The TRC Women's Hearings as Performance and Protest in the New South Africa

The article focuses on the South African “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” as an individual and collective ritual of healing based on the sharing of oral narratives. In particular it looks at the ways in which the sessions devoted to the testimonies of women on 28 and 29 July 1997 were carefully staged and ritualised. An analysis of the transcripts reveals that the speakers were highly conscious of the public role required of them, that most sessions implied not just bearing witness but ‘being heard’ by fellow South Africans, and that this asked for stories to be told according to the rules of (oral) rhetoric and performance. The article argues that, as a process that clearly connects the past and the future, the political and the religious, the personal and the social, the TRC is clearly indebted to African oral art, fulfilling similar functions in black culture and holding great potential for artistic expression. The presence of oral artists at the hearings – such as Gcina Mhlophe – underlines that oral poetry, in English and other local languages, is still meaningful in contemporary South Africa. Their poetic texts, together with the stories shared by the women, may in time become part of the collective voice of the country, also thanks to new means of transmission like the web, which interact productively with older forms of communicative sharing.