Beyond Nuremberg

• DOI: 10.1177/0032329214554387
• Author: Mahmood Mamdani
• Published date: 01 March 2015
• Date: 01 March 2015
• Subject Matter: Articles

Politics & Society

2015, Vol. 43(1) 61 –88

© 2014 SAGE Publications

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329214554387

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Article

Beyond Nuremberg: The

Historical Significance of the

Post-apartheid Transition in

South Africa

Mahmood Mamdani

Columbia University, New York, NY, USA and Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda

Abstract

The contemporary human rights movement holds up Nuremberg as a template with

which to define responsibility for mass violence. I argue that the negotiations that

ended apartheid—the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA)—

provide the raw material for a critique of the “lessons of Nuremberg.” Whereas

Nuremberg shaped a notion of justice as criminal justice, CODESA calls on us to think

of justice as primarily political. CODESA shed the zero-sum logic of criminal justice

for the inclusive nature of political justice. If the former accents victims’ justice, the

latter prioritizes survivors’ justice. If Nuremberg has been ideologized as a paradigm,

the end of apartheid has been exceptionalized as an improbable outcome produced

by the exceptional personality of Nelson Mandela. This essay argues for the core

relevance of the South African transition for ending civil wars in the rest of Africa.

Keywords

South Africa, apartheid, Nuremberg, CODESA, TRC

Corresponding Author:

Mahmood Mamdani, Makerere Institute of Social Research, Kampala, Uganda and Department of Middle

Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University, New York, New York, USA.

Email: mm1124@columbia.edu

554387PASXXX10.1177/0032329214554387Politics & SocietyMamdani

research-article2014

62 Politics & Society 43(1)

A dominant tendency in the contemporary human rights movement holds up

Nuremberg as a template with which to define responsibility for mass violence. This

same tendency tends to narrow the meaning of justice to criminal justice, thereby indi-

vidualizing the notion of justice in neoliberal fashion.

Beginning the late 1970s, Nuremberg was ideologized by a human rights move-

ment that moved away from a call for structural reform to accent individual criminal

responsibility. More recently, this same movement has tended to exceptionalize the

South African transition from apartheid by center-staging the process known as “truth

and reconciliation” and sidelining the political process that led to the larger agreement

of which the decision to constitute a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was

but one part. I suggest a critical appreciation of the post-apartheid transition in South

Africa, one that focuses on the political process known as Convention for a Democratic

South Africa (CODESA), both to rethink the centrality of and to suggest a move

beyond the logic of Nuremberg.

The human rights movement that gathered steam in the late 1970s anchored itself

ideologically in the lessons of the Holocaust and presented itself as a post-Nuremberg

movement. What connected this movement of the 1970s and beyond to Nuremberg

was less historical chronology than its apolitical thrust. Samuel Moyn has argued that

human rights were “born as an alternative to grand political mission,” as “a moral criti-

cism of politics.”1 In this essay, we seek to connect the moral and the political, the ethi-

cal and the historical, through a discussion of two responses to crimes against humanity:

the criminal trials known as Nuremberg and CODESA, the political talks that led to

the end of apartheid.

The contemporary human rights movement anchors itself ideologically in the les-

sons of defeat, not of revolution—the lessons of the Nazi Holocaust, not of the French

Revolution.2 Whereas the movement organized around the revolutionary banner—

Rights of Man—was highly political, the contemporary human rights movement is

consciously antipolitical, which is the meaning it gives to the notion of “human” and

“humanitarian.” Nuremberg is said to redefine the problem and the solution. The prob-

lem is extreme violence—radical evil—and the question it poses involves responsibil-

ity for the violence. The solution encapsulated as “lessons of Nuremberg” is to think

of violence as criminal, and of responsibility for it as individual—state orders cannot

absolve officials of individual responsibility. Above all, this responsibility is said to be

ethical, not political.

Could one argue that the lesson of the transition from apartheid is the opposite?

Should extreme violence be thought of more as political than criminal? I was part of

the audience one grey morning in Cape Town when the TRC questioned F. W. de

Klerk. De Klerk had read out a statement enumerating the wrongs of apartheid and

concluded by taking responsibility for apartheid. But the TRC was not interested. Its

interest was narrowly focused on specific human rights violations such as murder,

torture, and kidnapping: did de Klerk know of these? Had he authorized any of these?

It was striking how different this was from what we know of Nuremberg. At Nuremberg,

the greatest responsibility lay with those in positions of power, those who had planned

and strategized, not those with boots on the ground. At the TRC, the responsibility lay