The Truth Commission and the Predicament of Justice in South Africa

In the waning years of apartheid township residents in South Africa's Eastern Cape fashioned their own democratic experiments through street committees and popular courts. This manuscript contends that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's highly choreographed performances effaced those local visions. Drawing on testimony from East London hearings and the case study of the PEBCO Three the work contrasts the official chronology-Mandela's release negotiations and the rainbow nation-with the lived chronology of those who made the townships ungovernable. It argues that the TRC's legalistic human-rights discourse marginalized subaltern narratives that cherished communal order over constitutional abstractions. This clash of sensibilities between bureaucratic spectacle and grassroots memory produced a misunderstanding that continues to haunt South Africa's search for justice. By interrogating archival transcripts and revisiting key events the manuscript offers a humanistic critique of transitional justice and recovers the voices of those who saw themselves as creators of history.