Beyond Nuremberg : learning from the post-apartheid transition in South Africa

The contemporary human rights movement holds up Nuremberg as a template with which to define responsibility for mass violence. The lesson of Nuremberg is two-fold: one, responsibility for mass violence is criminal and must be ascribed to individual agents; above all, this responsibility is said to be ethical, not political. Two, criminal justice is the only politically viable and morally acceptable response to mass violence. Turned into the founding moment of the new human rights movement, Nuremberg is today the model for the International Criminal Court (ICC) and is held as the fitting anti-dote to every incident of mass violence...

Beyond Nuremberg : the historical significance of the post-apartheid transition in South Africa

The end of apartheid has been exceptionalized as an improbable outcome produced by the exceptionality of Nelson Mandela. It is thus said that the violence of Africa’s civil wars results from a culture of impunity among African leaders, and calls for punishment rather than political reform. This essay asserts the core relevance of the South African transition as an exemplar for ending civil wars in the rest of Africa. Whereas Nuremberg shaped the notion of criminal justice, the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) calls on us to think of justice as primarily political

Speak out on poverty: Hearing, inaudibility, and citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa

In 1998, Speak Out on Poverty held hearings across South Africa shortly after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) completed eighteen months of highly publicized, nationwide hearings at which victims testified. Speak Out challenged the TRC’s focus on overt political violations, seen to occlude forms of structural violence central to apartheid's policy and practice, as well as longer legacies of colonialism. Reading Speak Out alongside the TRC puts pressure on supposed differences between official truth commissions or tribunals and those run by civil society. Discussing Speak Out in relation to the TRC signaled more than a set of comparisons. In a time of transition, Speak Out spoke from within and against the noise of the TRC. It aimed to make poverty and inequality the nation's priority rather than reconciliation, or at least to challenge notions of reconciliation that did not have inequity and poverty at its center

History, trauma and remembering in Kivu Ruhorahoza’s Grey Matter (2011)

In 1994, the genocide in Rwanda claimed at least 800,000 lives in just 100 days. More than 20 years on, the memory and trauma of the atrocities still permeate the Rwandan society. This article explores how some of these different manifestations of trauma (individual and collective, actual and inherited, real and imagined, that of survivors and perpetrators), and especially their relationship to the genocide as a historical event, shape the internationally recognized Rwandan feature film, Kivu Ruhorahoza’s Grey Matter (2011). Drawing on the scholarship on trauma, the article examines Grey Matter’s uniqueness within feature films on the topic and its ambition to tackle the impossibility of memory and objectivity vis-à-vis varied experiences of the genocide. It traces the connection between trauma and Grey Matter’s structure, which refuses to offer events a firm chronological placement, both within and beyond the narrative