Making Memory Space: Recollection and Reconciliation in Post ...

attachment to human rights, mutual respect and democracy, and help prevent these ever
again being violated. 41
To this end, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established, to (among other things) bring
personal memory to the fore and from it establish a collective unity. It was designed in the hope of
replacing ‘entrenched visions of society and conceptions of self based in legislated difference and
police separation, with the construction of a new social order grounded in inclusion, democratic
representation and unity, while still nurturing and valuing diversity and difference.’ 42 As part of this
reconciliatory approach, official institutions of the state were called upon to assist in the facilitation of
new narratives and the construction of memory in a way that would acknowledge their place as a living
entity in the society. 43
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was largely based on the Chilean commission that
was established to determine crimes under the military junta between 1970 and 1990, called the
Comision National para la Verdad y la Reconciliation. The TRC in South Africa was investigating
human rights violations that occurred between 1960 and 1994; hearings began in 1996. The hearings
were a national project based around the notion that the act of telling the past would facilitate
commonality and healing for all South Africans, and the recollection and the breaking of silence would
‘heal the country, re-establish the state and construct the nation in a moral universe.’ 44 The TRC was
empowered to grant amnesty to any full disclosure of human rights abuses where political motivation
could be proven, with the hope that this would encourage the ‘truth’ to come out while reconciling
perpetrator and victim. 45 Such an approach situates memory and recollection at the centre of national
forgiveness and progression, in the hope that individual memories will give way to a form of collective
memory, which will allow the country to move forward. Consequently, critical narratives in the
emergent social, political and cultural identity of a new South Africa were based around the act of
remembering and forgetting.
The TRC succeeded in articulating the individual hurt of some of the population and forced many to
acknowledge the trauma in their midst. But, in seeking commonality and drawing broad analogies
between individual testimonies, the creation of shared recollection arguably undermined the unique
specificity of individual commentary. In many respects the TRC forms the basis for memory practice in
41 Gerard Corsane, ‘Transforming Museums and Heritage in Post Colonial and Post Apartheid South Africa: The Impact of
Processes of Policy Formulation and New Legislation’, Social Analysis, Volume 48, Issue 1, Spring 2004 (New York and Oxford:
Bergnahn Books, 2004), p.6.
42 Charmaine McEachern, Narratives of Nation: Media, Memory and Representation in the Making of the New South Africa
(New York: Nova Science Publishers Inc, 2002), p.xi.
43 Janet Hall, Op cit, p.175.
44 Charmaine McEachern, Op cit, p.xv.
45 Brandon Hamber and Richard Wilson, Op cit, p.2.
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