Blood Feuds and Childbirth

There is a widely held assumption that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) can somehow act as a means to resolve conflict. If indeed its task is to heal the conflict of the past, then the commission has manifestly failed at several important levels, largely to do with relations between political parties. For example, at the time of writing, both the National Party and the Inkatha Freedom Party have withdrawn their support for the process; Azapo and the Pan Africanist Congress have never supported it fully; there has been tension over the roles of the amnesty committee and those of the Attorneys General; the commission's leaders have been accused of being politically partisan; and there is anger over the existence of the amnesty provision, over the amnesties granted and over the lack of reparations forthcoming for victims.

Yet, in terms of the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act no. 34, 1995 - the Act that brought the commission into being - the commission is not required to resolve conflicts arising from the past. Healing is not within its formal mandate. Its task is to generate a detailed record of the nature, extent and causes of human rights violations that occurred in a defined historical past (1960-1994) and to document the contexts within which those violations occurred. It is obliged to facilitate the granting of amnesty, to allow victims of human rights violations to tell of their experiences, and to generate recommendations for reparation and rehabilitation. Through this process, the commission's broader mandate is to generate national unity and reconciliation.

It is at this point that notions of reconciliation and conflict resolution blur, for while there is no necessary link in law between the two concepts, it is difficult to imagine reconciliation without some degree of resolution, if not of the conflicts themselves, then certainly of the disjuncture in worldviews that fed the conflicts of the past. The imperative of nation building, the commission's task, has in part shaped the ways in which we can think of the relationship between conflict resolution and reconciliation.

It seems to me that the reason we tend to think of the commission as a conflict resolution mechanism lies precisely in its task of reconciliation and creating 'national unity'. One of the underlying assumptions of the commission's task has to do with the creation of a shared sense of the past, an imperative contained both in the process of documenting human rights violations and also in the moral rejoinder, 'never again'. It is at these two levels - which I collapse into 'shared past'- that I think the commission's most important role as a conflict resolution mechanism is played out.

In thinking about shared pasts, I imagine the commission to be a means of investigating and reordering the past in order to create 'unity' and 'reconciliation'. I take as given three assumptions. The first is that the commission is a performance, a public display of moralities. The second is that its task shares similar underpinnings to ritual. By this I mean that ritual has particular capacity to resolve conflict by creating spaces through which negotiation can occur and (new) boundaries can be established. My third assumption is that the commission's task is to generate a fiction of incorporation (unity) and a shared understanding of and orientation towards the past, envisaged as reconciliation. I want to explore these notions using anthropological examples of childbirth and blood feud to frame my discussion. I set these against a generic description of a human rights violations hearing held by the commission. It may seem strange to reflect on blood feuds and childbirth in the context of a discussion on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, yet the potential outcomes of the commission's process and findings fuse the two notions, at least in the present.

First, then, three descriptions:

• A human rights violations hearing

  The camera lights shine down on a stage decked in white-draped tables and flowers. Palm trees line the front of the stage. It could be a wedding setting except for the national flags, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission banners and the boxes of tissues centered on the tables. A person, usually a woman, sits facing a panel of commissioners. Perhaps she is accompanied by a friend or a child or a husband. Sometimes she is alone. A community briefer comforts her when words choke her, and she weeps. She tells a story of loss and pain and suffering. The commissioners listen, nodding in sympathy. They ask questions. After ten or twenty minutes the woman steps down from the stage, her story told. It will enter the official records of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a set of data that contributes to the "establishment of as complete a picture as possible of the nature, causes and extent of gross violations of human rights committed during the period from March 1, 1960 to the cut-off date ... emanating from the conflicts of the past" (Preamble to Act no. 34, 1995).

• Nuer conflict resolution

  Writing of the political organisation of the Nuer people in Sudan during the 1940s, E Evans Pritchard describes community boundaries as being derived through social limitations on violence. The political unit, the 'tribe', ended when there were no further mechanisms for solving violence. Until that point, ideas about descent provided the markers of social relationships and pointed out the routes for negotiation and conflict resolution.

  Evans Pritchard described Nuer society as having two main mechanisms for dealing with conflict. The first was an extraordinary system of political mobilisation. He claims that groups of like sizes mobilised against or in defence of one another on the basis of descent. The boundaries marking peace and conflict were thus defined by shared ideas about the past and by the location of particular groups in relation to one another as a consequence of their understanding of that past.

  The second institution that Evans Pritchard describes is that of the Leopard Skin Chief, whose role was to mediate in instances of revenge and blood feud. He was permitted to give sanctuary to murderers until such time as negotiations were made and compensations decided upon. He had no power to enforce his decisions, or outside of the context of the negotiations, yet he had immense authority and stature in contexts of conflict.

  One can imagine the commission as a new political configuration of the Leopard Skin Chief. The committee on amnesty essentially offers sanctuary to those accused of human rights violations and tries to reach some kind of an agreement on the shape of their liberty. One of the differences between the amnesty committee and the institution of the Leopard Skin Chief is that the amnesty committee lacks the discretion to link amnesty with reparation. Indeed, reparation is removed from the realm of responsibility of the perpetrator. Reparations are instead the task of civil society and government through the circuitous route of recommendations.

• A difficult childbirth

  Claude Levi-Strauss has described the ritual interventions made by a Cuna shaman in a difficult childbirth. A shaman, called in to assist the pregnant woman, begins to sing a tale of epic battle with Muu. Muu, the spirit responsible for forming the foetus, has abused her power by capturing the soul of the mother-to-be and refusing to allow the birth. The shaman does not touch the woman in labour. His words transform time from the pain of here and now to the limits of mythical time. His song eases the birth by transforming its context from the present to a mythic past, such that words parallel the process of childbirth. The transformation carries a moral imperative that has to do with overcoming abuse of power and transforming power relations so that the child can be born.

  So, through the transformation of mythic and historical time, a child is born in the present. The world is changed through the mediating effect of words that place the child and his birth in a relation to different kinds of time.

Boundaries and time

These descriptions encapsulate two themes that have to do with boundaries and the creation of shared notions of the past. In the description of Nuer conflict resolution, descent group boundaries and authority figures defined the kinds of action to be taken in instances of conflict or its resolution, and delineated the persons responsible for action. In that story, genealogical relationship is the measure of the territorial ambit of peace and mobilisation for war. Evans Pritchard described such forms of social organisation as 'segmentary lineages'. A lineage describes people in relation to one another as descendants of a common ancestor. Genealogical links express a shared orientation toward historic time. They express also a common set of ideas pertaining to boundaries. 'They' and 'we' are creations of shared notions of relationships that determine how 'blood' and 'time' link people in the present. Genealogy creates boundaries as it generates a fiction of group-belonging.

There are important applications for the commission within this description of pasts and boundaries. The commission is, after all, responsible for the creation of a new communityÑa nationÑand thence new or different boundaries. The unified nation is an 'imagined community', to use Benedict Anderson's persuasive term, in which shared understandings of the past will shape current and future projects. One can imagine this new community as a kind of kinship, in the sense that the commission is mandated to generate an understanding of the past (tracing linkages if not lineages), thence to create a nation (based on a shared sense of the past and a shared orientation towards the future).

In the story of childbirth, words transform time and, through the assertion of mythic time, historic chronology is re-established. The process from which the description of a human rights violation hearing is extracted closely parallels this description in that words publicly uttered about the past are anticipated to produce future changes (such as the creation of a human rights culture in South Africa, the possibility of reparations or rehabilitation for victims, and so on.) We see that ritual performance has less to do with solely talking than with talking in order to produce doing. Where ritual specialists talk, they do so in order to effect an action or activity. It seems to me that the test of efficacy of the commission lies in what it is able to do with the words spoken in human rights, amnesty and special hearings, and with submissions. It lies also in the extent to which a shared notion of the past can be createdÑin the frameworks that are generated as a basis for reconciliation and unity.

Frameworks

The two case studies show the work of frameworks based on imagined relationships and the transformation of time. Performance of memory create and enact frameworks of explanation. There are important applications here for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Maurice Bloch has commented: "...there is no one way of relating to the past and the future and therefore of being in history. There is, therefore, no one way by which one wants to inscribe memory in the public world." His argument forces us to confront immediately the problem of memory and its performance in the construction of national identity through the commission. We are forced to ask questions about the frameworks through which reconciliation and unity are to be achieved.

The commission's work rests on an assumption that time is out of kilter in South Africa; that radical violence of the kind enacted under apartheid somehow exists outside of time, or at the very least, ruptures the ordinary flow of time, pushing unresolved time into the present and potentially tainting the future. Through careful examination, the unquiet, unresolved past can be explained and a proper chronology, which differentiates between past and present, will be restored through reconstruction and analysis. The reconstruction is presumed to enable the construction of a national identity.

The model of nationhood that the commission is supposed to enact is powerful. It rests heavily on notions of shared frameworks through which the past can be viewed, rather as the Nuer model rests on understandings about social relationships as they are constituted and performed through time. Jack Kugelmass has suggested that memory is a process of both remembering and forgetting. He argues that in order to be assimilated into popular imagination (a collective memory), facts require a narrative framework or structure. He argues that where there is no accessible literature of destruction, performance (rituals both secular and sacred) are a means to bridge what he calls 'fundamental discontinuities in life'.

The world does not lack for a literature of destruction. South Africa has several narratives into which the facts of past violence can be fitted or against which they can be pitted. The commission can be seen as sculpting one such framework through which to generate shared understandings of the past. The framework on offer here is extremely limited. The commission's enquiry is limited to only gross human rights violations - at least in so far as the human rights violations submissions are concerned. The commission has quite literally enacted the framework of its enquiry through public hearings printed in the press and broadcast on the radio, TV and over the internet. The public debate accompanying the commission has focused on understanding the narrative framework emerging from its 'performances' and determining its efficacy and value. It seems to me that South Africa is currently witnessing a process of shifting a new framework of description and definition into place, creating, if not a cohesive narrative of past pain, then at least the beginnings of a framework within which moralities can be placed and debated.

That framework is based on notions of the autonomous, responsible self whose fundamental, inherent rights can be violated. Such a framework is not new, although its currency is now more widespread than before. The framework is contested. Indeed, that is the strength of the commission's process. Contestation over definitions and descriptions create a public space within which such definitions and descriptions can be analaysed, addressed, reconstituted, debated. The commission allows for such debates to be public by opening what is essentially a ritual space for discussion of citizenship and moralities through its excavation of the past.

The framework offered by the commission is important. It gives visible and tangible shape to the past, providing, shall we say, a ritual context within which the past can be examined and placed on record - at least in part. It is not and should not be the only narrative about the past in South Africa. Its existence does not, by the fact of its existence, guarantee change for the better.

Blood and birth

Ritual performance has the effect of transforming and reasserting historical time and chronologies. It creates space for the performance of particular moralities, and in so doing, creates and recreates boundaries.

If we are to imagine the commission in these terms, then the measure of its success in creating national unity and reconciliation lies in the extent to which it is able to generate fictions of belonging through its exploration of past violations. Through exploring violences and the contexts within which they occurred, the commission has somehow to create not a history but a new moral orientation in time. At its best, then, the commission can offer not a chronology of violence, but new frameworks for understanding past violence. Its success in transforming time may be marked by birth the celebrated national identity or ubuntu. Should it fail, the commission has created a gap in which recrimination and anger may play out. It seems, however, that its legacy will be the public debates around violence and moralities, generated by its process. In the sense that the commission has allowed for such debates, South Africa is made unique.

Fiona Ross lectures in the Social Anthropology Department at the University of Cape Town.

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