OVERCOMING APARTHEID Can truth reconcile a divided nation? Free download from www.hsrc p ress.ac.za OVERCOMING APARTHEID Can truth reconcile a divided nation? James L Gibson Free download from www.hsrc p ress.ac.za Published in South Africa by HSRC Press Private Bag X9182, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa www.hsrcpress.ac.za First published in the USA by the Russell Sage Foundation 112 East 64th Street, New York, NY 10021 © 2004 Russell Sage Foundation All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Russell Sage Foundation. Cover design by Jenny Young Production by comPress Distributed in South Africa by Blue Weaver Marketing and Distribution, PO Box 30370, Tokai, Cape Town, 7966, South Africa. Te l: +27 +21-701-4477 Fax: +27 +21-701-7302 email: booksales@hsrc.ac.za Distributed in the United States by CUP Services 750 Cascadilla Street, PO Box 6525, Ithaca, NY 14851 Te l: (800) 666-2211 or (607) 277-2211 Fax: (800) 688-2877 or (607) 277-6292 www.russellsage.org Distributed worldwide, except South Africa and the United States, by NBN Plymbridge Estover Road, Plymouth, PL6 7PZ, United Kingdom Te l: +44 +1752-20-2301 Fax: +44 +1752-20-2333 In South Africa ISBN 0 7969 2071 0 PB In the rest of the world ISBN 0 87154-312-5 HB Free download from www.hsrc p ress.ac.za This book is dedicated to the pillars of South Africa’s truth and reconciliation process, Charles Villa-Vicencio, Alec Boraine, and Des- mond Tutu, who accomplished far more for South Africa than even they dreamed possible. Free download from www.hsrc p ress.ac.za Free download from www.hsrc p ress.ac.za C ONTENTS About the Author ix Preface and Acknowledgments xi C HAPTER 1 Does Truth Lead to Reconciliation? 1 C HAPTER 2 Apartheid’s Legacy in Contemporary South Africa: Experiences, Attributes, and Attitudes of the Sample 28 C HAPTER 3 South African Collective Memories 68 C HAPTER 4 Interracial Reconciliation 117 C HAPTER 5 Truth, Reconciliation, and the Creation of a Human Rights Culture 176 C HAPTER 6 Tolerance: The Minimalist View of Reconciliation 213 C HAPTER 7 Judging the Fairness of Amnesty 258 C HAPTER 8 The Legitimacy of the Political Institutions of the New South Africa 289 C HAPTER 9 Lessons for South Africa’s Future and for the World 328 Appendix A: The Design of the Survey 347 Appendix B: The Questionnaire 353 Notes 409 References 441 Index 457 Free download from www.hsrc p ress.ac.za Free download from www.hsrc p ress.ac.za A BOUT THE A UTHOR J AMES L. G IBSON is Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government at Washington University in St. Louis, fellow at the Centre for Inter- national and Comparative Politics and Professor Extraordinary in Political Science at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and Dis- tinguished Visiting Research Scholar at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, South Africa. Free download from www.hsrc p ress.ac.za Free download from www.hsrc p ress.ac.za P REFACE AND A CKNOWLEDGMENTS While this book was being written, a low-scale civil war was taking place in American political science. Dubbed the “perestroika” move- ment, some academic political scientists were voicing a number of complaints against “scientific” political science. Many of these pro- testations were foolish and ill informed; some, however, were not. Supporters of the perestroika movement argue that contempo- rary political science in the United States is too little concerned with politics. By this the critics mean that political scientists are too focused on methods and theory and have devoted too little atten- tion to studying and analyzing the important political issues and controversies of our time. My own view is that it is impossible to expend too much effort on method and theory, given the range of unresolved methodological and theoretical problems characterizing our field. But at the same time, the complaint that politics is too often ignored has some validity. Consequently, this study is moti- vated in part by my desire to take important theories of political psychology and intergroup relations and advanced methodological techniques and marry them to what I judge to be one of the most important questions facing transitional polities: does truth lead to reconciliation? This book therefore purports to contribute to both policy anal- ysis and theory building and scientific hypothesis testing. The pol- icy question is obvious: I seek to assess whether South Africa’s truth and reconciliation process in fact achieved the goals it set for itself. In particular, I examine the degree to which South Africans are “reconciled,” and then ask whether evidence exists to suggest that the truth and reconciliation process contributed to this recon- ciliation. Mine is not a strong research design from the point of view of policy analysis, since I am forced to rely on cross-sectional empirical evidence collected near the end of the truth and recon- ciliation process. But certainly one objective of this book is to draw Free download from www.hsrc p ress.ac.za [...]... South Africa to its apartheid past Little rigorous research has been reported documenting how South Africans experienced apartheid, so I devote considerable effort to investigating how people believe they lived and their memories of the experiences they had under the old system In general, many of my findings about apartheid are Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za 20 Overcoming Apartheid entirely... mistakenly equating forgiveness of past enemies with reconciliation.”12 Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za 14 Overcoming Apartheid The larger South African society is the context for the second meaning of the term—reconciliation between the races and, closely related, between those who profited from apartheid and those who were injured by it Dan Markel (1999, 407) refers to this as “the public reconciliative... attempted to assemble a collective memory of the apartheid past for South Africans, and this contention is unlikely to be controversial What is perhaps novel in my analysis is the attempt to test the hypothesis that the degree of an individual South African’s participation in the collective memory forged by the truth and reconciliation process is re- 18 Overcoming Apartheid Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za... this in my listing of theoretical approaches since it is so central to my analysis Apartheid left deep scars on South Africa, and on South Africans, and individuals’ experiences under apartheid no doubt have shaped their understandings of both truth and reconciliation But not all South Africans were directly harmed by apartheid; not even all Black South Africans were directly injured by the Free download... is not just a chronicle of who did what to whom; instead, it is an authoritative description and analysis of the history of the country Was apartheid a crime against humanity? Was the criminality of apartheid due to the missteps of a few rogue individuals, or was apartheid criminal by its very ideology and through its institutions? These are questions for which the TRC provided unambiguous and, by its... country’s apartheid past Then I examine the degree to which ordinary South Africans accept this truth as the collective memory of the country, and I consider whether the activities of the TRC itself contributed to a common understanding of the nature of the country’s apartheid past My findings in this chapter are filled with unexpected nuggets, ranging from the widespread condemnation of apartheid. .. When I consider the truth → reconciliation hypothesis, in every instance I am investigating the hypothesis that those South Africans who accept the truth as Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za 8 Overcoming Apartheid documented by the TRC are more likely to be reconciled As I try to explicate more completely in chapter 3, “truth” here means the TRC’s truth, nothing more Furthermore, factors other than... Ending apartheid in South Africa came at considerable cost to those who had long struggled against the oppressive system In South Africa, in contrast to other nations emerging from a tyrannical past (for instance, Argentina and Uganda), the ancien regime ´ 6 was not defeated This meant that the transition had to be brokered One of the central issues in the talks over the transformation of the apartheid. .. offenses; the parties’ slogan was: “No amnesty, no amnesia, just justice” (quoted in Verwoerd 1997).7 Nonetheless, the South African Constitutional Court Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za 10 Overcoming Apartheid upheld the constitutionality of the act (Azanian Peoples Organization [AZAPO] and others v President of the Republic of South Africa and others, CCT 117/96 [July 25, 1996]), and the TRC... obviously concerns the deeds of individual victims and perpetrators, but to many, over time, it came also to address the larger issue of apartheid itself For instance, South Africa’s Human Rights Commission declared on July 31, 1993, that “the enormity of the crime of apartheid as a system of social engineering must be revealed in all its nakedness, including the distortions wrought upon some of those . OVERCOMING APARTHEID Can truth reconcile a divided nation? Free download from www.hsrc p ress.ac.za OVERCOMING APARTHEID Can truth. struggle over apartheid. 1 At one level, the TRC was extraordinarily success- ful: it held countless hearings, interviewed thousands of victims of apartheid,