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| Title: | Public ritual and private transition: the Truth Commission in Alexandra Township, South Africa 1996 |
| Author: | Bozzoli, Belinda |
| Year: | 1998 |
| Periodical: | African Studies |
| Volume: | 57 |
| Issue: | 2 |
| Period: | December |
| Pages: | 167-195 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | South Africa |
| Subjects: | offences against human rights commissions of inquiry townships Law, Human Rights and Violence Politics and Government Ethnic and Race Relations |
| External link: | https://doi.org/10.1080/00020189808707894 |
| Abstract: | The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was designed to reveal the truth about the political conflicts of the past. This paper examines the operation of one of its committees, that on Human Rights Violations, in one of the townships of Johannesburg, Alexandra, the home of many political leaders of the struggle against apartheid and a place where intense conflicts occurred in the period covered by the commission (1960-1993). The paper deals with the hearings in 1996 and explores 22 testimonies of victims of apartheid about resistance in the township. The commission used the method of ritual rather than that of law. The paper explores this procedure, the ways in which myths and narratives were embedded in the ritual, the definition of 'community', embraced by the ritual, and the patterns and types of storytelling, that enabled it. It looks at the way the private realm was brought into the public domain, and the ways in which the public realm was shaped by the discourses of nationalism. The public narrative placed the ANC in the lead of a just war and named heroes and martyrs. However, like the public narrative, the private ones also tended to marginalize the role of the youth and the revolutionaries of 1986. Unintendedly, the ritualized setting of the hearing resulted in a new form of sequestration of the experiences of ordinary Alexandrans. Bibliogr., notes |
