Justice, silence, complexity: Recent forays into the reconstitution of apartheid experience

This review essay situates itself within the broad body of scholarship that has returned to South Africa's apartheid years in order to critique the assumptions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and raise once more the issue of justice. It surveys three studies from 2014 that examine apartheid-era experiences not dealt with in their full complexity by the TRC. These studies all emerge from different disciplines: Pamela Reynolds' War in Worcester from anthropology,Jacob Dlamini's Askari from history, and Carrol Clarkson's Drawing the Line from literature. In surveying these studies, I set forth an argument that the TRC, in its yoking of justice to a project of nation-building and catharsis, inadvertently engaged in its own forms of silencing in dealing with the past. This occurred partly due to the TRC's binary framework of victim and perpetrator, which failed to address those who were more than merely victims (as I discuss in Reynolds? study of youth leaders in the struggle) or those who were both victims and perpetrators (as I discuss in Dlamini?s study of the askari). I move through the texts in a sequence that begins with these two attempts to reconstitute complex forms of black experience elided by the TRC, and concludes with Carrol Clarkson?s Drawing the Line, which I read as a way of thinking about a justice that aims to be open to moral complexity. Throughout, I pursue the question of whether there is a fundamental tension between the demands of justice and those of human complexity.