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Anthropological Theory

Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications

(London, Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)
Vol 3(3): 325–341
[1463-4996(200309)3:3;325–341;035240]

On having voice and

being heard
Some after-effects of testifying before the
South African Truth and Reconciliation
Commission1
Fiona C. Ross
University of Cape Town, South Africa

Abstract
In much recent theorizing, the memory of violence is considered to constitute the
post-colonial subject. The article is placed at the intersection of two arguments about
the role of voice and memory, particularly memories of violence, in the constitution of
the self and the collective. Richard Werbner (1998) has argued that ‘rights of
recountability’ are fast becoming part of the political arena as citizens seek to make
themselves heard and acknowledged in the public sphere. Achille Mbembe (2000)
traces modes of voice through the discourses of powerlessness. Here I consider the
ways in which testimonies circulate in public spheres in the aftermath of South Africa’s
ambitious Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The impetus is drawn from the
work of the Commission’s Human Rights Violations Committee, which elicited
powerful and moving testimonies couched in terms of victimhood. However, many,
having testified, are alarmed at the ways in which their testimonies proliferate outside
the contexts of individual control. The article raises questions about the effects of wide
circulation on individuals’ understandings of self and seeks a theory of vulnerability.

Key Words
storytelling • subjectivity • testimony • trauma • truth and reconciliation commission
• violation • voice

Voice n. sound formed in larynx etc. and uttered by mouth, esp. human utterance in
speaking, shouting, singing etc.; ability to use this; use of voice, utterance esp. in spoken
words, opinion so expressed; right to express opinion. Gram. Set of verbal forms
showing relation of subject to action. v.t. Give utterance to, express, make sonant.
Hear v. perceive with ear; listen; give audience to; listen judiciously to; be informed;
receive message from.
Little Oxford Dictionary (1981)

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In his recent book (2002), The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression and Inter-
subjectivity, Michael Jackson, following Hannah Arendt, argues that what he calls story-
telling (which refers to the capacity to narrate the self in life’s events for an audience
wider than the self ) operates as a bridge between the personal and the private. He argues
that storytelling works at a protolinguistic level (2002: 16), and, drawing from the works
of Bakhtin, Halbwachs and Mearleau-Ponty, proposes that stories are dialogic construc-
tions:

If . . . stories are neither the pure creations of autonomous individuals nor the un-
alloyed expressions of subjective views, but rather a result of on-going dialogue and
redaction within fields of intersubjectivity, then the very notions of self and selfhood
that are brought into relief in the European tradition of storytelling are themselves
creations of a social relation between self and other, and do not exist ‘outside of, or
prior to’ the narrative process (cf. Feldman, 1991: 13). The same principle holds true
of stories outside the European tradition, in which far less emphasis is given to the
heroic career of individuals or the delineation of personal identity . . . Respecting this
view, we may begin to see that stories, like memories and dreams, are nowhere articu-
lated as personal revelations, but authored and authorised dialogically and collabora-
tively in the course of sharing one’s recollections with others. (Jackson, 2002: 22)

Jackson argues for an understanding of storytelling as creating sociality, generating

intersubjective fields that span the divides between public and private and the forms of
language considered appropriate to each.2 His argument supposes willing storytellers and
willing and able listeners. His analysis rests on a notion of the social as resting on and
forging relations that approximate intimacy. What about, however, when storytelling
happens on a large scale? Truth Commissions and similar institutions, in which relating
experiences of harm in forms often called ‘stories’ or ‘testimonies’ takes on an import-
ant role, represent one such instance. In the South African Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, the focus of this article, testimonials about gross violations of human rights
were anticipated to serve as a mechanism for forging national unity premised on a shared
knowledge of suffering in the recent past (Wilson, 2001). Individual experiences of
suffering were harnessed to the imaginative work of forging a new public imaginary and
sociality. Here I focus on the after-effects of testimonies given before the Human Rights
Violations Committee of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (hence-
forth, the Commission) by victims of violence. Consideration of the Commission’s
innovative work of eliciting and documenting spoken and written commentary on
human rights’ violations, of media and academic dissemination of these, and the subse-
quent responses of testifiers illuminates the conventions by which individuals seek to
understand and render experience and the complexities that arise when experience is
given public voice.

VIOLATION, VOICE, DIGNITY AND HEALING

The Commission was brought into being by an Act of Parliament, the Promotion of
National Unity and Reconciliation Act, no. 34 of 1995. It was tasked with documenting
the nature, cause, patterns and extent of gross violations of human rights (defined in law
as torture, kidnapping, killing and severe ill-treatment), making recommendations on

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reparation and rehabilitation, and granting amnesty. To this end, the Act established
three committees to deal with the tasks of providing amnesty, identifying victims of gross
violations of human rights, and making recommendations for reparation and rehabili-
tation. In the Commission’s work, remembering and recounting experiences of violence
were intended to operate as a prophylactic against violence, recalling the ‘never again’
mantra of so many Latin American truth commissions and other official investigations.
In addition, the Commission sought to restore dignity to those who had suffered,
directed by Section 3c of the Act, which required that the Commission ‘restore the
human and civil dignity of victims by granting them an opportunity to relate their own
accounts of the violations of which they are the victims’.
Linking voice (‘relating their own accounts’, ‘testifying’ or ‘telling one’s story’) with
the restoration of dignity and thence with the constitution of the subject is not particu-
lar to the work of the Commission; Achille Mbembe (2000) has argued that it is a formu-
lation more widely applicable to post-slavery and post-colonial discourse in Africa. In
an oral presentation of his paper (August 2000), he characterized this discourse thus: ‘I
can tell my story, therefore I am’. Writing of Zimbabwe, Richard Werbner (1998) notes
increased demands for what he calls rights of ‘recountability’ in the aftermath of the
Zimbabwean liberation war and the violent state-orchestrated responses to the unrest in
Matabeleland after independence in 1980. He argues that these demands point to ‘the
right, especially in the face of state violence and oppression, to make a citizen’s memory
known and acknowledged in the public sphere’ (1998: 1).
Much of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s work was publicized in terms of
giving voice to the voiceless, assuming an unproblematic link between ‘voice’ and
‘dignity’ and between ‘voice’ and ‘being heard’. The linkage of self and voice was antici-
pated through the equation of the speaking self with the healed self. The Act did not
mention healing, but the prevalence of the biomedical and psychological metaphors used
in describing its work (Boraine et al., 1994; Boraine and Levy, 1995) produced the wide-
spread view that the Commission was a mechanism designed to promote healing of the
individual and social body, a perspective that Michael Ignatieff (1996) has criticized on
the basis that collectivities are not homologous with the individual psyche.
In the Commission’s model of voice, transparency of communication and clarity in
reception are presumed; the unevenness of social fields and their saturation with power
are not. I shall return to these points. The model assumed that what preceded the
Commission’s work was voicelessness and silence about the apartheid past. In fact, much
was already known about apartheid, told in diverse genres – in stories, songs, political
rhetoric, magisterial orders, court cases, newspapers, scholarly work, parliamentary
debates, at funerals and rallies and so on. What the Commission’s human rights viola-
tions hearings offered was a new structure for narrating experiences of violence and
suffering to a broad public. The hearings also offered an alternative means to attend to
harm – the opening of a public space that reached far beyond the Commission person-
nel and audiences present at the hearings. Here, the media played a central role.3
Hearings were initially broadcast live on radio and television. Later, coverage was
reduced to reports in the news and to the weekly series Special Report. The print media
carried a daily summary of the hearings and additional coverage of the more sensational
aspects of the Commission’s work. Electronic media were central to disseminating the
Commission’s work to a larger, class-structured audience; the Commission’s website

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ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 3(3)

carried news, background documents and, later, transcripts of testimonies and amnesty
decisions. The ‘public’ that received the Commission’s work was thus broader and less
local than that initially envisaged. International interest in the Commission’s work and
the attention that it received from the media and scholars meant that its process and
products, including testimonies, have been widely disseminated. For testifiers before the
Commission, this has raised questions about their relationship to testimonies and about
the sense of self that comes to be embedded in and shaped by the narrative form.
Throughout the duration of the work of the Commission’s Human Rights Violations
Committee (1996–1998), victims were encouraged by means of radio and newspaper
adverts, posters, word of mouth and via the networks of non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) to ‘come forward’ and relate experiences of harm. Individuals were invited to
make depositions – ‘to tell their stories’, as common parlance had it – concerning gross
violations of human rights. The process of soliticiting and recording narratives of viola-
tions of human rights, a process often described as ‘storytelling’, was constructed as an
authentically African mode of communication. Posters featuring a portrait photograph
of an elderly, black, unnamed woman alongside an invitation to people to ‘Tell Your
Story’, made by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, advertised the
Commission’s work prior to the first hearings. Commissioners and committee members
frequently spoke of the healing power of storytelling. Here is Archbishop Tutu, the
Commission’s chairperson:

Storytelling is central, not only to many religious practices in this country but also
to the African tradition of which we are a part. Ellen Kuzwayo is quoted . . . as saying:
‘Africa is a place of storytelling. We need more stories, never mind how painful the
exercise may be . . . Stories help us to understand, to forgive and to see things through
someone else’s eyes’. (Tutu, 1997: 7)

The Commission explicitly used ‘storytelling’ as part of its methodological approach to

ascertaining ‘truth’:

By telling their stories, both victims and perpetrators gave meaning to the multi-
layered experiences of the South African story . . . In the (South) African context,
where value continues to be attached to oral tradition, the process of story telling was
particularly important. Indeed, this aspect is a distinctive . . . feature of the legislation
governing the Commission . . . The Act explicitly recognised the healing potential of
telling stories. (Report, Volume One: 112)

By December 1997, 21,298 statements, concerning 37,672 violations, had been

received from victims of violence, their kin, friends and witnesses (TRC Report 1998,
Volume 1: 166). In addition to the complex statement-recording process (Buur, 1999),
76 public hearings were held across the country between 1996 and 1997, before which
approximately 10 per cent of deponents who fitted the criteria that defined victims of
gross violations of human rights were invited to testify about their own or others’ experi-
ences. The hearings, whose form was soon standardized (see Bozzoli, 1999), and the
testimonies that were offered before them, which, too, became standardized and replic-
able, were widely broadcast in diverse local and international media. Seated on stages

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facing a panel of Commissioners and committee members, accompanied by ‘briefers’,

testifiers described the violations they and others had suffered. Sometimes, testifiers read
from prepared statements. More usually, they spoke without notes, guided and
prompted by Commissioners. They described the full range of violations that the
Commission’s operational definitions of ‘gross violations of human rights’ admitted,
including terrible torture, injuries and death. They also described the everyday humili-
ations of Apartheid and a diversity of harms that the Commission did not consider gross
violations of human rights. Some described violations inflicted on them, and others
described harms done to other people, usually close kin. Their words, usually uttered in
mother tongues, were simultaneously translated into the two or three main languages
spoken in the area where hearings were held. Some testifiers were consummate tellers.
They used rich metaphor, tone and gesture and drew on poetic language and perfor-
mative convention to carry their meanings. Others found it less easy to convey the
complex stories they told: the setting was intimidating and the suffering of which they
spoke too great to bear easily in words (see Ross, 2003).
Notwithstanding their differences in style and telling, narratives were homogenized
in the media coverage of the hearings and in the Commission’s Report (1998), where
the complexity of testimonies and their often rich performative contexts and content
were often reduced and reified as stories of suffering. Such crystallized forms quickly
became formulaic, losing the capacity to hold the attention and restricting the range of
expressions through which to give voice to experience. From each testimony, the
Commission sought to isolate a coherent chronology, a clear relation between
component parts, a climax phrased in terms of the experience of a ‘gross violation of
human rights’.

STORY AND THE RESTORED SELF

The form of narrating experiences of harm that was introduced by the Commission took
hold of the public imagination, at least for a time, and was replicated in interactions in
diverse sites where public and private intersect. The idea that one told ‘a story’ before
the Commission was soon taken to be a standard feature of the Commission’s work. It
was also an idea adopted elsewhere, as for example in the work of the Healing of
Memories Institute which utilizes a methodology of storytelling in encounter groups as
a means to establish new forms of social interaction among South Africans (Kayser,
2001; Colvin, 2002). In the early stages of the Commission’s work, some interviewees
told me that they felt that the public testimonial form they saw at hearings and on tele-
vision was ‘undignified’, exposing testifiers to the potential for public humiliation as they
broke with established conventions of silence and blame. Within a short period,
however, the form seems to have embedded itself in a public repertoire so that, for a
period at any rate, individuals rehearsed and told life experiences in terms that approx-
imated Commission testimonies, and sought opportunities to ‘tell their stories’. In
Zwelethemba, the small town in which, between 1997 and 1998, I conducted field
research on the Commission’s work among women political activists, people frequently
asked me how they could go about telling their stories. By ‘story’ was meant a personal
account of events of violence and suffering during Apartheid, and their effects on
individual lives and relationships. During and long after the Commission’s work, inter-
viewees used the narrative model popularized by the Commission, even where the topic

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under discussion had nothing to do with the Commission’s work or with recording viola-
tions of human rights. When conducting unrelated research in a shanty-town near Cape
Town, many interviewees responded to my invitation to tell me about themselves and
their lives with recitations of violence that were presented chronologically, structuring
narratives temporally and orienting life stories toward events of graphic violence. At
several conferences I have attended, people have launched into descriptions of their lives
that paralleled Commission victim hearings (see also Kayser, 1999).
The capacity to narrate experience is widely and positively valued, especially in
contexts in which violence and its consequences sunder the everyday and the standard
linguistic forms associated with it. Elaine Scarry (1985) argues that one characteristic
result of violence and terror is an unmaking of everyday language. In such contexts,
where relationships between people are sundered and their sense of place and time frac-
tured, where the possibilities of exercising the kinds of effort that go into forging and
maintaining social relationships over time are limited and the grounds on which social-
ity is built are yet unstable, the possibilities of sustaining the ordinary through conven-
tion and routine are circumscribed. Narrative takes on an important role in restoring a
sense of self in time and place (Leydesdorff et al., 1999) and in re-establishing the
grounds on which forms of personhood and sociality can be forged anew. The examples
I have cited suggest that the testimonial form as popularized through the media offered
a means through which people could consider and give expression to their suffering by
reading their experiences in the light of a newly established, authoritative and very
powerful genre that became available and legitimate at a particular time in South Africa’s
history – a time of ‘transition’. The testimonial form became a means in the ongoing
work of fashioning the self in relation to changing social circumstances, a model through
which people could engage in the work of considering experience, reshaping their under-
standings and seeking acknowledgement.
There has been enormous media and academic interest, nationally and inter-
nationally, in the Commission’s work, and many of those who testified before the
Commission’s human rights hearings are weary of the demands made on their time
and patience by researchers and journalists who, they feel, intrude on sensitive
grounds. Testifiers did not, could not, anticipate the extent to which their testimonies
would circulate. At a recent conference, Christopher Colvin presented work on the
centrality of storytelling in what he calls ‘post-TRC South Africa’.4 He described the
influx of researchers and journalists during and after the Commission, their probing
questions into the intimate details of lives of hardship and events of suffering, the
feelings of those interviewed that the research process did not involve positive
reciprocity, and for some, the sense of disempowerment that accompanied these
processes. He described the frustrations expressed by members of the Cape Town branch
of the victim support group, Khulumani; frustrations at the slowness of the state’s
anticipated reparation measures, their sense of being used and abandoned by
researchers and journalists, and their anger at the slowness to materialize of promised
benefits such as scholarly publications. He notes that members of the group had
begun to consider charging money for interviews with researchers who sought their
‘stories’5 and concludes that ‘storytelling can frequently have negative personal and
political consequences for those asked to undertake the demanding work of
remembering apartheid’ (Colvin, 2002: 2).

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The concerns raised by members of Khulumani are not recent – my initial work in
Zwelethemba in the Western Cape was met by many of the same issues (Ross, 2003: 7,
126) – and similar issues beset most researchers in a variety of research interactions.
What is particularly important about what Colvin documents is the growing sense that
‘a story’ is an object, a thing that can be alienated from the self in exchange for resources;
in short, a commodity (Colvin, 2002: 5). Those who are bound, through choice, ex-
pediency, and the weight of social expectations to and by this form of narrative may find
its consequences hard to bear. My aim in the remainder of this article is to open further
questions about the effects of testifying in relation to the dissemination of testimony
through global media and scholarly processes in the aftermath of South Africa’s Truth
and Reconciliation Commission.

Story, testimony, voice

Although the word ‘story’ is in common currency in relation to narratives of violence in
South Africa, I prefer here to use ‘testimony’ or ‘testimonial form’ to describe the narra-
tives given before the Commission. These words, as opposed to ‘story’, capture a sense
of the narrative formality which adhered to the process in which ‘victims’ were asked to
narrate, in a format that soon became standardized, experiences of gross violations of
human rights before panelists, audiences present at the hearings and also to a larger
media consuming audience.
Testimony and its interlocutors have been the sites of much recent scholarship.
Research has shown that violence has a rupturing effect on language and temporality:
in the aftermath, the relation between words and experiences of violence, and between
words and violence’s recall, is itself fractured, damaged, ruined (Scarry, 1985; Langer,
1991, 1996). Recent scholarship has considered testimony’s structures, the complexities
of its demands on language, and problems of witnessing (Langer, 1991, 1995; Coady,
1992; Felman and Laub, 1992; Agamben, 1999; Bar-On, 1999).6 Their conclusions
vary: Georgio Agamben, for example, writing of witnessing in the aftermath of Nazi
concentration camps, concludes that ‘testimony is the disjunction between two impos-
sibilities of bearing witness’ (1999: 39), and proposes that ‘. . . language, in order to bear
witness, must give way to non-language, in order to show the impossibility of bearing
witness. The language of testimony is a language that no longer signifies . . .’ (1999: 39).
Others hold to a view that narrative forms such as testimony are significant in the recon-
struction of individual lives and social worlds. The widely cited work of Ingrid Agger
and Soren Jensen (1990) is an example of the latter. They consider testimony to be a
powerful mechanism through which recounting experiences of harm enables psycho-
logical remedy. Describing testimony as a universal ‘ritual of healing’, Agger and
Sorenson argue that, through it, the individual reintegrates painful experience into the
self (thereby becoming ‘whole’) and makes a public statement about harms inflicted,
thereby serving both to record harm and to denounce those who inflicted it. Ingrid Agger
(1994: 9) writes,

‘Testimony’ as a concept has a special double connotation: it contains objective,

judicial, public and political aspects as well as subjective, spiritual, cathartic and
private aspects. Testimony thus contains the quality of uniting within its structure
the private and the political levels.

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Agger’s model is of consequence among many of those who are engaged in trying to
assist in healing after traumatic experiences, who draw on such models (see for example,
Herman, 1992; Gurr and Quiroga, 2001), and these models have echoes in the projects
generically described as ‘truth commissions’.
Few studies have yet focused on the social ramifications of testimony or on the
political uses to which it is increasingly put, through mechanisms such as truth commis-
sions. To date there has been little attention given to the contexts within which testi-
monies are given or to the local conventions that shape how spoken interventions are
received. Acknowledgement is assumed to be a straightforward consequence of public
narration. The public nature of testimony may indeed enable easier recognition and
acknowledgement of suffering than might otherwise occur, but it should be borne in
mind that the social fields in which testifiers are located are complex, shaped by historical
processes and traduced by relations of power, and are not the blank slate that much
social-psychological theorizing implies.
Being able to narrate one’s experience in a public forum such as a Commission, even
given the constraints of genre imposed by the Commission’s mandate and format, offers
a means to identify the self in relation to a public, often envisaged as the state. However,
the aim of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was not simply to
establish a relation between the individual and the state but between individuals in order
to promote ‘national unity’. Individuals’ ‘stories’ of pain and suffering were to become
the grounds on which a shared memory could forge new forms of belonging. In this
sense, testimonial interventions of the kinds advocated by Agger and Sorenson and put
into operation in the South African Commission’s work may be seen as a special instance
of what Jackson describes as storytelling. For Jackson, storytelling offers a way for the
subjective to become social (2002: 105). He writes (2002: 245),

Stories make it possible for us to overcome our separateness, to find common ground
and common cause. To relate a story is to retrace one’s steps, going over the ground
of one’s life again, reworking reality to render it more bearable. A story enables us to
fuse the world within and the world without. In this way we gain some purchase over
events that confounded us, humbled us and left us helpless. In telling a story we renew
our faith that the world is within our grasp.

In the work of Agger and others, such interventions are assumed to be individually
and socially recuperative and to act as juridical interventions – signposts to blame and
accountability. It may be that in this, the expectations of testimony are too great. In the
face of the claims made for narrative’s efficacy, it is as well to remember that stories, testi-
monies and tellings are fragments, parts of people’s narration of their lives. They are
particular instances, synopses of experience, told at particular times for particular audi-
ences and located in specific contexts. Remembering and recounting harm is neither
simple nor neutral. Alongside the value that may be derived from public processes, we
would do well to remember that subject positioning is not uniform, and the social and
cultural locations from which to speak may be fraught, saturated with discomforting
customs that mould patterns of speech. They may render testifiers vulnerable. Recount-
ing harm does not guarantee that it will be received in ways testifiers might wish. Legal-
istic interventions may result in a strangulation of desired forms of voice. Nevertheless,

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in contexts where testimonial interventions are valued, they come to have significance
and may become important means through which individuals rework their senses of self.

Voice and the narration of self

In attending to the debates about ‘story’ and testimony as they relate to the Commission’s
work, I have been struck by the links between ‘self ’ and ‘story’; by the assumption that
narration is productive of an authentic self, and that the self is singular, constituted by
a single ‘story’ that can be appropriated by others. In such instances, the stakes of self-
narration are high. How have testimonies come to be seen by those who made them and
by others as viable means for constructing life stories and as constitutive of self? Testi-
mony is usually described as having been given (rather than, for instance, made or
spoken). If we take this formulation seriously, questions arise as to its epistemological
status once uttered. How have testifiers and others come to see narratives of experiences
as alienable products, as is suggested by the intention of some to ‘sell’ their ‘stories’? If
selfhood and ‘story’ come to be experienced as congruent and if testimonial forms are
invested with vitality that can be displaced, then what happens to the sense of self when
‘experience’ is traced through the processes of entextualization in which ‘testimony’
becomes ‘text’ and is re-embedded in diverse products? If, with Veena Das and Arthur
Kleinman (2001), we understand the act of narrating life experiences to be an act
through which individuals struggle to make shattered or dislocated social worlds
meaningful, then what are the implications when their narratives circulate through
global media that lie beyond individual knowledge and control and beyond the scope
of their intervention? And if, following Liisa Malkki’s formulation (1997: 242), we
understand ‘voice’ to be ‘the ability to establish narrative authority over one’s circum-
stances and future, and, also, the ability to claim an audience’, what happens when a
process that rests on narrating specific kinds of experience renders the individual
scrutable in terms of that experience as translated into various public domains? Once
‘stories’ circulate publicly, what controls are there over how they are used? What do we
as scholars, researchers, citizens, do with stories, performances, shards of experience? The
questions are broad. The remainder of this article takes as given the value of narration
in the creation of a coherent sense of self, and in the forging of new grounds of possi-
bility, and, in the light of concerns expressed by testifiers, pauses in order to consider
what is hidden or assumed within the formulation of storytelling in relation to the self.
My aim is to identify some of the limits of the efficacy of testimonial interventions in
contexts where new possibilities to narrate the self are granted and where individuals yet
remain vulnerable.7 As will become clear, the effect of testimonies generated through the
truth commission, media, academics and others is far broader and perhaps more
complex than naïve assumptions about testimony’s healing effects suggest.

CIRCULATION AND ENTEXTUALIZATION

The questions I have sketched here and others like them are significant in relation to the
Commission’s commitment to disseminating the process and products of its work
widely, and also in relation to scholarly interest in the Commission, its work and its
effects. The Commissioners in the South African instance were concerned that the public
hearings be experienced as ‘safe space’. To this end, testifiers were accompanied by
‘debriefers’ and were ‘briefed’ and ‘debriefed’ during the process of giving testimony. In

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some instances, where testimonies were thought to render testifiers particularly vulner-
able (as was the case with young women testifying about rape), testifiers were permitted
to speak from behind screens. Support mechanisms were put in place (with varying
degrees of efficacy) in the local communities from which testifiers were drawn, and some
testifiers were offered follow-up counselling by various NGOs. While the space of
hearings was imagined as safe – indeed, on occasion the tone of Commissioners,
especially the Commission’s chairperson, Archbishop Tutu, and vice-chairperson, Alex
Boraine, suggested that the hearings were sacred (see also Bozzoli, 1999) – the mediatiza-
tion of the hearings meant that the relative safety of the hearings did not endure. Even
where testifiers were able to control their self-representations in one context (e.g. the
public hearing), that very process also transformed ‘experience’ into ‘testimony’/‘story’
and thence into social fact, open to discussion and disputation.
Testimonies were given at open public hearings. They were broadcast in print and
electronic media in South Africa and abroad. They were posted on the Commission’s
website, reported in its 1998 Report, burned onto compact disks sold to the public.
Audio-clips of testimonies were recorded as commemoration packs of CDs, sold in
newsagents, bookstores and airport lounges. Here, testimonies circulate beyond the
confines of the immediate and intimate; their trajectories lie beyond individual control.
They have been and continue to be used by scholars, journalists, social commentators,
and others as exemplars, descriptive devices, illustrations, ‘raw data’. The shift from local
‘ecologies of narration’ (Jan Blommaert, personal communication, January 2003) to
global ones marks a shift too in the life and form of texts: oral performances before the
Commission are transformed through transcription processes into texts that enter a
wider social domain through entextualization processes and proliferate there. In the
process, their form and intent may be altered. This has important implications for the
experience of self of those who gave testimony. What happens when the contexts within
which testimony was elicited are shifted, when testimonies are placed into other
contexts? Sometimes fresh perspectives may result. We should not lose sight of the value
of these perspectives. At other times, or even simultaneously, the recontextualization may
be experienced as harmful to the sense of self of the original narrator.
Let me give some examples that raise diverse questions in relation to these problema-
tiques, particularly in relation to the ethics of re-presentation and scholarly work:

1 Colleagues, concerned that it may not be easy to recognize testifiers’ pain in the bare
transcripts of the Commission’s hearings, are currently engaged in an important project
of close linguistic reading and analysis (Blommaert et al., 2000). Their work has shown
that not all narratives are equal; some insert themselves into public life with more efficacy
and power than others. In turn, these narratives are likely to circulate more widely than
others. Identifying patterns of speech that mould, disguise or mark pain’s insertion into
speech, sometimes their methods involve reading against the grain of narratives whose
creators set out to break with the model of ‘victim’ that the Commission utilized. This
work of excavating and revealing pain in accounts that expressly set out to disguise it or
to shatter normative models suggests important questions about the social life of
testimonies.
2 Testifiers have expressed anger that their testimonies appear (often unacknowledged)
in poet-journalist Antjie Krog’s book about the Commission, Country of My Skull

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(1998). Some feel they revealed more than they wanted to at the public hearings from
which Krog draws their testimonies. Others feel that in writing about pain, Krog appro-
priates it, translates it from their experience to hers, and takes unauthorized ownership
of their ‘stories’. Their concerns indicate the ease with which experience can be
subsumed, and the sense of loss that may accompany this.
3 In July 1996, Yvonne Khutwane testified about a variety of forms of violation. In the
print media, her testimony was condensed to her experiences of sexual violation.
Reported as a ‘story’ of rape, that framing was taken on and repeated in the Commission’s
1998 Report, and in a talk given at a conference on Transitional Justice at Yale University
by Commissioner Wendy Orr. The case material in the latter has been reproduced in a
scholarly book (Minow, 1998) and forms part of the basis on which other authors
consider the effects on women of interventions such as the Commission (e.g. Hayner,
2001). Her testimony and the circulation of meanings and condensations about it, and
my conversations with her about these, are the subject of a chapter in my book (Ross,
2003). Yvonne Khutwane keeps copies of as many of these articles as I, and perhaps
others, have been able to find for her in an envelope hidden away to give to her grand-
children to read when they are older.

The kinds of replication and entextualization that I have just described are import-
ant in generating new understandings of violence and its consequences, but the effects
for the individual testifier may be more complex. Where the re-establishment of dignity
is linked to a particular narrative given in public, then an individual has made an
emotional and social investment in and to its form. What is at stake is, at least in part,
the sense of self.

CONTROL AND SELF-REPRESENTATION

The forms of communication that scholars take for granted – writing, for example –
may perform an odd alienation: for some testifiers, seeing the self as though from the
outside can be disconcerting, even painful. Some have been angry at the ways in which,
once uttered in public fora, their words circulate beyond their control, reported and
repeated in the media, on the internet, reproduced and analysed by scholars and others.
Where people struggle to re-establish ‘authorship’ over ‘stories’ (Das et al., 2000: 12), and
where coming to voice is equated with dignity, the scholarly process may be experienced
by the individual as contributing to a loss of voice, of agency, and of self. Frequently,
discomfort stems from a sense that the products of these processes do not do justice to the
self. The arrogation or loss of voice may then be haunted by humiliation or abjection.
Among those who testified before the Commission and whose ‘stories’ have been repli-
cated elsewhere, some, educated and politically astute, have chosen to try to wrest
control over their words and representations, often using realist forms to do so.
Nombuyiselo Mhlawuli, usually represented in discussions of Commission testi-
monies as the wife of Sicelo Mhlawuli, a political activist killed by the security forces in
1985, commented to students making a documentary film that ‘Many people have been
writing stories about us, making films and documentaries. What about doing it for us?
We do it ourselves and tell our stories the way we’d like it’ (in We Tell Our Stories the Way
We Like, UCT, 1999).
Recently Shirley Gunn – formerly a soldier in uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), the ANC’s

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armed wing – who testified to the Commission in August 1996, told me that she wishes
to make a film about her own experiences because she is ‘sick and tired’ of having her
‘story’ told by others. She now heads the Human Rights Media Watch, an NGO that
monitors media representations, and is chairperson of the Cape Town branch of
Khulumani.
Yazir Henri, previously an MK soldier who testified to the Commission in 1996,
writes of his anger and despair over encountering his testimony as ‘a story’, used by others
without his knowledge or consent. Broadcast in the media, published in newspapers and
books, lodged on the internet, his testimony, like others, circulates beyond his control.
Presenting papers to conferences on ‘Commissioning the Truth’ (University of the
Witwatersrand, June 1999) and ‘Transitional Cultures’ (London, September 2000),
Henri argued that the alienation of ‘self ’ from ‘story’ was a damaging effect of the
Commission’s methodology of public ‘storytelling’ (Henri, 2000 and forthcoming).
Given the Commission’s aim of linking voice and dignity, his critique poses the question
of the effects of representation on the construction of self. Yet, in the circulation of realist
forms, there is the danger that the same processes of reinscription against which Henri
reacts may occur.
Roland Barthes begins a chapter entitled ‘The Rustle of Language’ with the comment,
‘Speech is irreversible; that is its fatality’ (1986: 76). He continues, ‘What has been said
cannot be unsaid, except by adding to it: To correct, here, is, oddly enough, to continue’,
and adds, ‘In speaking I can never erase, annul; all I can do is say “I am erasing,
annulling, correcting”, in short, speak some more’. Barthes describes this form of speech
as ‘stammering’, and comments that it is ‘a message spoiled twice over’ (1986: 76).8 As
Barthes makes clear, the original saying cannot be undone. It can only be modified
through further acts, further work. In some cases, individuals struggle to be more closely
associated with their testimonies: to own them in the face of media that disperse them.
Others seek the means to dispose of their words as they wish, including by seeing them
as commodities for sale. Still others seek to tell different stories of self.

A VOICE WORTHY OF THE SELF

In an exploration of voice and its arrogation in A Pitch of Philosophy, Stanley Cavell
(1994: 135) describes agency as a coming into one’s own powers. He implies that agency
has to do with the finding of a voice worthy of the self. The concerns of testifiers
described earlier suggest that restoration of dignity is not simply a function of restored
voice, but of a voice in control – that is, a voice with a signature.
Cavell’s comment and the anger implicit in many of the examples cited in this article
raise questions about forms of ownership and arrogation in the public realm. These are
important in the light of the first-person encounters that characterize much research,
and the exteriorization of these that is the product of academic work. Does this mean
that representation is intrinsically violent? Kirsten Hastrup argues that it is. Writing of
her experiences of participating in and watching the performance of her life-story as
theatre, she comments that the production of a biography entailed violence of a symbolic
nature: forcing the self to see the self as though from outside. She states, ‘Ultimately, it
is this violence that is the source of . . . authority’ (1992: 341). Yet, she also argues that
such violence is ‘in some way the only source alternative to silence about other worlds’
(1989: 341). The issue cannot rest there. Writing of testimony, Paul Gready argues that

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when marginalized people speak, they face different struggles. He concludes that these
are now

less over the articulation of the subaltern voice than for greater control over voice,
representation, interpretation and dissemination. Voice without such control may be
worse than silence; voice with such control has the capacity to become a less perish-
able form of power because in essence it allows voice to enter into a more genuinely
reciprocal dialogue. (2001: 12)

Transcription, translation, entextualization, interpretation, analysis, dissemination: all

these are core to the anthropological task. As scholars, we need to develop a critical
ethical theory of risk and vulnerability in relation to subjectivities forged in and inhabit-
ing globalized linguistic forms.

IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION . . .
Testimony became a powerful genre in shaping self-narration in South Africa in the late
1990s. Some individuals have found the form useful. For others, it is one dimension in
the work of shaping lives and senses of self. Some have rejected it. Others, having testi-
fied, now struggle against the hardening that characterizes the process in which the
speaking word sediments into the spoken (Merleau-Ponty, cited in Csordas, 2002: 258).
Still others may yet find value in the testimonial mode, seeing in it the opportunity to
express experience in a genre that became socially validated. The effects are not limited
solely to those who testified: interviewees have described to me their sense of comfort
derived from recognizing similarities in their experiences to those of testifiers.
That testimony becomes something one can dwell in, and that it can be experienced
as constituting the self is a philosophical and moral puzzle that scholars need to take
seriously. We should not underestimate the effort that goes into constructing or
accommodating oneself to speech genres, no matter how mediated the process. Narrat-
ing involves a concerted act of will. The work of creating ‘testimonies’ thus involves not
only recognition of suffering, and the sculpting of a linguistic form to carry the experi-
ential, but also an individual determination to express and be acknowledged, whatever
the psychic or social motivations that influence the decision to give testimony. The effort
is perhaps the more so when that which is sought to be expressed lies outside of
conventional language practices or familiar forms of public acknowledgement and vali-
dation. Individuals who speak of the intimate effects of suffering make use of styles that
may – and often do – break with conventional narrative framings. They frequently speak
from subject positions that are not ordinarily endowed with power and in so doing take
risks that may not be immediately apparent to scholars.
Veena Das reminds us that ‘It is often considered the task of historiography to break
the silences that announce the zones of taboo’. However, she adds, ‘even the idea that
we should recover the narratives of violence becomes problematic when we realize that
such narratives cannot be told unless we see the relation between pain and language
that a culture has evolved’ (1996: 88). Her argument about the relation between pain
and culture is important, particularly where the context is not ‘culture’ in the singular
but rather globalized cultural forms. Literature on trauma and narrative is explicit in its
recognition that telling may ‘reawaken’ memories of trauma, with negative effects for

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ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 3(3)

the individual, but the problems of vulnerability in the face of large-scale social processes
such as global information flows has not been much addressed.9 These processes raise
new and troubling questions about the making of the self and the social.

Notes
1 The topic addressed in this article has generated stimulating discussions, especially
with Nowi Khomba, Christopher Colvin, Jan Blommaert, Richard Wilson, Undine
Kayser, Ann-Maria Makhulu, Bill Milhalopoulos, Juan Segura, and Erik Doxtader;
participants at the conference on Narrative, Memory and Trauma at the University of
Cape Town, 2002; and graduates at the New School for Social Research, where I
presented the material in September 2002. Richard Wilson and Jan Blommaert read
and commented on various instantiations of the article which has benefited greatly as
a result, although they are in no way responsible for the article’s shortcomings. I thank
the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, where I was a visitor
while writing, and the Wenner Gren Institute for Anthropological Research for the
fellowship that enabled me to be there.
2 The difference between story and shared speech in his formulation is not clear.
However, Barbara Johnson (1990: 8), writing of middle class America, comments that
‘Storytelling is at the core of what goes on when people talk’. Her definition accords
well with Jackson’s idea of storytelling. She writes:

A story is a narrative (that is, it presents a sequence of events) with a point (a reason
for being told that goes beyond or is independent of any need for a reporting of
events). Because of the requirement that a story have a point, the worlds created
in stories must be relevant in the world in which the stories are told. Because these
are human worlds, a story must have human relevance, and because they are local
worlds, tied to specific communities of speakers, they must have local relevance.
. . . In addition to, and partly because of, these requirements for content, there are
requirements for form: stories must be told in ways that are both conventional and
creative. (1990: 18)

My thanks to Jan Blommaert for this reference.

3 The media was envisaged as a key component in the Commission’s work, and its role
was discussed at several conferences between 1996 and 1998. The Commission
created a media liaison office, and established a media accreditation process and
disseminated research and background information to journalists.
4 My paper, presented at the Conference on Narrative, Memory and Trauma, University
of Cape Town, July 2002 (see published proceedings, Telling Wounds, edited by C.
van der Merwe), and given the day after Colvin’s presentation, was a dialogue with
his ideas. I am grateful for permission to cite from his work.
5 Interviewees did not envisage transforming the research relationship into one of
waged labour.
6 Despite the proliferation of studies in the last decade (see for example Herman, 1992;
Agger, 1994; Felman and Laub, 1992; Bar-On, 1999; Agamben, 1999), the term is
not used in a standard way in the literatures. Narrative forms described as testimonies
vary from the narratives offered by witnesses in court-rooms, to the testimonios

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popularized in Latin America, to video- and tape-recorded interviews with survivors

of concentration camps (Langer, 1991, 1996), to documentary material, literature
and art produced by survivors (Agamben, 1999) and to the forms of narrative
construction offered by exiles and survivors of torture during and subsequent to
therapy (Agger, 1994). Each differs in formality and the degree of precision required.
The immediate social contexts within which each is made differ widely, as do the
contexts about which people testify.
7 The role of narrative in the making of personhood in post-Apartheid South Africa
deserves more sustained attention than I am able to give it here. Southern African
conventions hold that persons are made through their relationships with others, a
convention expressed in the adage umntu ngumntu abantu – a person is a person by
means of others. Relationships are sustained not only in words but in the ongoing
actions of caring and duty sustained over time. This is not to say that narrative is
unimportant but merely to point out that narratives of self are only one way of making
personhood.
8 I am grateful to Juan Segura for this reference and for an invigorating discussion of
the forms of subjectivity that testimony enables and constrains.
9 Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman (1996) address some of these questions in
relation to the effects of the media on understandings of suffering.

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FIONA ROSS is a Social Anthropologist at the University of Cape Town. Her book Bearing Witness: Women
and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, is a study of women’s testimonies and political
activism. Her latest research focuses on the meaning of home for residents of an informal housing settlement.
Address: Social Anthropology, University of Cape Town, P. Bag Rondebosch 7701 South Africa. [email:
ross@humanities.uct.ac.za]

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