Amazwi Abesifazane

The Truth and Reconciliation's greatest contribution was to give back to South Africa its heart.

--Wilmot James and Linda Van De Vijver

At a press conference Mandela took De Klerk's hand and said, "We must forgive but never forget."

--Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert

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How does one remember what one most wants to forget? Why does one choose to remember at all? How can a country traumatized by racial injustice become a nation? What is the role of narrative--written and imaged--in such a process? How does one construct an archive in multiple forms?

Alchemy and Memory

Apartheid had obliterated social history in South Africa. In order for the nation to move into the future, that history needed to be recovered. In 1996 the recently elected African National Congress (ANC) government established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Under the leadership of Bishop Desmond Tutu, this commission was given the task of reconstructing the history of life under apartheid with the purpose of setting the record straight and developing a cultural and historical archive. This history had either been hidden or destroyed because the ruling party could not afford to allow such information to be released--even to its own membership. As a result, South Africa had lost the record of its own past. In order to reconceptualize itself as a nation, the ANC, in conjunction with the courts, developed a plan to approach the nation's tortured past and rebuild collective memory.

This commission's mandate was to hear those narratives offered by the victims of apartheid (limited to the period between 1960 to 1994) and to determine who was, in fact, a victim (a term specific here to those brutalized by politically motivated violence). The goals were to record their stories, to bring to justice perpetrators of crimes against humanity, to have such perpetrators reveal all hidden information about their crimes, and then to orchestrate their requests for forgiveness involving those victimized as well as the families of those who were killed. The commission was also obliged to offer recommendations for how to compensate such victims.

At times, perpetrators did break down and admit their guilt. They wept in front of victims or their families and asked forgiveness, thus achieving one of the main mandates of the commission--to seek reconciliation. But this goal has also been the source of a great deal of criticism and cynicism. Some feel that given all that occurred, reconciliation was always an inappropriate goal for the commission. But the terms of the commission--the possibility for amnesty, the emphasis on truth, truth-telling, and reconciliation--were established before the end of apartheid. They were negotiated in the transfer of power, when it was determined that the government would not seize property and that there would be the possibility of individual amnesty, but no general amnesty. The process was completely dependent on the stories of individual South Africans.

Once the testimonies of the 21,400 people who came forward were transcribed and categorized, a full eighty percent were designated as the stories of "victims." (1) Perhaps most significantly, the hearings of the commission were transparent, taking place in open, public sessions that were available to everyone via radio and television. The whole society became immersed in this process. Many books have been written detailing the process in the name of the commission and by the commissioners themselves, as well as by journalists, political leaders, victims, and perpetrators.

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The act of creating the commission and the years of public testimony and debate that followed changed South Africa. The new, progressive constitution guarantees that it will never be possible for South Africa to return to the repressed, fascist state it once was. Nor can it any longer hide the consequences of apartheid. But many have felt that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has constructed a circumscribed version of the truth established through "narrow lenses" designed to "reflect the experience of a tiny minority of victims and perpetrators." (2) Because indigenous women, for example, were not widely included in the process, their stories have remained hidden. It is into this environment of ongoing historical and psychological reflection, of debate about the past and its implications for the future, that Amazwi Abesifazane, or "Voices of Women," was imagined into being by sculptor Andries Botha. He hoped to bring focus into the often-undocumented lives of indigenous women, many of whom are from the rural areas and townships that suffered extreme acts of violence during the decades of apartheid. Poet and essayist Njabulo Ndebele writes:

    The homelands were another arena of gross violations of human
    rights. KwaZulu-Natal, the Ciskei, and KwaNdebele, in particular ...
    suffered cyclical attacks and counter-attacks in which the line
    between victims and perpetrators blurred as comrades and vigilantes
    assumed both roles .... In the townships, people experienced
    "necklace killings," the burning of houses of suspected spies, and a
    reign of terror by groups acting in the name of liberation. (3)