Truth and Consequences
In a recent interview with Lia Weintraub, I briefly mentioned the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa as an example of a public listening process. I want to dive a little deeper into the topic of the TRC because to me it highlights both the value of such listening, but also encapsulates a range of problems and tensions.
South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission began its work in 1996. The idea was that for the country to move forward towards reconciliation and become a functioning nation after decades of Apartheid, we needed first to come to terms with the truth about what had happened during those 34 years – from 1960 to 1994. It was based on a restorative justice approach instead of retribution and prosecution.
Those who felt they had been a victim of violence could come forward and be heard, and have their experience publicly acknowledged. The Commission would also recommend reparations. For perpetrators, the incentive was that if they came forward and told the full truth of what they had done, they could receive amnesty from prosecution. Over about two years, the Commission received around 21,000 statements from victims - some 2,000 of these took place in public hearings.
It was an extended, national, years-long public process of listening. Listening to the victims tell the stories of what happened to them, and have these acknowledged and witnessed. And listening to perpetrators publicly admit to and reveal their actions. This was vitally important, because while Apartheid (literally: separateness) had been there for all to see — official government policy that impacted every aspect of everyday life for millions of people — its enforcement and survival for so long had relied on decades and layers of secrets, denial, and cover-ups. The TRC was a process of truth-seeking and public memory formation.
It was successful in this to some extent. Thousands of victims were heard and believed, and received public recognition of what had been done to them. Many were able to directly confront their abusers. Some perpetrators also came forward and revealed and acknowledged what they had done. The entire country got to listen, over a period of years. No longer could anyone — particularly white people — deny what had happened, or have an excuse for not knowing. There is now a detailed public record.
But the TRC also had many shortcomings. Many of the perpetrators who came forward and spoke up and received amnesty were the foot-soldiers. Very few senior decision-makers stepped forward to testify, or faced any consequences for not doing so. And while the process of investigating and prosecuting perpetrators continues almost 30 years later, this is painfully slow. On top of that, despite many of the victims re-living their trauma in public and under the glare of the media, large numbers of white South Africans, the very people who needed to hear and admit the truth of what had happened, simply tuned out — refused to listen.
More importantly though, while there was an emphasis on promoting reconciliation and forgiveness between perpetrators and victims of apartheid — with the victims being asked to forgive — this has not been matched by adequate repair and redress. While Apartheid may no longer be the law of the land, South Africa remains one of the most unequal countries in the world. Black people have been asked to forgive and reconcile, while white people have retained their privilege. In her book Emotional Justice Esther Armah calls this a model that ‘privileges one group and extracts emotional labor from another.’
The TRC demonstrates the importance but also the pitfalls of listening as a social process — because it shows how listening is always tied to power. We cannot talk about the importance of listening in public life unless we reckon with the role of power. To leave power out of the equation is to sentimentalize listening, to use it to achieve a superficial kind of connection and unity that papers over inequity and injustice for the comfort of the privileged and powerful.
While the TRC was in progress I was still co-anchor on PM Live – a daily national current affairs show on national radio. Every afternoon, we’d play reports from the testimonies of the day. Since I was in the studio and wearing headphones, these voices, of victims and perpetrators, recounting traumatic abuses in graphic detail, felt like they were right inside my head.
Would I have listened to as much of the TRC’s proceedings as I did, if it had not been part my job? I don’t know. I do know that listening to the testimonies from the Truth Commission in this way, every day, over months, had a deep impact on me. It was at times disturbing, traumatic and moving. It also shifted my understanding of my country and my place in it, in the world, in a profound way. I of course knew Apartheid was wrong, and knew a lot about what had happened — but now my knowing took on a different shape. It became more embodied. I felt, rather than just knew.
I’ve been thinking about this shift in the way that Dougald Hine talks about the difference between knowledge and knowing, in his book, At Work in the Ruins:
“Knowledge is what we hold out there — the arms length facts, the wealth of information, the fruits of scientific knowledge production — and knowing is what happens when the distance is gone, when we let the knowledge in.”
“To cross this threshold is to become vulnerable: one way or another, you can be changed by what you come to know, and that change may come in the form of loss. Perhaps the loss of who you thought you were, the stories you liked to tell about yourself… There is something intimate about the move from knowledge to knowing: it deserves to be handled with care.”
I had already had to unlearn many things I’d been taught to believe from a young age — at home, at school, at church, and on the radio and TV — about race and gender, about good and bad in the world — but now it started to feel like the entire world had turned upside down.
I understood this feeling more clearly when I came across this quote from Howard Zinn, and I think of it often: “I start from the supposition that the world is topsy-turvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out of power, that the wealth is distributed in this country and the world in such a way as not simply to require small reform but to require a drastic reallocation of wealth. I start from the supposition that we don't have to say too much about this because all we have to do is think about the state of the world today and realize that things are all upside down.”
What may have been self-evident to Howard Zinn took me a while to realize, and I feel like it’s an ongoing process. My effort to listen more deeply is my effort to understand this more profoundly — to reduce the disconnect between how much of this is intellectual knowledge for me, and how much of it I know — how much of it is deep embodied understanding. And I know there are still many ways I’m not listening — I’m resisting listening — because I’m still not willing to grapple with the consequences of what that listening will teach me, and what it will demand of me and the way I exist in the world.