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It is imperative that the first democratically elected government in South Africa enable South Africans to come to terms with the injustice of their past. Such is the enormity of the impact of apartheid policies that the present government cannot grant individual and specific compensation to all. Instead, its representatives have created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a site and a vehicle for bearing witness to the individual and collective acts of violence and suffering under apartheid. 1 This witnessing has two functions. One is to encourage the confession of crimes by the perpetrators in order to make the truth public. This is essential in a country where press censorship and clandestine and unaccountable government operations withheld verifiable information about state violence and its antagonists from the public eye. This truth is reinforced by the testimony of the victims, which makes public and therefore legitimate the suffering formerly officially denied. The second function of the Commission is that of effecting reconciliation. The Commission hopes to bring about reconciliation through the public acknowledgment of a common humanity, which the apartheid state denied officially to blacks, thus compromising the humanity of all South Africans. In the words of the Commission's principal officer, former Anglican Archbishop and Nobel Prize winner, Desmond Tutu, "African jurisprudence is restorative, rather than retributive." 2 This common humanity is publicly affirmed ideally (but not always in practice) through the ability of ordinary citizens to understand the sufferings of others. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission has chosen to make hearings public, thus accentuating its ritualistic aspect, but it may also grant amnesty to perpetrators who make a public confession of apartheid crimes. 3 This choice has provoked controversy but affirms the belief of the government and many citizens that forgiveness and reconciliation are prerequisites for a united nation and that transparency is the basis for trust.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission illustrates for South Africans the significance of public, ritualistic, and symbolic representation of pressing social tensions in order to acknowledge their emotional consequences and to facilitate the understanding and analysis of their impact. Symbolic representation of social conflict is also what theatre does. Both processes can be described, in Victor Turner's terms, as "social drama." 4 His identification of four...