Why there is no easy way to dispose of painful history

R.W. Johnson

• The Truth about the Truth Commission by Anthea Jeffery
  South African Institute of Race Relations, 167 pp, Rand (SA)89.95, July 1999, ISBN 0 86982 463 5

No book in recent South African history has attracted such venom as Anthea Jeffery’s analysis of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She has been accused of wanting to defend the apartheid past, of having a desire to hurt and humiliate black people and of much else besides. Yet none of her attackers has dared to take issue with her on the basis of fact or evidence – Jeffery’s scholarship is beyond reproach. She is one of the few people who have actually read the five volumes of the TRC Report and is probably the only one who has tested it against the evidence uncovered by the various judicial inquiries, special investigations and court cases which had – in far greater detail – covered much of the same ground as the TRC and their findings. Jeffery has, moreover, done something of the sort before. The Natal Story: Sixteen Years of Conflict (1997) displayed the same impressive scholarship and, with almost painful evenhandedness, sought to put forward the opposing interpretations of every incident in which Inkatha and the ANC had been protagonists, leaving the reader to make up his own mind. This was, in current South African terms, a brave thing to do, but it is as nothing compared to the courage required to lay bare the procedures of the TRC.