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Truth, Reconciliation, Gender: the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Black Women's Intellectual History1

2005; Routledge; Volume: 20; Issue: 47 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0816464500090384

1465-3303

Dorothy Driver,

African studies and sociopolitical issues

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes My thanks to several hosts for occasions between 2001 and 2003 when I presented papers on the TRC and gender: at the University of Adelaide Department of English and the Adelaide Research Centre for the Humanities and Social Sciences; the University of Leeds Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History; the University of Chicago African History Seminar Series; and the University of Tulsa Departments of English and of Gender Studies. My grateful acknowledgement also to the National Research Foundation and the University of Cape Town Travel Grants Committee for facilitating the visit to the University of Leeds. Ubuntu is defined as ‘humanity, goodness; … Human-heartedness; compassion; the qualities embodying the values and virtues of essential humanity, or of Africanness’, see A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles (Oxford University Press, in association with the Dictionary Unit for South African English) Oxford, 1996. See also John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (Heinemann) London, 1969, p. 108; Mark Sanders, Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (Duke University Press) Durham, NC and London, 2002, p. 124; Mark Sanders, ‘Reading Lessons’, Diacritics, vol. 29, no. 3, 1999, pp. 3–30. I use here the formulation translated from the Xhosa by Noni Jabavu, The Ochre People (1963) (Ravan Press) Johannesburg, 1982, p. 69. See also Ellen Kuzwayo, Sit Down and Listen: Stories from South Africa (The Women's Press) London, 1990, p. 122, for the saying in six indigenous South African languages; and Ellen Kuzwayo, ‘“My Life is My Neighbours”’, Monitor: the Journal of the Human Rights Trust, special issue on Human Rights in South Africa, 1988, p. 133. See Nomfundo Walaza, quoted in Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull (Random House) Johannesburg, 1998, p. 213; and Kuzwayo's Sit Down and Listen, pp. 121, 122. Sanders, Complicities, p. 119. In 1991, then Bishop, later Archbishop, Desmond Tutu said: ‘It seems to me that we in the black community have lost our sense of ubuntu—our humanness, caring, hospitality, our sense of connectedness, our sense that my humanity is bound up in your humanity.’ Sunday Times, 26 May 1991, p. 2. Krog (the importance of whose autobiographical account of being a reporter on the TRC cannot be underestimated) also speaks of Tutu's Africanisation of the concept of reconciliation as a practical ethics, not as ‘far removed from the world’ as the Western Christian concept of forgiveness may sometimes seem. For Tutu, says Krog, ‘hatred and revenge [ … ] dehumanise not only yourself, but your community’, Country of My Skull, p. 143. In his Xhosa novel Ityala Lamawele (1914), Krune Mqhayi shows the mother of the homestead opening the homestead to people in need and teaching the young girls that ‘womanhood means looking after and caring for even those unknown strangers’; quoted in his own translation by Peter Mtuze in his ‘A Feminist Critique of the Image of Woman in the Prose Works of Selected Xhosa Writers (1909–1980)’, PhD, University of Cape Town, 1990, p. 31. In the same novel, men who lack ubuntu are considered not sufficiently morally elevated to be marriageable: girls choose between male twins, one of whom shows ‘concern for the welfare of the people of this homestead; is generous to its daughters and to strangers and looks after its livestock’, while the other twin ‘roams about and attends dancing sprees all over the country’, p. 30. Cynthia Ngewu, one of the Guguletu Seven, said: ‘This thing called reconciliation … if I am understanding it correctly … if it means this perpetrator, this man who has killed Christopher Piet [her son], if it means he becomes human again, this man, so that I, so that all of us, get our humanity back … then I agree, then I support it all’, ellipses in original, quoted in Krog, Country of My Skull, p. 142. It is also worth remarking that as a cleric Tutu performed, let's say, as a man in a frock. Note also that Krog's chapter ‘Truth is a Woman’ refers to the special consideration women give to others, ‘this story of the power of women to care, endlessly’, Country of My Skull, p. 245. See Sanders, ‘Ambiguities of Mourning: Law, Custom, Literature and Women before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, Law Text Culture, vol. 4, no. 2, 1988, pp. 105–51. Sanders, Complicities, p. 125. Thomas Mofolo's Sotho novel Chaka (1931), for instance, portrays women exhorting men to battle and forewarning against cowardice: ‘True men are gone, we remain with strange beings, / We remain with men-like beings who are not men!’, Daniel Kunene (trans.) (Heinemann Educational Books), London, 1981, p. 19. Moreover, a female doctor medicates Chaka so as to turn him into ‘a fierce person’, p. 14. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Choreographies’ in Peggy Kamuf (ed.), A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (Oxford University Press) New York and Oxford, 1991, pp. 441–56, where he speaks of the feminine as an escape from phallogocentrism, whereas ‘woman’ inhabits a gendered economy. Fiona Ross, ‘Existing in Secret Places: Woman's Testimony in the First Five Weeks of Public Hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, seminar paper, Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town. See also Beth Goldblatt and Sheila Meintjes, ‘South African Women Demand the Truth’ in Meredeth Turshen and Clotilde Twagiramariya (eds), What Women Do in Wartime: Gender and Conflict in Africa (Zed Books) London and New York, 1998, pp. 27–61; Ilse Olckers, ‘Gender-neutral Truth?: a Reality Shamefully Distorted’, Agenda, no. 31, 1996, pp. 61–7; Fiona C. Ross, Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (Pluto Press) London, 2003; Sanders, ‘Ambiguities of Mourning’; Sanders, Complicities, pp. 197–211; Annalet van Schalkwyk, ‘A Gendered Truth: Women's Testimonies at the TRC and Reconciliation’, Missionalia, vol. 27, no. 2 (1999), pp. 165–88; Lyn Graybill, Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Miracle or Model? (Lynne Rienner) Boulder and London, 2002, pp. 97–112. Goldblatt and Meintjes, ‘South African Women’, p. 29. Their submission was presented as ‘Gender and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: a Submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, May 1996, . Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, 7 vols (Juta) Cape Town, 1998–2003, vol. 4, p. 283: ‘Don't forget to tell us what happened to you yourself if you were the victim of a gross human rights abuse.’ Ross, Bearing Witness, pp. 93, 42, 46–7, 25, et passim. Ross, Bearing Witness, p. 50; Graybill, Truth and Reconciliation, pp. 105–6. Sanders, Complicities, p. 200. Olive Schreiner, Dreams (1890) (Wildwood House) London, 1982, p. 49. Goldblatt and Meintjes, ‘South African Women’, pp. 48–52. For other reasons see Graybill, Truth and Reconciliation, pp. 103–6; Krog, Country of My Skull, pp. 238–40; and Ross, Bearing Witness, passim. The relation between the ‘individual’ and the ‘systematic’ in Mtintso's argument is precisely what is at stake in my own thinking: only by bringing the former into the latter, as occurs through following the philosophical moves of ubuntu, can a gendered social analysis occur. Maxeke, quoted in Ellen Kuzwayo, Call Me Woman (The Women's Press) London, 1985, p. 103. Kuzwayo, Call Me Woman, p. 103. The paragraph that follows has its basis in several paragraphs from an earlier essay, ‘M'a-Ngoana o tsoare thipa ka bohaleng (the child's mother grabs the sharp end of the knife): Women as Mothers, Women as Writers’ in Martin Trump (ed.), Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture of the 1970s and 1980s (Ravan Press) Johannesburg, 1990, pp. 230–3. Emma Mashinini, Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life: a South African Autobiography (The Women's Press) London, 1989, pp. 91–5. Mashinini feels lacking in her relation with those around her in Denmark (white medical personnel, and male torture victims from other countries who have been so ‘derailed’ in prison that they could not get along with their families, p. 91), measures herself through her relations with her family as well as with the community back home, whose rejection of her would be like dying ‘twice over’ (p. 94), and takes pride in her inability to follow her Danish doctor's advice, ‘Live for yourself’ (p. 95). Key moments in Mashinini's Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life are as follows: her husband's acceptance of her political activity (p. 26) and the unusualness of her equality with male activists (p. 33); her embrace of white activists (pp. 80, 105, for example) and her disgust with the treacherous black journalist (p. 92); her love of ‘beautiful things’, such as crystal glass and her BMW (p. 98), and, throughout the book, the easy and unapologetic movement between her maternal life and her work as a trade union leader. Sanders, ‘Reading Lessons’, p. 11, citing Stanley Friesen, Missionary Responses to Tribal Religions at Edinburgh, 1910 (Peter Lang) New York, 1996, 124ff. See Margaret Daymond, Dorothy Driver, Sheila Meintjes, Leloba Molema, Chiedza Musengezi, Margie Orford and Nobantu Rasebotsa (eds), Women Writing Africa: the Southern Region (Feminist Press/University of Witwatersrand Press) New York/Johannesburg, 2003, pp. 1–82. On the one hand, conforming to the Black Consciousness (BC) demand that black women not threaten black solidarity but also—presumably—dissociating herself from the feminist-individualist terms associated with a white South African feminism, Christine Qunta proclaimed: ‘I take the view that we are Africans before we are women’, Tribute, August 1990, p. 44. On the other hand, motherhood slips smoothly into the realm of the communal in the manifesto of the BC Black Women's Federation, formed in 1975, which speaks of black women's efforts ‘to present a united front’ and ‘to redirect the status of motherhood towards the fulfilment of the Black people's social, cultural, economic and political aspirations’. Asha Rambally (ed.), Black Review 1975–1976 (Black Community Programmes) Durban, 1977, p. 109. Ross, Bearing Witness, pp. 25, 64–5, passim. Jacques Derrida, ‘On Forgiveness’ in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (trans.) (Routledge) London and New York, 2001, p. 60. A few men did nonetheless present their stories at the Women's Hearings, and are excluded from the TRC Report. In Country of My Skull, Antjie Krog takes care to include the testimonies of men who suffered genital torture (one, for example, speaks of the ensuing sexual impotence, p. 183), and she provocatively opens her chapter detailing the sexual abuses against women (chapter 16, ‘Truth is a Woman’) with the testimony of Alwinus Mhlatsi, who presents himself in the vulnerable position associated with women, pp. 233–5. Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, vol. 1, p. 53. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Routledge) London and New York, 1994, pp. 65, 43. Ubuntu is a (non-examinable) school subject in high schools in Kwa-Zulu Natal. Dubbed the ‘Inkatha’ subject, it teaches Zulu nationalism, and is a subject ‘devoted to the values and philosophies of the organisation’. M. Kentridge, Unofficial War (1990), p. 104, qtd Dictionary of South African English. The word is prevalent in tokenist business organisations and facile talk about economic equality. Derrida refers to hospitality as an opening up to the absolute stranger, the stranger being the one ‘who puts me in question’; see Sanders, ‘Ambiguities’, p. 34. Derrida also speaks in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness of the madness of forgiveness as a forgiving of the unforgivable, and of the difference between forgiveness and the ordinary ‘economic’ transactions of reconciliation, pp. 32, 49, for example. Yet both seem necessary, in his thinking, as some sort of guide or check to the other. Using this logic, and recalling also Derrida's statements in ‘Choreographies’ about the undecidability of sexual difference, in a process of reconciliation properly informed by ubuntu the alterity of masculinity and femininity to each other would thus be held in constant tension with any exchange of experience, exchange of understanding. See Lisa S. Price, ‘Finding the Man in the Soldier-rapist: Some Reflections on Comprehension and Accountability’, Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 24, no. 2, 2001, pp. 221–7. Sanders, Complicities; Carolyn Burdett, Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism: Evolution, Gender, Empire (Palgrave Macmillan) London, 2001; and Graham Pechey, ‘Olive Schreiner, the Short Story and Grand History’, Critical Survey, vol. 11, no. 2, 1999, pp. 4–17.