Summary

South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission was the twenty-first of its kind. It was more ambitious in the scope of its enquiry, more transparent in the nature of its proceedings, and more highly charged, symbolically, than any that preceded it. Its public hearings of testimony from victims and perpetrators, drenched with emotion and drama, are what most people remember when they recall the TRC. Yet at the same time, there were parallel processes of documentation, data analysis, quasi-judicial shifting of evidence and writing up the results.This book engages more directly than any previous scholarship with the range of the TRC's activities, with the kinds of truth it sought to construct, and with the various ways in which its "truths" were (necessarily) fractured, incomplete and selective. This is no shallow exercise in debunking. It yields penetrating and conceptually nuanced analyses. While many of the essays in Commissioning the Past are critical of the shortcomings of the Commission, they simultaneously demonstrate a deep awareness of the contradictory brief and difficult circumstances in which the TRC operated. The book takes academic understanding of the TRC onto a new plane.