Lawrence
113
Truth for Amnesty
114

"It would receive a publicly generated, authoritative account of who did
what to whom, and why, from 1960, the year of the Sharpsburg massacre, to May
1994, the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as South Africa's first democratically
elected president."

"Why did the creation of such an account weigh so heavily against the objections
to conferring amnesty on the perpetrators of gross human rights violations?
The premise on which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was
founded was that an understanding of the past would be crucial for unifying a formerly
divided nation and effecting reconciliation among its citizens."

"Yet the truth commission saw its commemorative function as going even beyond
attempting to fill chasms in the national memory: it wanted to produce an
account that would, specifically, promote social and political cohesion among people
who had formerly been adversaries. While the commission did acknowledge
that difficult truths might be initially divisive (Report 1 :18), its approach endorsed
public memory as a force that binds individuals into community, providing a
shared understanding of the past and making available a set of ethical and political
dispositions to guide future action."

Account for apartheid

" To account for apartheid, of course, is also to assign responsibility, to help
determine the "why" and the "how;' a determination that was also part of the
TRC's reconciliatory mandate. While this aspect of its mission is, in some sense,
historical the goal was to understand the antecedents and causes of this crime
against humanity- it is also a deeply ethical project."
115
" What is needed, the report continues, is "an
(1: 134), one that would supercede the indifference and thoughtlessness that characterized
apartheid era, apartheid-producing constructions/abdications of responsibility.
The hope was that the TRC accounts would, through their ascriptions of
responsibility, have a transformative effect, giving rise to that altered sense.
4
In this paper I address the question of how the TRC amnesty accounts might
have that transformative effect and whether they were likely to do so. I examine
how a particular feature of the historical and political context gave shape to some
of the amnesty accounts and affected their capacity to accomplish what the commission
hoped. Questions like this- about the reciprocal shaping of discourse and
world -lie at the core of discourse analysis's disciplinary concerns. They are equally
central to the concerns of rhetoric."

Rhetoric

116
 "The discipline of rhetoric is grounded in concepts that have to do with how
discourse is shaped, what its ends are, and how it in turn has -effects in the world.
These concepts are adequately robust to provide analytic leverage and adequately
flexible for constantly changing social, political and historical situations. In this paper
I use one rhetorical concept, epideictic, to clarify how the TRC accounts might
effect social cohesion. I draw on another concept, that of rhetorical {if{uration, to
interpret the relationships among a set of texts."

"Like other disciplines, discourse analysis comprises both theoretical and
methodological approaches. In addition to posing a question that comes from its
core concerns, I adopt this discipline's attention to systematic, close analysis of
specific uses of language, and I share its assumption that such uses of language
give rise to social realities like responsibility, community, justice,, and power."

" Recent work by scholars of Critical
Discourse Analysis have addressed just this issue with respect to the TRC Human
Rights Violations (or victims') hearings. Verdoolaege (2008), Blommaert, Bock
& McCormick (2006) and Anthonissen (2006) have shown how victims' narratives
evinced the traces of their former disempowerment, disempowering them in
the present, and how such narratives were guided and mediated by commissioners.
Other scholars of discourse studies have argued that the hearings, by omitting
any testimony regarding apartheid's legalized abuses (forced removals, economic...etc)"

"This paper evaluates the TRC accounts
according to the commission's goals as well, but it seeks to illuminate the reciprocal
dynamic between the transitional situation and the discourse to which transitions
give rise"

epideictic - " For Aristotle, epideictic was the species of rhetoric delivered
on ceremonial occasions; its functions were praise and censure;its thematic provinces were the noble or blameworthy deeds of the past"

" Desiring to invigorate Aristotle's interpretation of epideictic
discourse, twentieth-century rhetorical scholars have theorized its capacity
to unite an audience by engendering a commitment to common values. Perelman
and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) propose that epideictic discourse "strengthens the
disposition towards action by increasing adherence to the values it lauds" (SO)."

117
" and blame may increase an audience's adherence to values:
A successful epideictic encounter is one in which the rhetor, as a mature member
of the culture, creates an aesthetic vision of orthodox values, an example
(paradeigma) of virtue intended to create feelings of emulation, leading to imitation.
As such, epideictic instructs the auditors and invites them to participate in
a celebration of the tradition, creating a sense of communion.(Sullivan 1993: 118)
Epideictic oratory provides an example, a vision in language, which the audience
desires to emulate; adhering to the same values, the audience coheres as a community.
The TRC hearings, then, producing praise and blame, were to provide
exemplars of responsibility that would inspire audiences to follow suit"

" Ritivoi (2006) has identified one problem that arises when we ask
discourse to work epideictically in societies with violent pasts: how could such a
discourse produce an exemplar from the past without resorting to expedient fiction? When to invoke the past is to invoke a history of atrocity, and to ignore it is
to avoid responsibility, how can epideictic function?"
Syria!!
118
" They also remind us that the binding
of individuals into community is largely a rhetorical achievement; that is, it is accomplished
through specific and situated uses of language. Events like the TRC
hearings and the accounts that emerge from them offer the opportunity to study
the linkages between transitional accounts of the past, their ethical resonances, and
the rhetorical processes through which they emerge."

"Participants in these debates identify such constraints from the entire span
of the TRC's life and activities: severe limitations on staff and other material
resources, its relatively brief life of two and half years,8 a definition of gross human
rights violation that excluded legalized crimes such as forced removals, the
overjudicialization of the hearings, an emphasis on public hearings rather than
behind-the-scenes investigation, attention to individual perpetrators rather than
the apartheid system, a larger proportion of high-profile violations than those
perpetrated against "ordinary" people, methods for taking and mediating victims'
statements that encouraged particular kinds of narrative coherence over others,
the inability of many victims to use prestigious forms of storytelling, witnesses'
119
"loyalty to their allies and hostility to their opponents, and the partialness and partiality
of the final report, with which no political party was satisfied and about
which one commissioner wrote a dissenting opinion"



"
Wilson (2001: 84-92) observes
specifically that the committee, having identified racism as belonging to the realm
of the personal rather than the political, ensured that in the Amnesty hearings,
racism would not be discussed as part of the context in which human rights violations
were committed (84-92)."

120

“The idea that any use of language would not arise from its context sits oddly,

of course, among rhetoricians and discourse analysts. And the TRC Report itself

observed that truth "cannot be divorced from the way in which the information

is acquired; nor can such information be separated from the purposes it is required

to serve" (I: 114). The key issue is not whether the accounts are contextually

shaped; it is how they are shaped.”

“These accounts,

which were to improve social cohesion by orienting citizens to common values, became

a compelling case for e~mining how an epideictic discourse is constituted

in a transitional society. This chapter examines, specifically, how the need to establish

whether amnesty applicants' offenses had been politically motivated gave the

amnesty accounts their distinctive contours and affected their epideictic capacity.”

criteria

121

“These criteria dictated that participants consider the applicant's motive; the nature

of the applicant's offense; whether that offense had been committed under

orders or, on the other hand, if the applicant had the authority to order the offense;

the identity and, in particular, the political affiliation of the victim; the

political objective that the offense was meant to accomplish; the relationship between

that objective and the offense (whether objective and offense could be seen

to be directly related, and whether the offense was proportional to the objective);

and whether the perpetrator had felt personal malice or received personal gain

from the offense.”

“To establish how the political motivation requirement shaped the amnesty accounts,

I examine how the accounts invoke the criteria of the Act. Analyzing the

relationship between the two texts, I both identify and characterize points of intersection

between them, interpreting how the present text an amnesty account- is

related to a prior one- the criteria for establishing political motivation.”

Intertextuality – “taking up of prior texts into present ones” (Bakhtin/ Volosinov)

122

Reference to Bahktin/ Volosinov:

“the true object of inquiry ought to be precisely the dynamic interrelationship of

these two factors, the speech being reported (the other person's speech) and the

speech doing the reporting (the author's speech). After all, the two actually do

exist, function, and take shape only in their interrelation ... the reported speech

and the reporting context are but the terms of a dynamic interrelationship.”

Tyler – range:

range ... from overt citation of other texts to allusion by failure to mention what

“ought to be mentioned .... In between these two extremes are numerous means of

implicating other texts and textual traditions, either by direct comparison or indirectly

through presuppositions, genre conventions, common tropes, key concepts,

and the set of commonplaces that constitute the so-called theory and method of a

community of discourse. (Tyler 1987:90)”

123

As Tyler's list suggests,

this work tends to acknowledge that prior texts may be alluded to both explicitly

and implicitly. For Fairclough (104), this difference is characterized as "manifest

intertextuality" (explicit) and "constitutive intertextuality;' or, more simply,

"interdiscursivity" (implicit)

“In order to describe points of intersection between the amnesty accounts and

the criteria for establishing political motivation, and to delineate the conceptual

distance between them, I draw on the concept of rhetorical figuration. Figuration

provides a way to describe many of the practices noted in the literature on

intertextuality.”

Figuration (traditionally – styles - outside of invention and arrangement)

“For traditionalists such as Vickers (1988), the

figures are expressive devices that can give a discourse its emotional power. But

other contemporary rhetoricians see figures as constitutive of discourse, rather

than merely providing it with stylistic and emotional "value added," as Fahnestock

(1999) puts it. Perelman's and Olbrechts-Tyteca's interpretation of the figures

(1969) as functioning argumentatively reaches towards a notion of the figures

as constitutive of argumentation rather than as increasing the persuasive power

of an argument already composed. Fahnestock shows how the figures of series,

opposites, reversal and repetition participate in scientific reasoning. And poststructuralism

has elevated the trope to the fundamental condition of rhetoric;

that is, like literature, discourse persuades tropologically through aesthetic pleasure

rather than, like argumentation, by presenting theses for our conscious assent

or dissent.”

“A figurative use of language is ideological and driven by the

rhetorical situation, which includes the rhetor's purpose, the institutional context,

and history.”

124

“The figures used in this analysis are repetition (direct citation), synecdoche,

metonymy, and metaphor.12 This range of devices allows for interpreting both

close and loose relationships among texts. Directcitation, or repetition, shows a

very close relationship among texts; progressively looser ties may be interpreted

through synecdoche, metonymy and metaphor. The language of a perpetrator's

account may, for instance, repeat the language and categories of the Act; the relationship

here would be one of direct citation or repetition. The language of

the account may provide specific instances of the Act's general categories, putting

that passage of the account in a synecdochal relationship to the Act. (Synecdoche

may occur also in the reverse pattern, offering a more general category for a specific

one, or it may interpret a part-for-whole relationship.)”

“In this essay, I argue that the intertextual dynamic between the Act and two

perpetrators' initial statements in the Amnesty hearings shapes talk about victims

of human rights violations in ways that trouble the accounts' epideictic potential.

In what follows, I consider the segment of the hearings in which initial statements

are delivered, narrate the two cases examined here, present the analysis of the intertextual

dynamic between the criteria, on the one hand, and talk about victims

in the initial statements, on the other, and discuss how that dynamic gives shape

to responsibility as it emerges from the statements.”

125

Amnesty statement – applicant’s initial statement

generic features

“They then provide some background against which the offense is

to be understood - the length of this background varies enormously - and then

relate the details of the offense. They may or may not terminate with an apology or

other statement suggesting change of heart or reform. The length of the statements

varies; those examined here are relatively lengthy at just under 3000 words each.”

Applicants – varying degrees of assistance

relation to apartheid – enforcer, supporter, resister – liberation – “just ends” – “just means”

From footnote: “Thus, all

instances of politically motivated killing, abduction, torture, and severe ill-treatment were to be

considered gross violations of human rights, whether the perpetrator had been a member of the

state's security forces or one of the liberation movements.”

126

Harrington – killed ANC activist

127

Claims – Jama – terrorist – decision to kill

James Wheeler

amnesty

128

“As TRC observers expected, this requirement encouraged accounts that emphasized

victims' and perpetrators' political affiliations and identities. Talk about

victims invokes the "political opponent" criterion through repetition, hyperbole,

synecdoche, metonymy and metaphor, and this criterion, in conjunction with the

proportionality criterion, licensed construals of victims not only as political opponents

but also as agents of violence, violence that called forth correspondingly

violent responses.”

“With only one exception, then, all direct invocations of the victim other than his

name bear a strong relationship to the "political opponent" criterion.”

“The Act, in section 20 (2), focuses the definition of an apartheid-era policeman's

political opponent on any "members or supporters" of "a publicly known

political organization or liberation movement engaged in a political struggle

against the State." To call the victim "my political opponent;' then, is to repeat

the language of the Act; to call him "the enemy" is to relate the two terms through

the Act does not speak of enemies, but of opponents. To call the victim

"an ANC member" is to offer a specific instance of a "publicly known liberation

movement engaged in a political struggle against the State!' Thus the relationship

here is synecdochal, in which a specific term (species) is substituted for a

general one (genus). To quote characters in the account as having spoken of "the

ANC dog" is to relate the account and the Act through metaphor. When the victim

becomes "a self-proclaimed communist" the figurative relationship becomes

one of metonymy, in which something associated with the thing, or an attribute

of the thing, is substituted for the thing itself (the pre-transition ANC had strong

affiliations with the Communist Party).”

“The figurative intertextual relationship,

then, between this nomenclature and section 20 (3) of the Act is variously that

of repetition, hyperbole, synecdoche, metonymy and metaphor.”

129

“When we turn to the actions in which this political opponent/victim is embedded,

the proportionality criterion of the amnesty hearings becomes salient. This

criterion, expressed in paragraph (f) of section 20 (3), suggests that a politically

motivated offense will be proportional to the political objective it was meant to

achieve: "the proportionality of the ... offence to the objective pursued" is one element

of the situation that was to guide judgment here. This criterion was expected

to assist amnesty applicants from the resistance movements, as their objective was

imbued with a moral imperative absent from that of applicants who had enforced

or supported apartheid.”

“It is probable, however, that the accounts of applicants

from the state security apparatus also oriented to this criterion. According

to it, the victim's death requires a political objective that could counterbalance

an offense of this gravity. In the Harrington account, synecdochal relationships

between the proportionality criterion and the initial statement license such an

objective: they fashion a victim whose acts of terrorism had to be stopped.”

“The account explicitly and repeatedly links these acts of

terrorism to the reason for bealting and killing him:

( 1) Due to this information the specials [constables] and I started assaulting Jama

for more information.

(2) Since we ... were at war with the ANC, proof in his pocketbook was that he

had participated in rallies in the Richmond area, in attacks against the IFP

and the knowledge amongst us policemen was that Mr Jama had to be killed.

The initial statement orients most dearly to the proportionality requirement with

the following two passages, which make the victim's purported actions the primary

reason for killing him:

(3) Mainly to prohibit him from committing any further acts of terrorism, such

as the one in the Richmond area, Mr Jama had to die.

( 4) I could stop him from killing other people and burning more places as he had

done in the Richmond area.

Bythis account, and by alluding synecdochally to paragraph (f) of the Act, the

victim's own acts of terrorism elicit a proportional response from the offender.”

130

“They are, however,

linked with the language of the act in an indirect relationship: the victims in the

Wheeler statement figure synecdochally to other characters in the statement, characters

who themselves bear a direct intertextual relationship to the Act. That is,

the victims are linked intratextually to characters in the account who are construed

as political opponents, enemies, and terrorists. The victims are named as

"black people," and "black people" in this account also names those who murder

civilian South Africans, threaten to overthrow the government, and establish

a Communist state. Thus the victims of this offense become representative of the

agents of violence.

The two victims are invoked in the account infrequently, four times in the

recounting of the killing- its planning, execution and aftermath- and four times

in a retrospective reflection on those events. Narrating the events that led up to and

immediately followed the shooting, the victims are named twice as "black people,"

once as "the driver;' and once as "a black person":”

“as "Mr Godfrey Papyana ... and Mr Viyani Papyana," and once as

"someone." While it is dear that the first set of references is racialized and the second

individualized, the point I want to make now is that none of these construals

of the victims meet the criteria for establishing political motivation. Indeed, to

commit an offense against a person because of his or her race had specifically been

ruled out as a political objective by the amnesty committee early in its hearing”

131

“An internal dynamic in this account, however, relates the phrase "black people"

to political movements, organizations and opponents, an intratextual relationship

that creates a looser intertextuallink between the victims and the political

opponent criterion, tying the victims' identity as "black people" to political activists,

and, ultimately, to the political objective pursued by the applicants.”

This is insane. And sick.

“Wheeler says that

( 6) [Learning the history of the Afrikaner people] sharpened my awareness of the

Afrikaners [sic) struggle for freedom and the onslaught against it by the Black

populations as well as the English populations.

Shortly after, black South Africans are connected to the ANC which, in this

account, figures always as "the ANC SACP [South Africa Communist Party]

aUiance."

(7) The objective of the ANC SACP alliance was identified to us as the overthrowing

of the White-controlled government and the establishment of a Black

Communist government.

Additional passages in the statement evoke the ANC SACP alliance as promoting

either the overthrow of the white government or the institution of a "Black

Communist government:'”

Harrington – military / ANC SACP enemy “"During my military training ... the

ANC SACP alliance was identified as South Africa's most important enemy to

me." As in the Harrington statement, these passages orient externally to the political

opponent criterion through synecdoche, metonymy and hyperbole. “

132

“thus the victims

are discursively related, at one remove, to the political motivation requirement.

The ANC is then associated with a terrorist campaign presented in vivid language:

(8) During that time there was a very strong terrorist campaign against the general

population of the country with the assistance of the specially [sic] limpet

mines while the so-called necklace methods of murder were used practically

exclusively against Black people. Media reports and instructors in the South

African Defence Force indicated practically without exception that it was the

ANC SACP alliance which was responsible for this.”

“Cumulatively, then, "black people" in this account figure primarily as political

opponents, enemies, terrorists and murderers, providing a rationale for the

applicant's claim that "I came to the conclusion ... that it would not go well with

the Afrikaners in South Africa if Black people or other populations would rule

over them."” Ummm…seriously? And the conclusions of those who were native?

“Again, the victims of Wheeler's offense are intertextually related, at

a remove, from the proportionality requirement: killing was more likely to be

amnestied if its objective was not to protest an election but to prevent governance

by terrorists.”

complexity

133

“Another dimension of the problem is evidenced in the range of agents

from political leaders to the "foot soldiers" of apart~id: how to distribute responsibility

among those who made policy, gave orders, and carried them out? "At the

century's end;' Teiltel (2000) observes, "there is a mounting sense that responsibility

for modern persecution derives from individual agency against a background

of systemic policy" (75). Accounts of responsibility might therefore acknowledge

the agency (and lack of agency) of individual perpetrators, complicit beneficiaries,

and political authorities.”

PostWWII?

fascinating – reform?

“A focus on individual perpetrators' accountability, however, was an important

component of the truth commission's reconciliation process and its epideictic potential.

The commission hoped that the hearings would, in effect, help rehabilitate

perpetrators, a rehabilitation formulated by Philippe Salazar (2002) in terms of

citizenship: having rendered their accounts at the amnesty hearings, "the agents

of disruption and destruction [will] have reclaimed the right to attend the democratic

banquet" (82). This re-entry into the life of the polis hinges, however, on

individual acceptance of responsibility, an acceptance that would not only be personally

transformative; it would be a public avowel of commitment to the new

sense of responsibility, promising a more widespread commitment to that value

and providing an exemplar to inspire emulation. Such accounts might also have

provided the critical perspective on the past for which Ritivoi calls. Discourse

could function epiideictically, she suggests, if it found

a vantage point from which to assess and process the past in order to learn from it,

to critically evaluate individual accountability, and to understand how to rescue

collective agency without shedding responsibility for specific actions.

(Ritivoi 2006: 121)”

134

I’d like to read more!

“The epideictic shape of the Wheeler and Harrington

accounts did not fulfill their epideictic potential.

Accounts of the past that arise during transitions are generated in one context

to have meaning in others. The statements studied in this paper were formulated

to win amnesty, but the hope was that they would also be suitable for constructing

history, public memory, and collective values. Transitions ask rhetoric to do enormous

work; even as they call on it to transform former adversaries into fellow

citizens, they place constraints on its capacity to do so. This paper has examined

how two accounts of who did what to whom, and why, were shaped by the

need to determine whether perpetrators' offenses had been polhically motivated.

The construals of victims that arose from this constraint dampened the epideictic

power of those accounts.”