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Human Rights, Storytelling, and the Position of the Beneficiary: Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Kay Schaffer  and
Sidonie Smith
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Extract

In the end we are a society of people, not of ideas, a fragile web of interdependent humans, not of stances.

—Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

One of the most compelling criticisms to emerge during South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings called attention to the fact that those who benefited from the everyday policies and practices of the apartheid regime were neither identified as complicit in perpetuating systemic violence nor called to account. Nor was their implicated position in the apartheid state extensively analyzed in the commission's report. Commenting at the time on the inadequacy of the TRC process to identify beneficiaries of the apartheid regime and expose its structural violence, Mahmood Mamdani wrote that the TRC “has been interested only in violations outside the law, in benefits which are corruptions, but not in the systematic benefit which was conferred on beneficiaries at the expense of the vast majority of people in this country” (“Reconciliation” 3; also qtd. in Young 149). Mamdani here asserts that the ethical concept of the beneficiary is central to truth telling, reconciliation, and transitional nation building. His trenchant critique implicitly questions whether the truth-and-reconciliation project, relying as it does on the management of justice through the juridical statuses of “victim” and “perpetrator,” can deliver on its promise of addressing injustice and the aftereffects of radical injury and harm. Those positioned neither as victims nor as perpetrators are not called to recognize the benefits to them of structural violence, through which power, privilege, and “corporeal vulnerability” are unevenly distributed (Butler, Precarious Life 30). Nor are they asked to “bear moral responsibility to redress” the consequences of injustice (Mamdani, “Diminished Truth” 183). In response to Mamdani's critique, we want to consider how the ethical stance of the beneficiary can become visible in relation to victim and perpetrator positions and to what effect.

Type
Little-Known Documents
Information
PMLA , Volume 121 , Issue 5 , October 2006 , pp. 1577 - 1584
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2006

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