Conflict, Terrorism, and Invented Settler Colonial Victimhood in South Africa

Unsurprisingly, the South African anti-apartheid struggle and ‘post-apartheid’ reconciliation, seemingly reflect the very same parallels of narrative construction, which pits victims in resistance as autonomous instigators, bearing agency and volition to violence at par with the state. A glance over the trials of anti-apartheid liberationists in the 1963–1964 Rivonia Trial makes for a teeth-grinding read on the manipulation of language and instrumentalization of incendiary labels. Infamous former prime minister and forefather of ‘Grand Apartheid’, Hendrik Verwoerd’s apartheid state, along with its international patrons including Britain and Israel, were intent on weaponizing the language of terrorism, in treason and sabotage charges against now celebrated African National Congress (ANC) freedom fighters: Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mahlaba, Ahmed Kathrada, Elias Motsoaledi, Andrew Mlangeni and Denis Goldberg. The positioning of the settler colonial apartheid state as ‘victims’ of a black insurgent ‘terror’, was aptly noted by the defendants during trial. Nelson Mandela’s defiant retort at the dock to the apartheid state encapsulated the hypocrisy of colonial legality and self-victimisation by branding the apartheid justice system as ‘illegitimate’. Mandela, facing the death penalty along with his collaborators for forming the militant wing of the ANC Umkhonto we Sizwe, further articulated in his not-guilty plea that the apartheid state and its members should instead ‘stand indicted here’, not the ANC defendants. In their shackled resistance, Mandela and the ANC freedom fighters showed the courtroom and, in extension, apartheid’s legal infrastructure to be yet another site of political struggle, to not only contest but also articulate the production of racial victimhoods within the settler colonial polity. The Rivonia trial is but one of numerous instances where the South African apartheid state responded to both militant and non-violent resistance to racial victimization in terms of terrorism and counterinsurgency. To be clear, the aim of this text is not to engage with the merits of the South African—or Israeli state’s—juridical production of terrorism as an illegality; rather, I am interested in the utility of such framings that co-opt a real or imagined insurgent terror in defence of a settler colonial project.

Beyond the Rivonia trials, the apartheid settler colonial bureaucracy further extended its self-victimhood even in its moral demise, by framing racial violence within a ‘post-conflict’ reconciliation lens. Following the 1995 Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Bill and the negotiated settlement between the incumbent apartheid National Party and the succeeding ANC, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established to mark the official end to apartheid as a system of racial governance and a crime against humanity. The TRC was tasked with implementing a large-scale national truth-seeking process to excavate decades-long structural and racial abuses under the apartheid state, from 1960 to 1994. In pursuit of a ‘post-apartheid’ justice, institutional reconciliation in the South African context prioritised notions of transformative and testimonial justice over legal retribution, to compensate for the apartheid state’s structural violence. Over the course of three years, the commission collected over 20,000 victims’ testimonies, from which it produced a concluding five-volume report in 2003 detailing its findings, as well as a proposed ‘recommendation of measures’ to bring about a reconciled and rebirthed ‘rainbow nation’. However, as I probed the South African settler colonial experience in my research, the institutional production of reconciliation solely along the lines of ‘war’ and ‘conflict’ by the commission became a glaring ethical issue. While I am not South African, it was self-evident the connection between a widespread disaffection with reconciliatory outcomes in the ‘post-apartheid’ era, especially among black, indigenous, and coloured communities, and the displacement of the settler colonial structure that necessitated their victimhood(s).

At first glance, it would seem that the commission was robust and thorough in seeking testimonial justice for victims, and for that very reason, it is often hailed as a landmark architecture of justice within Transitional Justice and Peace and Conflict Studies. However, I was struck by the lack of historical nuance and sensitivity to the violence victims were subjected to as they testified and recounted to the commission, the abuses inflicted upon them and/or their loved ones. Harrowing testimonies provided by mothers of disappeared, tortured, detained and/or executed anti-apartheid liberationists were particularly unsettling to engage with, not least because of their traumatic content, but also the nature through which they were pushed to a moment of ‘dramatic climax’ in highly emotive accounts. Reading through what can only be described as an interrogative line of questioning by the members of the commission, I was disarmed by the lack of care or consideration for potential re-traumatisation for victims.

I argue that the disregard shown to victims, who were extracted from and further violated in testimony, reflected the commission’s centring of a performative national ‘post-conflict’ redemption, over a sincere advocacy for justice. Following the conflict narrative thread, the TRC craftily articulated an injury to the national psyche, borne out of an experience of widespread inter-communal and interpersonal discord. In doing so, the commission appropriated victims’ traumatic testimonies to appeal to a national victim complex, aligned with its portrayal of a South African nation in ‘conflict’. In keeping the historical context of such ‘conflict’ conveniently ambivalent, black and indigenous victims became dispossessed of a claim to structural violations dating back to the arrival of Dutch settlers in the 17th century. In tandem, victims bore a heavy and unconscionable responsibility to forgive and absolve the settler colonial state of centuries-long expropriation and displacement. I cannot help but draw parallels with the very same disdain and indifference shown to Palestinian victim communities who are subjected to inhumane inquisitions to evidence their victimhood. The potency of an Israeli-Zionist victim complex is such that daily accounts of settler terror in the Occupied West Bank do not suffice. Restrictions on the movement of a whole population through ‘terminals’ or checkpoints do not suffice. The establishment of diasporas formed by generational exile does not suffice. Palestinians must also reach for a ‘dramatic climax’, pulling their martyred from the rubble and thrusting them in front of cameras in the hopes that the world may not only bear witness to their suffering but also identify a common humanity.