The Facts of Reconciliation: Fictions of Truth in the South African TRC

This paper delves into the complex interplay between factual and fictional narratives during the proceedings of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Through a close analysis of a specific testimonial account from Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull, I illustrate how legal truths unearthed in the TRC hearings were often shaped by fictional constructs. The 1987 murders of Richard and Irene Motasi by the South African Police Force (SAPF), as depicted in Krog's text, exemplify the ways in which fictions came to be interwoven into the very fabric of the TRC process, influencing and fundamentally transforming its trajectory, while also highlighting the broader difficulties of untangling truth from fiction in the fraught contexts of both apartheid and the Commission itself. By tracing the transformation of the bare facts of the Motasi killings into the nationally circulating literary fictions and aesthetic representations that then went on to serve as evidence in the TRC, I demonstrate how the factual testimony became inseparable from the fictional narratives that had proleptically framed its public understanding. Drawing on archival sources and conversations with key actors, I reconstruct a pivotal juncture in those hearings where 'truth' itself arguably became a property of fiction, and fiction ultimately served to establish, indeed commission, truth.