Its Time for True Transformative Justice in SA

Its Time for True Transformative Justice in SA

Suren Pillay

Cape Times 2010-05-06

On a recent visit to a government agency- as a citizen, not a researcher- I began chatting with an affable front desk consultant. After some general conversation on the dire state of the world, she – of Afrikaner descent – confided to me that an Afrikaner savant has predicted the end of the universe in 2012. This savant also predicts that when Nelson Mandela dies, his body will lie in state in a glass coffin for seven days. On the eighth day, she whispered almost without sound, ‘the blacks will kill all the whites…’ Before I could wonder aloud why she was sharing this with me, someone who considers himself black, she elaborated, ‘then all the Indians…’ Suddenly I was transformed from potential perpetrator to fellow victim, and understood why she felt obligated to convey this humanitarian insight to me. Despite this oddly revealing anecdote, I also believe that twenty years after Nelson Mandela’s release, the pervasive allure of these genocidal visions have lost their grip. The current sputter of talk about a racialized civil war in some circles, occasioned by the murder of Eugene Terreblanche, is already slipping, unable to find traction in the wider society. The fear that once silenced private moments of doubt, and stiffened the sinews of public displays of kragdadigheid, has given way to other more pressing misgivings – about jobs and crime. Terreblanche’s death is being understood as such by most people, rather than part of a systematic erasure of whites. Gestures of reconciliation, including the disposition of Nelson Mandela and other liberation leaders and the acceptance of both African and South African political identities in post-apartheid society, has in the past allayed these fears for many white South Africans. Of course, these gestures also reflected a pragmatic political compromise with power. While certain relations have changed, others remain intact: political power has shifted, but economic power less so, producing only a small coterie of ‘black diamonds’. The killing of Eugene Terreblanche, whatever the story will be that will emerge in the trial, is also a brutal reminder of the structural violence, terror and humiliation that is the gristle of many interactions between farmers and farmworkers across the country. A 2008 study found that white workers earn on average 450% more than black workers. This and other research suggests persuasively that South Africa is the most unequal society in the world. However, citing these data often produces a predictable response: both black and white tend to experience these statistics as accusations and mutual incriminations. Progressives acknowledge and lament this reality, while others dispute it or deny any responsibility: ‘I never voted for apartheid’, ‘I was too young’, or ‘it was those Afrikaners’. Rather than being reconciled, these disputes show just how divided we remain. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was an important attempt to negotiate a collective future out of a conflicted past, and create a single political community based on acknowledgement and forgiveness. However, while the TRC – aligned with the international community – acknowledged apartheid as a ‘crime against humanity’, it focused primarily on the secondary violence that arose from the implementation of apartheid. This included a focus on violence committed by both state agents and anti-apartheid activists, but not on the system that legalised racial division and skewed access to resources. Two categories of people fell out of view along the way: the millions of victims, mostly black, of apartheid’s banal bureaucratic violence, and the lesser millions of predominantly-white beneficiaries of the system. Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani observed that whilst the TRC recognised the consequences of apartheid for millions, it only acknowledged some 20 000 ‘victims’ in the end, defined as those who experienced ‘gross violations of human rights’. It is worth pondering the questions this raises for us today, especially in the light of the legacy of land tenure dispossession and forced removals at the heart of our colonial past. In hindsight, we have to ask ourselves, has the meaning of ‘justice’ in post-apartheid South Africa been shaped, and limited, by the needs of ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ identified by the TRC? Notwithstanding those awaiting reparations, some of apartheid’s most visible victims now flagrantly relish ‘the good life’, as former liberation activists have become the faces of the new political and economic elite. Some former activists are self-righteous about the good life – as Smuts Ngonyama notoriously quipped, ‘we didn’t struggle to be poor’ – because it means justice for our struggle and sacrifice, years in exile, and languishing in prison. Is ‘the good life’ not justice then for the painful years under the anvil of the apartheid state, when Eugene De Kock’s men might come knocking in the night? Is it not justice, afterall, to ensure that comrades benefit from tenders, after a shared history of life-or-death moments pursuing a good cause? If apartheid’s victims and perpetrators are narrowed to numbers defined through the TRC, have we in the years after 1994 unconsciously come to believe that justice is served and deserved only by that few? And if perpetrators- the footsoldiers of the security apparatuses- have received either amnesty or jail terms, does this explain why many whites today can feel no further responsibility for apartheid’s legacy? Historically speaking, if most white citizens simply lived normal lives, raised families, worked hard in their jobs, and lived within the law, how – they ask – can they be accused of gross human rights violations? On the other hand, if apartheid’s black victims were only those who experienced beatings, torture and assassinations firsthand, couldn’t it follow that black beneficiaries of justice after apartheid might also be few? Is this picture not worryingly close to today’s reality? It is worth asking what might have been, and might be, if we instead think of apartheid crimes as the collective experience of millions. Rather than recognising or memorialising individuals, what then about the ordinary, unnamed victims who slumber in their thousands as statistics in our archives: the share-croppers and peasants wiped out by the 1913 Land Act, migrant workers wrenched from their families, the domestic workers who have mothered millions? The forebearers of those who continue to live that legacy in places like Ventersdorp. And for its beneficiaries, did apartheid not bequeath a legacy of racial privilege, cohesive suburban neighbourhoods, good schools, healthcare, and a path out of poverty based on a discriminatory system that turned colonial racism into law? What if we collectively embrace apartheid as that living legacy in the present? If apartheid’s wrong is the creation of this shared dilemma, how do we conceive of justice in a society marked by the co-existence of suffering for the majority, and a good life for a few old and new beneficiaries, rather than one of individual victims and perpetrators? What, then, are our past and present ethical responsibilities across racial and ethnic divides? Would we be jolted into more urgent actions to address apartheid’s overlooked victims, that vast majority ineligible for reparations through the TRC? That majority for whom a historical violence is still at work, assaulting the dignity of the self, and the integrity of the body. Would such a view of justice allow activists now-turned politicians and entrepreneurs to feel complacent and entitled to the good life, without experiencing a niggle of guilt? Would it encourage apartheid’s beneficiaries to join a conversation about a more equitable distribution of resources, both intellectual and economic, without responding defensively? Is it not time to create a form of justice then that truly addresses transformation, and counters growing perceptions that ‘transformation’ upholds old privilege by empowering only our struggle veteran ‘tenderpreneurs

’, and the young leaders being moulded by their example?

*Suren Pillay, of the HSRC and UWC, is co- editor (with Chandra Sriram) of ‘Truth vs Justice? The Dilemmas of Transitional Justice in Africa, UKZN and James Currey Press, 2010. A version of this article appeared in the latest edition of the South African Reconciliation Barometer published by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation.