Every Sunday this summer, read one of the Foreign Affairs editorial team’s top picks from the archives that sheds light on secret histories and untold stories in international affairs. This week, we’re featuring Sisonke Msimang’s 2018 essay on the end of apartheid in South Africa—and the legacy of the country’s efforts to unearth the truth about the crimes and human rights abuses committed under a racist regime.
When South Africa transitioned to democracy in 1994, after the activist Nelson Mandela and his party, the African National Congress, helped topple the apartheid regime that had been in place for nearly half a century, Mandela and the ANC made a choice: to avert a brewing race war through a process of truth and forgiveness. The resulting Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, was a quasi-legal process “intended to ‘bear witness,’ record, and, when appropriate, grant amnesty to the perpetrators of crimes of apartheid,” wrote Msimang, a South African writer and political analyst. But even though the TRC “offered a chance for many families to hear the truth about what happened to their loved ones,” it “failed to address the deeper wounds of apartheid that continue to plague South Africa.”
Although it was important to expose the brutality and human toll of the apartheid regime, wrote Msimang, the TRC sidestepped the structural impacts of apartheid on the millions who had been systematically dispossessed, forced to relocate, and deprived of basic democratic rights and economic opportunities. As a result, “the power imbalances that defined race relations under apartheid continue to exist.” In South Africa today, she wrote, “many look back on the process as a carefully managed stage show—a piece of theater concerned with the appearance of truth-telling rather than the substance of what the truth actually means.”
Indeed, on Wednesday, May 29, South Africans displayed their dissatisfaction with the status quo at the ballot box in a historic vote that brought the ANC’s 30 years of dominance to an end. Polls show that many South Africans believe their country is heading in the wrong direction, pointing to high rates of crime, unemployment, and inequality. Msimang saw the writing on the wall in 2018, arguing that from the start, the ANC had “failed to ensure that the new South Africa was not simply a new democratic polity but a country genuinely committed to economic justice and equality.” For as long as entrenched economic inequality persists, she warned, “the deferred dream of reconciliation festers like a sore.” |
