prediction that the TRC would be an exercise in futility was spot on.
Credit: SABC/TRC
Sources:
https://humanities.uct.ac.za/apc/trc-and-codesa-failed-south-africa-its-time-we-reflected
2 Comments
The way you broke this down is incredibly helpful.
It is important to see South Africa as an evolving colonial state: 1. Racialised capitalism through European settler colonialism, pursued by force, European-created laws and ethnic cleansing –> 2. Racialised capitalism through strictly enforced racial segregation, racial property and income laws/policies and European settler expansion through foreign white immigration campaigns
–> 3. Minority dominated capitalism through an ANC commitment to liberalise industries and allow neocolonialism (foreign wealth extraction) post-1990. The racial trauma affecting all ordinary peoples of South Africa (whether be deep hurt, shame, anger, distrust, loss of humanity through comfort with racism, war trauma, PTSD) is merely a symptom of a system in SA that has never really changed in substance but rather in how it is presented and enforced. The system is a fundamentally economic system of enrichment for a few (both in-country and foreign), where for centuries a “white” few are enriched, owning and controlling the assets of a “black” (overwhelmingly so) country, with small, racialised “brown” people benefitting more than the majority and less than the upper minority. Post apartheid was really post enforced racial segregation, nothing more. The IMF loan signed by the ANC pre-1994 election kept the apartheid system in place, making our ANC leaders de facto neocolonial managers of a minority owned and controlled economy for the benefit of the minority few and all foreign extractors. The TRC is meaningless without redesign of the system, stopping neocolonialism in South Africa by, for instance, nationalising the mineral wealth of the country instead of allowing foreign and domestic elites to take what is not theirs, and ensuring racial inequity is addressed at all levels in all industries and in all neighbourhoods. Using privatisation to maintain and worsen the system’s problem minority domination and neocolonialism is a big issue. I would take TRC and “non-racialism” talk more seriously when we have a Commission of Inquiry into the Minerals-Energy Complex of South Africa, market dominance and monopolisation in industries such as banking and why Monsanto has special laws since the 1990s in our country.