Truth, reconciliation, and the restoration of the state: Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians

  I never wished it for the barbarians that they should have the history
  of Empire laid upon them.
  --J. M. Coetzee (Waiting for the Barbarians 151)

In Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominick LaCapra observes that the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) "was in its own way a trauma recovery center" (43) providing a social mechanism for South Africa to work through the trauma caused by apartheid. LaCapra's observation suggests that the TRC offers a method through which the rupture caused by centuries of domination under a system rooted in racial and cultural inequality might be healed by reconciling the oppressed with the oppressors. The motto on the TRC's home page, "Truth. The Road to Reconciliation," summarizes the commission's ideology. The singular truth here implies that an empirically verifiable truth can be found, and the juxtaposition of "The Road to Reconciliation" with "Truth" suggests that the publication or voicing of truth will lead directly to reconciliation in South Africa, perhaps even that for the TRC, "Truth" and "The Road to Reconciliation" have become equivalent terms. The TRC's goals, however, are implicitly more ambitious than either LaCapra or its internet home page indicate. The TRC is a part of South Africa's Department of Justice and Constitutional Development, so one of its aims from the outset has been to achieve justice in South Africa. Exposing truth, it implies, brings not only reconciliation but also a sort of justice.

Although it predated the establishment of the TRC by 15 years, J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians anticipates and challenges the TRC's conflation of the quest for truth with the quest for justice. Like the TRC, much of the criticism of Coetzee's novel sees exposing the experiences of the oppressed as a sort of justice, but I see in the novel a pointed critique: the state's remembering of the often fragmentary evidence of oppression amounts not to justice in the reparative sense but rather to an expedient, a way to secure political legitimacy. Waiting for the Barbarians articulates the problem of justice in South Africa and challenges the basic premises of the TRC by exploring, first, the difficulty of establishing the truth about the experience of the oppressed and, second, the manipulation of their voices to protect the interests of the state.

Something called restorative justice

  [T]he perpetrator ... should be given the opportunity to be
  reintegrated into the community he has injured by his offense.
  --Desmond Mpilo Tutu (55)

The justice that the TRC seeks for South Africa does not attempt to heal the victim at the expense of the perpetrator. Rather, the TRC's goal is to heal the perpetrator alongside the victim, to make the perpetrator a viable part of a new South African society that values both the victim and the perpetrator equally. According to the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995, the legislation that established the TRC, its stated purpose is fourfold. (1) First, the TRC is charged with creating "as complete a picture as possible" of the atrocities of apartheid by recording both "the perspectives of the victims and the motives and perspectives of the persons responsible" for those atrocities. Second, the TRC serves to facilitate the "granting of amnesty" to those who "make full disclosure" of their involvement in human rights violations. Third, the TRC is to restore the "human and civil dignity" of the victims of atrocities "by granting them an opportunity to relate their own accounts" and "by recommending reparation measures." Finally, the TRC is to construct a narrative of apartheid based on its findings that provides "as comprehensive an account as possible" and recommends "measures to prevent the future violations of human rights" (2.3.1). Although part of its task is to make recommendations about reparations, the TRC's primary concern is to foster social healing that reconciles the divisions in South African society and allows it to carry on as a unified state. This social healing, in the TRC's view, constitutes justice, a new type of justice that Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the chair of the TRC, terms "restorative justice" (54). (2)

Clearly, part of Tutu's goal in pursuing restorative justice is to avoid the violence historically inherent both in the traditional exacting of justice and in decolonization. The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon's manifesto for African revolution, declares that "decolonization is always a violent phenomenon" (35), and it is this violence that Tutu fears. (3) He claims that "We make the mistake of conflating all justice into retributive justice, whereas there is something called restorative justice, and this is the justice we have chosen" (qtd. in Ryan). The central concern of this type of justice, as Tutu defines it, is