Truth and Reconciliation Commission: South Africa Faces Apartheid

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was a body created by South Africa’s new democracy to uncover the truth about political violence under apartheid. Chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, it began public hearings in April 1996, heard thousands of victims and perpetrators, and handed its main report to President Nelson Mandela in October 1998. Its unusual offer of amnesty in exchange for full confession made it one of the most studied experiments in transitional justice.

Background: from apartheid to democracy

Apartheid, the system of legal racial segregation introduced after 1948, was enforced through mass removals, detention without trial, torture and killings. Opposition movements, including the African National Congress (ANC), turned to armed struggle after the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, and the conflict produced violence on several sides, including bloody clashes between ANC supporters and the Inkatha Freedom Party in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

After the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, negotiations led to the first democratic elections in April 1994. A central question was how to deal with the past. Blanket amnesty would have denied victims justice, while full-scale prosecutions risked derailing a fragile transition in which the old security forces were still powerful. The interim constitution of 1993 committed the country to granting amnesty for political offences, leaving parliament to decide how.

Creating the commission

The answer was the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995. It created a commission of 17 members, appointed by Mandela after public nominations. Desmond Tutu, the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, became chair, with Alex Boraine as deputy chair.

The commission’s mandate covered gross human rights violations, meaning killing, abduction, torture and severe ill-treatment, committed between 1 March 1960 and 10 May 1994, the day of Mandela’s inauguration. It worked through three committees:

• The Human Rights Violations Committee collected statements and held public hearings for victims.
• The Amnesty Committee, led by judges, decided applications from perpetrators.
• The Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee proposed support for survivors.

The hearings

The first public hearing opened in East London on 15 April 1996. Over the next two years the commission took around 21,000 statements from victims and held hearings in town halls, churches and community centres across the country. Survivors and relatives described detentions, disappearances and killings, often in their own languages with simultaneous translation. Tutu himself wept at one early session.

The hearings reached a wide audience. Radio carried them daily, and a weekly television programme on the national broadcaster summarised the testimony. For many white South Africans this was the first time they heard in detail what had been done in their name, while for many black families it was the first official acknowledgement of their loss.

Special hearings examined the role of institutions such as business, the media, the legal profession, the health sector and faith communities. In November 1997 the commission held a nine-day hearing on Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and the “Mandela United Football Club”, whose members were linked to assaults and killings in the late 1980s.

Truth for amnesty

The most distinctive feature of the TRC was amnesty. Perpetrators could apply for amnesty for specific acts, but only if the acts were associated with a political objective and if they gave full disclosure. Remorse was not required. Those who received amnesty were freed from criminal and civil liability for the acts covered.

About 7,100 people applied, many of them prisoners already serving sentences. Most applications were refused because the crimes were not political, but amnesty was granted in around 850 cases. Some hearings exposed secrets the old state had long denied. Eugene de Kock, former commander of the police death squad based at Vlakplaas farm, testified at length about killings and implicated senior officers; he received amnesty for many crimes but remained in prison for others until his parole in 2015. Former police officers revealed where the bodies of disappeared activists had been buried, allowing families to recover remains.

Amnesty was refused to the security policemen who sought it for the death in custody of the Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko in 1977. By contrast, the four young men convicted of killing the American student Amy Biehl in 1993 were granted amnesty in 1998, with the support of her parents.

Not everyone co-operated. Former president P. W. Botha refused to appear before the commission despite a subpoena. He was convicted of contempt in 1998, but the conviction was overturned on appeal in 1999 on a technicality.

The report and its findings

Tutu presented the first five volumes of the final report to Mandela on 29 October 1998. The report found that the apartheid state and its security forces were the primary perpetrators of gross violations, and it held the state responsible for torture, killings and cross-border raids. It also found that the ANC had committed gross violations in its armed struggle and in its camps in exile, and it criticised the Inkatha Freedom Party and others.

Publication was controversial. The ANC, by then led by Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s deputy president, went to court the night before to block the release of findings against it, but the application failed. Former president F. W. de Klerk obtained a court order that led to a passage about him being blacked out. The Amnesty Committee continued its work until 2001, and two further volumes followed in 2003.

Reparations and criticism

The commission recommended individual reparation grants of about 21,700 rand a year for six years to each identified victim. The government instead paid a one-off sum of 30,000 rand in 2003, along with some community programmes. Victims’ groups such as the Khulumani Support Group called this inadequate.

Critics have also argued that the bargain of truth for amnesty was not completed. The commission handed several hundred cases to prosecutors, but very few people who were refused amnesty or never applied were ever put on trial. Others questioned the strong emphasis on forgiveness, influenced by Tutu’s Christian faith and the African ethic of ubuntu, arguing that victims were sometimes pressed to reconcile. Supporters reply that the commission revealed facts that courts alone could never have uncovered, and helped make a peaceful transition possible.

Key people

Desmond Tutu gave the commission its moral authority and much of its public face, insisting that it should hear victims from every side. Alex Boraine, his deputy, had studied earlier truth commissions in Latin America and did much of the work of designing the process. The journalist and poet Antjie Krog, who reported on the hearings for radio, later described them in her book Country of My Skull, one of the best-known accounts of the commission’s work.

Timeline

• 1993, December: The interim constitution provides for amnesty for political offences.
• 1995, 19 July: The Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act is signed into law.
• 1996, 15 April: First public victims’ hearing opens in East London.
• 1997, November: Hearing into Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and the Mandela United Football Club.
• 1998, 29 October: Tutu presents the five-volume final report to President Mandela.
• 2001: The Amnesty Committee completes its work.
• 2003, March: Volumes 6 and 7 of the report are released.
• 2003, 15 April: President Thabo Mbeki announces one-off reparation payments of 30,000 rand per victim.

Why it matters

The TRC gave a public voice to thousands of victims and created an official record of apartheid’s crimes that can no longer be credibly denied. Its model of truth-telling and conditional amnesty influenced later commissions in countries such as Sierra Leone, Liberia and Canada, and its mixed results remain central to debates about how societies can confront a violent past. It also stands beside the 1994 election as a defining institution of South Africa’s transition.