Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation?

• Author: Yarbrough, Michael Y.
• Position: Book Review

Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? by James L. Gibson Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation (2004) Price: $47.50

Law and legal institutions have always drawn heavily from their cultural contexts in formulating assumptions, interpretations, and normative standards. Similarly, legal institutions can effect large changes in cultural norms and structures that in turn can change popular notions of justice. Truth commissions, themselves part legal and part cultural institutions, have by their very nature always implicitly acknowledged this feedback loop. But South Africa made it explicit to a greater degree than had ever been done before. Its Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), led by a cleric rather than a jurist, simultaneously intervened both in concrete questions around the legal status of individual actors from the apartheid regime and its opposition, and in more abstract questions about the role of that immediate history in the remaking of the country's values. The TRC thus explicitly tied questions of law to questions of culture as crucial to its role in instituting a human rights regime.

This explicit mission presents an unprecedented opportunity for a kind of social experiment: Did the TRC succeed in establishing a broadly-held human rights culture that can support the legal enforcement of those rights for decades to come? In his recent book Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation?, (1) James L. Gibson concludes that it probably did. He presents data suggesting that many South Africans emerged from the TRC process more open to interracial reconciliation and a human rights culture. Although tempered somewhat by what Gibson views as troubling signs, particularly among black respondents, he presents a largely optimistic picture both for South Africa and for future truth commissions in other locations.

These conclusions are drawn from an extensive, and groundbreaking, survey of South Africans' attitudes about race, politics, tolerance, history, and law. The TRC appears at every stage as a special optic through which to view the current state of South Africa's young democracy. While largely discrete and readable on their own, successive chapters build on metrics developed earlier in the book. This allows Gibson to analyze, for example, the relationship between South Africans' acceptance of the TRC's version of "truth" and their willingness to reconcile across racial and political lines. A reader...