The year 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s appointment of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Through the second half of the 1990s and beyond, the TRC was lauded around the world as an exemplary transitional justice intervention and used as a template by many countries going through processes of peacemaking and democratisation. Today, however, the TRC is vilified in many quarters locally, while views on it internationally are ambivalent, influenced profoundly now by the failures of South Africa’s democratic administrations over three decades. Clearly, it seems, despite the work of the TRC, South Africa has neither reckoned with its pasts effectively nor found a way to make Mandela’s reconciliation project stick. What went wrong?
This is a question addressed by scholar Andre du Toit in a recently published book titled The Truth Commission and its Burdens: Perpetrator Findings and their Consequences. The book should be read as a companion text to the book he published in 2022 titled Amnesty Chronicles: The Inner History of the Amnesty Negotiations During the South African Transition, in which he expertly examined the genealogy of the TRC’s amnesty mandate and explored the reasons why successive ANC-led administrations failed to implement TRC recommendations on a systematic prosecutions process to deal with perpetrators of gross human rights violations who had not secured amnesty from the TRC. In The Truth Commission and its Burdens, Du Toit casts his net wider, searching for the reasons why the ANC turned its back on the TRC and ultimately ensured that almost all of its recommendations were ignored by the state.
The TRC made wide-ranging recommendations, so wide in fact that it would not be inaccurate to call them a provisional agenda for societal transformation. In my reading of the recommendations, three areas loomed largest in addition to the question of prosecutions: 1) for the longer term healing of a traumatised society to be supported, the state (guided by the ANC) had to find a way of turning the TRC’s own highly stylised performance of testimony into durable community-based spaces for remembering and storytelling; 2) the TRC’s limited short-term reparations work had to be expanded and connected to South Africa’s other special instruments for restitution in ways that would contribute meaningfully to a broader societal restructuring, informed fundamentally by a redistribution of wealth; and 3) the archive assembled by the TRC would have to be built on determinedly and made as accessible as possible both to the public and to the continuing work outlined above. All of these outcomes, of course, were structurally out of the TRC’s hands. They were in the hands of the ruling party and institutions of the state.
The TRC got a lot wrong, without a doubt. But from the perspective of 2025, it is relatively easy to see that the fundamental failure of the TRC as an instrument of restitution and transformation has to do with the fact that the springboard which it created for continuing work was instead turned into an inert museum artefact by prevailing relations of power. Why did that happen? What went wrong?
In my reading of scholarly discourses on the TRC, there seem to be three primary schools of thought on the phenomenon. Du Toit provides an overview of one of them in the first few pages of The Truth Commission and its Burdens – there are scholars who argue that the TRC is best understood as a continuation of the colonial commission of inquiry, an instrument of governance designed routinely to delay, defer, obfuscate and exonerate, and at best able only to provide structures of power with a basis for minor adjustments and recalibrations. In this view, the TRC was never meant to do more than it did, and, in fact, achieved exactly what it was put in place to do.
This more or less structuralist perspective is countered by two closely connected views. One is that elements within the African National Congress (ANC), led by Nelson Mandela, had every intention of turning the TRC springboard into continuing longer term restorative work, but that after Mandela both the ANC and institutions of the state quickly became dominated by constellations of power having a vested interest in shelving TRC recommendations and simply moving on. So, for example, as Du Toit reminds us, in 1999 Mandela was crystal clear on the need for prosecutions: “Accountability does need to be established and, where evidence exists of a serious crime, prosecution should be instituted within a fixed time frame. That time frame needs to be realistic … for we cannot afford as a nation and as government to be saddled with unending judicial processes.” And yet, the subsequent failure to take up prosecutions seriously – there have been a handful of isolated cases and a litany of laughable promises to ‘start the process’ - has meant that the ANC has overseen what amounts to a blanket amnesty, the very outcome the leadership had rejected in the early 1990s.
And then there is the view that the TRC made a fatal mistake (or mistakes), which lost it credibility with the ANC and doomed any chance of its recommendations being implemented. Du Toit leans towards this view, arguing that when the TRC decided to issue findings on accountability (the so-called ‘perpetrator findings’, which included the naming of violations by members of ANC and ANC-aligned formations) it had overreached its mandate and provoked the ANC unnecessarily. It was the last straw.
Du Toit marshals strong evidence to show that the perpetrator findings were indeed the trigger for the 1998 confrontation between the TRC and elements within the ANC under the leadership of Thabo Mbeki, when the latter attempted to interdict the publication of the TRC Report. However, across his two books Du Toit also details or names or alludes to a range of other sources of friction between the ANC and the TRC. For me, five of these other sources cast the longest shadows. Firstly, from the get-go, during the earliest discussions about the possibility of a truth commission for South Africa, there were those opposed in principle to such a mechanism. These voices pointed, for instance, to the way in which Argentina’s truth commission had white-washed the perpetrators of terror in that country’s years of dictatorship.
Secondly, there was strong resistance to – and in some quarters outright rejection of – the TRC’s embrace of the principle of equivalence, a principle perhaps best described by Archbishop Tutu when he said: “A gross violation is a gross violation, whoever commits it and for whatever reason. There is thus legal equivalence between all perpetrators.” This was what Mandela was to call ‘an artificial even-handedness’, an approach which made no distinction between the violations of state terror and those occurring in the fighting of a just war.
Thirdly, of course, many found the amnesty processes objectionable, some seeing in them repetitions of long colonial and apartheid practices of indemnity. Fourthly, in certain quarters there was growing concern about what might be contained in the records being assembled by the TRC. By 1999 there was what I can only call a paranoia – and I saw this from the front row as I oversaw the National Archives’ acquisition of the TRC’s archive – about access to an archive which contained, for instance, evidence of individuals and formations of the liberation movements being compromised by collusion, infiltration and collaboration. No surprise, then, that 30 years on, as Du Toit reminds us, both the TRC archive and the accumulations of apartheid records secured by the TRC remain extremely difficult to access
And then, lastly, there were those opposed to prosecutions. Some feared that litigation would force into the public domain precisely what the ANC wanted to remain hidden. (Again, we’re talking about the contents of the TRC archive; but also, the contents of apartheid security establishment records purloined by former operatives as ‘insurance policies’.) Others feared that prosecutions would undermine, if not unravel, Mandela’s reconciliation project. Yet others were daunted by the enormous practical and ethical challenges they would present.
A complex picture, then. Du Toit might be right about perpetrator findings being the tipping point. But I suspect that the weight of resistance to the TRC and its work within the ANC and institutions of the state would have sunk the TRC as a springboard for continuing work anyway.
As scholars like Adam Sitze have pointed out, the TRC was burdened by structural limitations. As Du Toit argues compellingly, its work was seen as threatening by too many powerful people and structures. And as many have documented, constellations of power were shifting through the 1990s and into the 2000s in ways which doomed, or shackled severely, all the country’s instruments for restitution, reparation, transformation and redistribution.
Needless to say, given where South Africa finds itself today, without these instruments working well, there can be no meaningful reckoning with oppressive pasts. There can be no reconciliation. And there can be no liberatory future. Obviously a lot has changed in the country through three decades, horizons of possibility have certainly shifted, and a myriad new challenges are confronting us. Nonetheless, in my view, it is still not too late to revisit and revivify these instruments, from the springboard left by the TRC to the stalled land restitution process, from the abandoned reparations process to the faltering land reform programme. There was a reason why Nelson Mandela gave his Foundation a mandate to keep exploring ways of reckoning with South Africa’s oppressive pasts. And there is a reason why the Foundation is advocating strongly now for the Constitution’s provision for equitable access to land finally to be turned into a lived reality.