That South Africa Belongs to All Who Live In It: Reifying a Fractured Nation through the TRC (2009)

Undergraduate: Diana Gergel

Faculty Advisor: Christopher Browning
Department: History

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The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established in 1994 at the end of apartheid in South Africa to negotiate transition from the outgoing white minority National Party to the incoming African National Congress (ANC). The TRC aimed to create a nonracial, unified national community through which South Africa could move forward – the “rainbow nation”, as Nelson Mandela termed it – by uncovering apartheid atrocities. From 1996-1998, public hearings were held throughout the country where survivors of gross human rights violations shared their stories. Coterminous to the survivor hearings and continuing through 2000, former apartheid officials and ANC ex-combatants applied for amnesty. Drawing on interviews conducted by the author with survivors, commissioners, and non-governmental organization leaders, this study argues that survivors underwent the traumatic experience of sharing their stories publicly to participate in South Africa's process of healing and nation-building. However, due to the systemic issues of identity politics and socioeconomic inequality and the significant historical, socio-political and legal constraints that the TRC confronted, the new South Africa encapsulated in the TRC's vision of a "rainbow nation" did not come to fruition. Reparations payments fell far short of survivors' expectations, leaving those who suffered most to bear the brunt of this failure.