A growing area of interdisciplinary inquiry, political reconciliation has been illuminated by comparatively few detailed empirical analyses of its discourses. Annelies Verdoolaege’s book-length critical discourse analysis of the South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Human Rights Violations (HRV) hearings is a welcome contribution to the extensive bibliography on the truth commission and reconciliation; it provides important new perspectives on the hearings and enriches our understandings of the relationship between discourse and reconciliation.
Verdoolaege’s ambitious project is “to analyse how, through a certain type of reconciliation discourse constructed at the HRV hearings, a reconciliation-oriented reality took shape in post-TRC South Africa” (p. 5). Her central argument is that while the commission exerted power to limit the meanings of reconciliation that arose in the hearings, the reconciliation discourse that emerged was ultimately multidimensional, polysemous and inclusive, an inclusivity that extended its power and reach in post-TRC South Africa.
In addition to the theoretical assumptions of CDA, Verdoolaege draws primarily on Foucauldian notions of the archive and knowledge/power to motivate the study and elaborate its analysis. In short, her goal is to both elucidate and deconstruct the commission’s power to define the discourse of the hearings. Driving the study’s main line of inquiry is archontic power: How is the archive of HRV hearings defined by the commission’s power to determine what could and could not be expressed in the hearings? Analyzing the transcripts for inclusions, variations, exclusions, and interactions among participants, she infers the rules of formation that shaped the HRV hearings’ reconciliation discourse.
The study is grounded in 30 transcripts from the HRV hearings. Having read all 1,819 of the transcripts, Verdoolaege chose a representative sample based on witnesses’ (or, as they are identified in the book, “testifiers’”) gender, geographical location, ethnicity, political affiliation, and attitude toward reconciliation. Verdoolaege also obtained South Africa Broadcast Corporation’s audiovisual recordings of the hearings, allowing her to interpret oral and visual cues and meanings. Because both transcripts and recordings are English-language translations, Verdoolaege keeps her analysis mainly at the level of theme. She is candid about the problems that translations pose for linguistic analysis, but points out that these are the versions available to those who did not actually witness the hearings and are thus the texts through which most people engage with them. It may, of course, be the transcripts’ imprecision that accounts for the modest number of close analyses they have motivated, but Verdoolaege’s study demonstrates the contributions that discourse analysis can make to understandings of the HRV hearings (see Bloomaert, Bock & McCormick Reference Blommaert, Bock and McCormick2006 and Anthonissen Reference Anthonissen2006 for additional examples).
As Verdoolaege notes, any commentary or scholarship on the TRC is liable to cite partial aspects of the HRV testimony, obscuring the multivocality of that testimony, and supporting partial perspectives on reconciliation. Verdoolaege’s discourse analytic study, which she identifies as its own archontic project, draws attention to that multivocality, making it harder to obscure in future entextualizations. In short, the study simultaneously exerts archontic power and counters the archontic power of the commission, thereby participating in the work of reconciliation.
The main analysis is presented in chapter 5, in which the transcripts are examined for ideological, historical, and identity-related layering. Verdoolaege identifies ten features – which might more intuitively be called themes – by which the transcripts construct multiple ideologies of reconciliation, relationships between past and present, and testifiers’ identities. Different testimonies, for example, gave rise to different conceptualizations of reconciliation and different attitudes toward it. Some testifiers expressed a commitment to nation building, others to personal forgiveness. For some testifiers, reconciliation would be conditional, achieved only after perpetrators acknowledged wrongdoing or reparations were granted. A few eschewed reconciliation altogether. Other themes included the continuity between past and present, the struggle with White identity, some testifier’s simultaneous identity as victim and perpetrator, and the testifier’s attitude toward the African National Congress (ANC). Verdoolaege interprets the HRV discourses as layered, proposing “that various indexicalities or meanings were established simultaneously” (53). This can mean that the HRV discourse as a whole comprises multiple and competing meanings of reconciliation, history, and identity, but also that individual transcripts may incorporate multiple meanings of reconciliation and the past, or multiple identities.
Verdoolaege then moves to interpreting the rules of formation that underwrote the testimonies’ emergence. Examining how commissioners guided and responded to individual utterances, she “arrive[s] at a repertoire of preferred utterances … a repertoire that will lead us to deconstruct the archive of the HRV hearings” (53). Identifying ideal testifiers, acceptable testifiers, and non-ideal testifiers, she elucidates the discursive means by which the commission included and excluded particular kinds of testimony. For example, commissioners asked leading questions that encouraged testifiers to articulate a commitment to reconciliation, reinterpreted testifiers’ utterances to foreground reconciliation, sometimes encouraged testifiers to mention certain aspects of their previously written statements, praised some testimony and remained silent on others, and occasionally shut testifiers down altogether.
Ideal testifiers, Verdoolaege finds, were willing to reconcile and forgive, expressed solidarity with their community or the nation, demonstrated emotion as they discussed the abuses they had endured, connected past to future in a way that allowed the TRC to bridge them, identified as both victims and perpetrators (as could be the case with political activists of any affiliation), struggled with their own racial identities (in the case of Whites and Afrikaners), and were both supportive and critical of the ANC (as Verdoolaege points out, the commission was eager to demonstrate it was not a tool of the ANC). Non-ideal testifiers might express anger, refuse to reconcile, and ask that perpetrators recompense them. Acceptable testifiers might focus on religious rather than community reconciliation, or make reconciliation conditional on truth telling, apology, or material recompense acceptable to the commission (asking that the government build them a house, for instance, was acceptable; it was already doing so for millions of South Africans).
So while the HRV testimonies were interactionally constrained, Verdoolaege proposes that the process allowed for interpretations of reconciliation, history, and identity that exceeded the commission’s preferred meanings and challenged its master narrative. And she argues that this multivocal, polysemous reconciliation discourse was able to “reverberate in South African society” more extensively than a narrower reconciliation discourse would have done (5): “Because the HRV reconciliation discourse was so multidimensional and inclusive, a wide variety of South Africans could identify with its discourse” (165).
Chapter 6 explores how the TRC’s multivocal reconciliation discourse “might have contributed to the coming into existence of a wide variety of reconciliation-related practices in South Africa’s reality” (155). Here the book overviews an array of reconciliation-oriented practices in post-TRC South Africa (political discourses, arts, academic activities, community initiatives), concluding that “in the years immediately following the TRC process, as well as in current day South Africa, reconciliation discourse was and remains firmly anchored in both social and political discourse” (163). Verdoolaege wants to argue, moreover, that the TRC’s reconciliation discourse has “left traces … on more than a discursive level.” This argument is difficult to make in a short chapter, and recent theories of reconciliation’s relationship to discourse might obviate the need for this move: Doxtader Reference Doxtader, Villa-Vicencio and Doxtader2003, for instance, proposes that reconciliation is what happens as interlocutors deliberate about how to reconcile. In any case, Verdoolaege’s claim about polysemy and expanded reach is compelling on its own.
When it comes to deconstructing regimes of truth, discourse analysis is good at identifying variation and contested meanings in discourse; it works against the marginalization of institutionally unendorsed meanings. So studies like this can participate in the work of reconciliation by circulating those meanings; I see this as a crucial dimension of its endeavor and one of its key contributions.
It is not novel to say, on the other hand, that close textual analysis is not as good at pointing out what is absent or, by extension, at analyzing archontic power at its most effective. Although Verdoolaege discusses dimensions of history, politics, and culture by which archontic power circulated (for instance, the legislation that created the TRC, the selection of 1,819 witnesses from a pool of 20,000, or the ritual, quasi-religious arrangement of the halls where hearings took place), exclusions that remain uncontested because they are unspoken in the hearings remain largely outside the study’s purview. For example, the archive of the hearings includes little talk about apartheid’s legalized abuses such as forced removals or job reservation, as the TRC’s definition of gross human rights violation ruled these out (Mamdani Reference Mamdani, James and Vijver2001). Yet this rule of formation is deeply effective.
The scholar’s position vis-à-vis reconciliation is inevitably difficult to negotiate, as anyone working in the field is likely to have experienced. Verdoolaege positions herself self-consciously as an international observer and acknowledges her own archontic power. Occasionally, however, the study adopts the TRC’s assumptions about reconciliation, as when it suggests that most South Africans were convinced that a reconciliation-oriented process was the only alternative when trying to establish a peaceful society (182). This may be the case, but many South Africans may not have agreed that truth would advance reconciliation. The problem occasionally has her militating against her own theses, as when she proposes that her “[ideal] testifiers … should be the point of reference for future generations when recalling the TRC process” (136). If the study is to expand upon the TRC’s preferred meanings rather than reinforce them, as I believe is the case, this recommendation rings untrue.
