The Routledge Companion To Literature And Human Rights

Human Rights and Ubuntu in Antjie Krog’s Writings after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Mark Sanders

Transitional justice, as commonly understood, presupposes a reference to human rights. Although measures that have been taken in the name of transitional justice vary, human rights has functioned as a common legal code, its status sometimes underwritten by a bill of rights forming the core of a constitution that, once the transition is complete, is to govern future relations between a given state and its citizens. For this nexus, South Africa has, for some time, provided the model. Its Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1996–2003) received a mandate, envisaged in the interim national constitution, to investigate gross human rights violations committed in defense of the apartheid state and in the struggle against it. The acts for which it was empowered to grant or withhold amnesty were defined in the same terms. The public hearings at which people testified to what had been done to them or their kin were known as Human Rights Violation Hearings, or HRV Hearings. It soon became clear to observers and commentators that those witnesses were being asked to formulate what they had suffered in terms that allowed for classification according to a definite table of violations. Let us recall the exasperation, however, with which one of the Truth Commissioners declared to a witness: “We wish that you bear in mind that there are six more witnesses which we still have to take. Could you please in summary form, as the person is asking you … give us human rights violations which were done to you by the ANC [i]n those camps” (Williams 1996). Although objections against this prescription were raised by journalists and scholarly commentators, some of whom displayed a touching naïveté about juridical mediation, the basic pattern of questioning pursued by the Commission did not change.

One might therefore imagine that the forms taken by literary responses to the Truth Commission would correspond to what was familiar to readers of American autobiographical genres such as testimonio or, from an earlier epoch, the narratives of former slaves. In these books, written with or without an amanuensis, the life is given form by way of an indictment of oppression that, although experienced first hand, is significant because it is systemic. One might even expect to find autobiography in which, as has been argued to be the case in advocacy more generally (Slaughter 2007), autobiographers come to present themselves as subjects of rights.

Ubuntu – writers respond to the Commission

But it was clear also that the Truth Commission, despite the demand of its questioners for narratives of human rights violations, was being inspired by something else – which, although joined with human rights in practice, differed from it because it took a different view of the human being who is supposed to be the subject of rights.

This was ubuntu. Invoked in South Africa’s 1993 interim constitution, and given centrality by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who chaired the Truth Commission, ubuntu is an African ethic of reciprocity, phrased in Zulu, as it often is in public discourse, as umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (a person is a person through other people). The word “person” translates the word umuntu, or human being. The basic challenge to human rights is clear: if the human-being of a human being, or the personhood of a person, depends on his or her relation to others, then there is no pregiven humanness that would provide a stable basis for a system of human rights. Among those drawing on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, this dependence has been termed “dispropriation,” in order to emphasize that what we call the “self” does not precede the call of the other (Sanders 2007: 16, 18–33, citing Keenan 1997: 20). Although a growing ubuntu jurisprudence has tended to be conservative in its interpretation of ubuntu per se (see Sanders 2007: 25–28), the effects of ubuntu on the understanding of legal personhood, on which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is based, are far reaching when viewed philosophically (Sitze 2013: 215–48). Human rights, in sum, beg the question of the human.

In South Africa, with the Truth Commission, ubuntu is thus a challenge to the automatic appeal to human rights in what has come to be known as transitional justice. If the role of human rights is to effect a transition in which people begin to view themselves as rights-bearing persons, the effect of ubuntu is to counter this restricted view of juridico-political change with the possibility of a transformation that, because it does not presuppose, and is not dominated by, an idea of the human being as legal person, may open the way toward different and unanticipated outcomes.

If Tutu’s role was decisive, it is writers who have given amplification to the challenge of ubuntu to human rights, and thus to a radical questioning of the limits to transformation set in the now customary processes of transitional justice. In A Human Being Died That Night, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, who was a member of the Truth Commission, draws our attention, without naming it as such, to the power of ubuntu in guiding people toward forgiveness: “The motivation [to forgive] does not stem only from altruism or high moral principles. The victim in a sense needs forgiveness as part of a process of becoming rehumanized” (Gobodo-Madikizela 2003: 128).

Perhaps the most sustained engagement with ubuntu by a writer has come from Antjie Krog, an Afrikaans poet and public intellectual who reported on the Truth Commission for SABC radio. Her book, Country of My Skull (Krog 1998), emphasizes how ubuntu began to inform the work of the Commission under Tutu’s leadership, by “Africanizing” the concept of reconciliation through the idea that “‘a person is not basically an independent, solitary entity. A person is human precisely in being enveloped in the community of other human beings’” (Krog 1998: 110). In the decade since the publication of Country of My Skull, Antjie Krog has published several books exploring racial self-transformation. Emphasizing ubuntu, these works also tacitly challenge transitional justice’s project of molding human beings into rights-bearing persons.

A testimony revisited

In 2009, Krog returned to the Truth Commission in a remarkable coauthored book, There Was This Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile (Krog et al. 2009). In this book, as in her subsequent book, Begging to Be Black (2009), ubuntu emerges as the most profound challenge to assumptions about human being that have informed the “transition.”

There Was This Goat draws its energy from translation (in which Krog has actively been engaged since her Afrikaans rendering of Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom). In its case, though, to translate is to have to retranslate. Notrose Nobomvu Konile (d. 2007) was the mother of one of the Gugulethu Seven, a group of young men murdered by a state death squad near Cape Town in 1986, after an infiltrator led them to believe that they were receiving military training from Umkhonto weSizwe, the military wing of the African National Congress. The willingness of the mothers, with the exception of Mrs. Konile, to forgive the perpetrators had led Gobodo-Madikizela (2003) as well as Krog (1998: 109) to reflect on ubuntu.

Mrs. Konile’s testimony, heard by the Truth Commission in April 1996, was confusing, not least because it was particularly resistant to the demand for a narrative of human rights violations, drawing on dimensions of experience (such as a dream) not easily assimilated in those terms. But it had also been imperfectly translated from Xhosa into English by the simultaneous interpreter, something that had to be remedied before its implications could emerge more fully. Krog thus worked with two of her colleagues from University of the Western Cape, Nosisi Mpolweni from the Xhosa Department, and Kopano Ratele from Psychology, in order to unravel the meaning of her words. After the testimony is transcribed and retranslated, and the three travel to the Eastern Cape to visit Mrs. Konile at her home in the small town of Indwe, where they see actual places to which she alludes, much of it comes clear.

What also happens is that Krog reopens the conversation on ubuntu begun in Country of My Skull. This time, she is not faced with a confrontational interlocutor, critical of how group solidarity is sometimes given legitimacy in the name of ubuntu, to whom “[t]here’s nothing I can say” (Krog 1998: 264). Mpolweni and Ratele are on her side (and in ways that they only fully realize when their shared middle-class status is placed in relief by Mrs. Konile’s poverty) (Krog et al. 2009: 172–73). The authors of There Was This Goat emphatically connect ubuntu and testimony that did not conform to what the Truth Commission sought, and which made it a model for transitional justice:

It is important to reread … “non-fitting” testimonies in particular ways … . At the risk of oversimplifying … [whereas Eurocentric culture] places high priority on individuality and reason … Afrocentric culture places the emphasis on communality and a view of human being, which presupposes interpersonal relationships as expressed in “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu,” meaning, a person is a person through other persons.

(Krog et al. 2009: 43–44)

The authors suspect that if this “cultural idea” of “the self-in-community (I am because we are here) and the unity-of-the-world (we are all inter-connected … ) … make[s] a person like Mrs. Konile sound incoherent,” – they are commenting on how dreams link the living and the ancestors – it is because “what racism, apartheid and colonialism did was (and still is) to destroy those specific values,” substituting the idea, from “Western psychology [that] the individual comes first (a really strange notion … )” (Krog et al. 2009: 60–61).

Toward conversation

Although this is their collective starting point, it soon becomes possible to identify different and even divergent voices in the book. After Mrs. Konile’s testimony is retranslated, and certain things in it are clarified, Kopano Ratele points to the limits of cultural explanation, arguing that

even subjects from our own cultural group are both familiar and strange … . In spite of, or because of, the difficulty of following Mrs. Konile, it was ultimately her elusiveness which achieved that point: that another person, regardless of her or his group or belonging, is always strange to some extent. Indeed, when looking at an “African self,” an intra-Africanness [sic] strangeness needs to be part of it.

(Krog et al. 2009: 99)

In other words, if human rights proved to be restrictive, so too could the researchers’ demand for an otherness that, because it conformed to a predetermined notion of Africanness, foreclosed the singularity of the witness and her testimony. What Ratele is trying to show is that, although at one level it is fair to assume that ubuntu forms part of Mrs. Konile’s concept of self, at another level it would contradict ubuntu to assume, without listening to what she actually said, that this was so, or entirely so.

This accords with the idea, ascribed in the book to Antjie Krog, and consistent with the concluding poem in Country of My Skull (Krog 1998: 278–79), that

we … listen to stories in order to become, for one brief moment, somebody else, to be somewhere we’ve not been before. We listen to stories in order to be changed. At the end of the story we do not want to be the same person as the one who started listening.

(Krog et al. 2009: 19)

Yet Krog is insistent in locating evidence of ubuntu in Mrs. Konile’s words and in asking her collaborators to confirm for her that, as an African cultural idea, ubuntu is diametrically opposed to anything to which Whites subscribe. Despite holding to the transformative potential of listening, which corresponds to the reflection on strangeness introduced by Ratele, Krog’s questions about ubuntu seek to gather information. “How do you have ubuntu?” she asks Nosisi Mpolweni, “How do you raise a child with ubuntu?” Such questions are indeed answered. Mpolweni tells her that “[i]t’s something that comes from within, that is a natural part of the self,” although “[n]owadays, ubuntu is gradually getting lost. Among the contributing factors are poverty and the legacy of the previous regime” (Krog et al. 2009: 126).

Ratele, however, is more resistant to Krog’s questions, as if he is reluctant to be a native informant. As he relates it, his biography discloses a limit and a complication: “I have grown up with material sharing, but emotionally and psychologically there are things that I really find impossible to share” (Krog et al. 2009: 127). An only child in a rural village until moving to a township in which he was one of eleven children, he did not take easily to the latter: “You want to climb away, close yourself up, but you cannot ignore them, their farts, their smiles, their own insecurities, their anger at each other” (2009: 203–4). Ratele does also generalize: “You are always formed by others, not by yourself, but because in, say, the black community, everybody is so close, you cannot make out what ‘you’ is” (2009: 204). Yet, “[i]t is as if I want to pull back, I don’t want these lines connecting me. Part of me cannot run away from them, they are the me” (2009: 204). In other words, although life may be structured around interdependence, caring, sharing, and even forgiving, and those things may be prescribed in the name of “ubuntu,” a person’s life trajectory may lead him or her not to, or not to want to, conform.

“Part of me,” says Ratele; the strangeness within, which Ratele finds with Mrs. Konile, may stem from his own biography. “It was obvious how carefully, yet firmly, [Mrs. Konile] refrained from confirming Nosisi’s references to God or Christian faith as a source of strength. She also seemed to avoid admitting that ubuntu was playing a role in her life” (2009: 197). She refuses to forgive death squad member Thapelo Mbelo, although she thinks that she should (2009: 201). Setting out in search of evidence for the alterity of Black in relation to White, what Krog is told by her coauthors is that Black people do not necessarily occupy the place in the binary presumed. Just as a witness may decline to conform to a demand that she speak of herself as a subject of human rights that have been violated, so may she decline to conform to the well-meaning but no less consequential demand that she speak as a Black. Ratele insists that ubuntu is related to the unexpected (2009: 202); he refers to unexpected, seemingly impossible acts of generosity, but it could also relate to what he calls strangeness. The collaboration is transforming for him in this respect, but for Krog, who is still deeply invested in being White/Boer, and in wanting to be unlike other Whites/Boers (2009: 198, 213), the struggle continues in her book, Begging to Be Black, published later the same year.

It is, arguably, a strength of There Was This Goat that it does not explicitly give Krog the last word, allowing her, as the book’s first author, to form a synthesis of the voices in the dialogue in the way that I have proposed – namely that the demand for an identifiable otherness can, in practice, end up being a negation of otherness. It is, after all, in the contradiction of the question – or its underlying assumptions – that something like “truth” emerges. The fact that Krog appears to remain at the level of information-gathering, but that her questions lead Ratele to reflect on the very demand for information as he contradicts her, would then not be regarded as a failure, but as a success of the project. Viewed in those terms, it is not necessary that Krog (or the Krog persona) perceive this, as long as it is clear to the reader.

The classical antecedents for truth-seeking dialogue are well known (and may have been behind the Truth Commission’s notion of “dialogue truth” [TRC 1998: 113–14]). And it has recently been observed how, in Krog’s recent books, “[t]he openness to exchange, conversation, lies at the heart of the ethics of these narratives” (Coullie 2014: 314). How conversation functions as a form – distinct from autobiographical testament or cultural explanation – is explored explicitly in Krog’s Begging to Be Black, in which, in one of the book’s alternating story lines, conversation itself becomes a topic for thought.

While a visiting fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Krog engages Paul Patton, an Australian philosopher influenced by Deleuze and Derrida, in a series of informal dialogues. As in There Was This Goat, Krog is insistent that there exists an identifiable African worldview, distinct from that of Europeans or Whites, which emphasizes interconnectedness (Krog 2009: 102, 155, 184–86). Patton, however, observes that, in a dialogue in which one claims to acknowledge the alterity of one’s interlocutor, it may be problematic to approach that interlocutor with a fixed idea of what he or she subscribes to: “I really feel a bit uncomfortable with your black/white divisions. You suggest that blackness is more than skin-deep, to use the cliché, and this is essentialist talk” (2009: 122). Again, as in There Was This Goat, dialogue is at risk of becoming interrogation, as the questioner assembles evidence to support her case.

Whereas in that book, Kopano Ratele is an interlocutor who negates Krog directly, in Begging to Be Black, Patton, who is staged by Krog as a fellow White, raises a philosophical objection in classical form: petitio principi (begging the question). The two books thus demand to be read together, and by an active reader. That is to say, Ratele’s negation in There Was This Goat, which is emphatic even if it is partial, is not simply to be read as empirical. The more far reaching implication is that by insisting that your (Black) interlocutor holds what you suppose Blacks to hold, you beg the question. This is how it works in terms of logic.

But it is in the sphere of ethics that it really matters – since Krog’s purpose in “becom[ing] ‘blacker,’” in “mov[ing] towards a ‘blackness’ as black South Africans themselves understand it,” is to discover “what kind of self I should grow into in order to live a caring, useful and informed life – a ‘good life’ – within my country in southern Africa” (2009: 93–95). Ethically speaking, what has happened is that the interlocutor is no longer encountered in his or her singularity, and that, instead of being under the sway of the other (what Levinas, using a classical term, calls heteronomy), one uses the other as a kind of mirror in which one sees an image of one’s better self. That this would contradict the reciprocity of ubuntu should be obvious, if ubuntu is understood as dispropriative, and as an entertaining of the stranger (Krog 2009: 186–87; see also Krog et al. 2009: 99, citing Sanders 2002: 129).

What is so important is that, in both books, the statement of this contradiction is left to the reader, or largely to the reader. It is hinted at by Krog’s interlocutors, but never broached by the Krog persona. In this sense, the conversation begun is an open one. Drawing inspiration from ubuntu, these literary responses to the Truth Commission do not simply produce autobiography of a rights-bearing subject, a staple of transitional justice, but ambitiously advocate (self-)transformation. If in these works, literary form – conversation, dialogue – doubles as (and corrects) the question-and-answer typical of the Truth Commission hearings, showing how openings for dialogue may have been missed, by leaving a place for the reader these volumes also invite us to see that even the most passionate plea for transformation of the self may be susceptible to the assumption that the other possesses and professes nothing other than what one demands.