Description
South Africa’s 1995 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) stands as the first ground-breaking institution of transitional justice to centre victimhood and victim-centred reconciliation. In a bid to achieve reparative healing for victims, the TRC adopted dialogical and expressive modes to explore pluralised narratives of victimhood through testimony. Drawing on the concept of racial injury and trauma, this paper advances that the TRC’s approach of centring truth in testimony, carried performative expectations for victims, whilst reinforcing a static understanding of apartheid’s racial violence. Through addressing the extractive undertones present within the TRC’s Human Rights Violation Committee, this paper postulates that the TRC deployed racialised tropes which engaged victims in a dialogue of collective and individual legitimacy. The paper further argues that through centring the success of reconciliation on individual victims’ testimonies, the TRC rendered actors and agents of apartheid inanimate. In so doing, the TRC effectively detached racial violence from a social, political and economic network of perpetratorship.
