Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa

273 Pages·2016·9.62 MB·English

by  Rita Kesselring

Bodies of Truth
Stanford Studies in Human Rights
Bodies of Truth
Law, Memory, and Emancipation in
Post-Apartheid South Africa
Rita Kesselring
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights
reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University
Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-8047-9848-8 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8047-9978-2 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-8047-9983-6 (electronic)
Cover image courtesy of author.
Typeset by Newgen in 10/14 Minion Pro
Contents
Foreword vii
Foreword from the Series Editor ix
Acknowledgments xi
List of Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
1 Apartheid Victimhood before the Courts 23
2 Reparation, Representation, and Class Actions 53
3 Embodied Memory and the Social 77
4 The Formation of the Political 117
5 Emancipation from Victimhood 133
6 Ethnographic Experience and Anthropological Knowledge 167
Conclusion: The Embodiment of Experiences
of Violence as Seeds of New Forms of Sociality 187
Notes 209
Bibliography 229
Index 247

Foreword
AT THE TRUTH and Reconciliation Commission, victims spoke about their
losses, their hardships, and their horrendous experiences under apartheid rule.
They made us—the commissioners, their fellow South Africans, and the global
community—listen, cry, and feel with them. The Truth Commission was very
important to mark the point where remorse, forgiveness, and reconciliation
became finally possible, but we should not forget that victims’ suffering did
not necessarily stop when the commission’s work ended. The lifetime of the
commission was too short to listen to everyone, even though each and every
person who lived under apartheid has a singular story to tell. Many, during the
commission’s lifespan, were not yet prepared to put their sufferings into words.
Twenty years on, the publication of this book is, unfortunately, still timely.
Unlike many books about apartheid, Rita Kesselring’s is not only about the
past. It is about the persistence of the past into the present. It illuminates how
the present society sometimes perpetuates the chasms of the past. In our urge
to build a new South Africa, we have neglected thousands of victims and their
plights. They have been patient. They have joined in building a new society. But
memories do not simply go away. There are memories we all share, but which
burden some of us more heavily than others.
Victims formed groups, engaged with the Truth Commission, pointed out
the shortcomings of the commission’s work, and offered their help in address-
ing those shortcomings. Victims went to court against those who refused to
contribute, to show remorse, or to help repair. Meeting in court is not how we
had hoped to build our society. The law can sometimes do more harm than
good. But sometimes, the law wakes us up and reminds us of our duties to dis-
cuss as fellow human beings the questions the plaintiffs raise.
viii Foreword
I commend the courage of all those who stood up and spoke out, in the
courts and elsewhere. This book brings us closer to those who do not seek the
limelight. It offers us insight into the people who cannot or do not want to
speak out. We must listen to them. Together, we must finish the work that the
commission started.
Rita Kesselring, a young Swiss anthropologist, enhances our understand-
ing of the intricacies of victims’ lives in today’s South Africa. She listened to
victims. She shared their frustration with a society that seems to have turned
the ability to move on into a touchstone of good victimhood. Let her book be
a reminder that a political transition does not automatically bring social equal-
ity. Today, twenty years after the commission, we no longer need to discuss
whether retribution, amnesty, or reconciliation is the way forward. We need to
deliver on the dream and the promise of a new South Africa.
God bless you.
Reverend Mpho Tutu
November 2015
Foreword from the Series Editor
RITA KESSELRING’S Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-
Apartheid South Africa interrogates the limits of law as a mechanism for trans-
lating “experiences of suffering, survival, and solidarity” into new forms of
sociality that are capable of grounding political and social change. Her study
invites the reader to move between a more analytical consideration of struggles
in post-apartheid South Africa around modes of justice-making and reconcili-
ation and the more elusive phenomenologies of embodied harm. This is a diffi-
cult task, in part because Kesselring’s theoretical framework demands as much
introspection as application, since one of the major contributions of her book
is to show how even the most expansive discourses of injustice cannot fully en-
compass experiences of suffering and the ultimately bounded fact of what she
describes as “pain’s isolating nature.”
Kesselring’s study is the result of almost two years of ethnographic research
in South Africa between 2009 and 2013. Her project took her throughout the
country, and her writing is infused with a strong sense of intersubjective con-
nection and empathy as she grapples with the task of rendering analytically
meaningful the personal journeys among her interlocutors, from what she calls
“victimhood” to “victim subjectivity.” Even the photographs in the book re-
flect a keen sensitivity to the nuanced inflections of everyday life in the still-
segregated townships on the outskirts of Cape Town: the weary man pausing
between bites of porridge; the street-side food merchant in the midst of serv-
ing lunch; two ladies playing with a pet tortoise. The images speak to one of
Kesselring’s central arguments: that there is an immediacy to lived experiences
that resists translation into the categories of identity that are recognized by the
state, social psychiatry, and the law. At the same time, by following the trajecto-
ries of her interlocutors through political activism, legal argument, and social