Ideas & Debate

The slippery road of truth and reconciliation in Africa

truth

A witness before the Truth commission in Kilifi. Recommendations at such hearings have been poorly implemented, or left to gather dust on the shelves. PHOTO | FILE

In May of 2008 I attended a conference that brought together wise heads in the fraught and complex field of truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs).

These people, assembled from all over Africa, offered their collective experiences in working with perpetrators and victims of historical abuses.

They were experts in digging out the truth and in assessing how to both dispense justice and reconcile individuals and communities, and were in Nairobi to provide input to Kenya’s own imminent Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission — when the draft TJRC Bill was on its way to Parliament.

I wrote an article in this column about the conference and the conclusions it reached, and just before attending the recent launch of a new book titled Stretching the Truth: The Uncertain Promise of TRCs in Africa’s Transitional Justice I went back to read what I had written to find that all the worries that had been expressed at the 2008 conference were more than justified.

“We can only hope,” I wrote then, “that in the rush to legislation those who will be shepherding it through will pause for long enough to incorporate what the eminent men and women who spoke at the conference offered.”

I had already come to appreciate how difficult it would be to coax serious benefits from what Kenya was about to undergo, accepting that “the idea is no doubt noble; its ambition could not be grander; but its effective realisation will be monumentally challenging”.

Educated by the TRC experts, I worried that we were asking the commissioners and their staff “to write the definitive history of Kenya going back to 1963, and also to sort out who had done what nasty things to whom. We then want them to figure out how to handle those who have abused (plus those who have authorised abuse) and those who have been abused,” I wrote, “in a just and practical way. And, assuming they are not completely exhausted by then, they must reconcile us so that similar abuses do not recur.”

They would be asked to do this publicly and accountably, and would be subject to incredible pressure of all kinds, I confidently predicted. Utopians would demand the whole truth and total justice.

Others would say we’ve already had enough commissions and we know enough of the truth, so cut straight to the justice. And there’d be those who would do anything to keep inconvenient history buried and, where it couldn’t be so, for amnesty to be granted to the ignoble.

Then there would be some (fewer!) who’d be as concerned with reconciling for the future as with either hiding or squaring the past.

George Wachira and Prisca Kamungi (authors of the just published book) and others who have studied what has happened in other African countries found that the world of TRCs is full of pitfalls. First, experience showed that perpetrators tend to stay very far away.

After all, what incentive is there to come forward, when often the threat of prosecution follows? Then, in not a few instances generous amnesties have been the order of the day, pragmatic concessions to post-conflict progress.

So TRC hearings have been dominated by victims – plus rogues posing as such. But even victims (particularly women) have not rushed to share their tortured stories… except, often, when talk of compensation was floated.

Experience also shows that even where expectations of compensation have been raised, rarely have more than symbolic payouts occurred. And even when they have, it has been after much struggle. Other recommendations too have been poorly implemented, or not at all.

Kenya was the first country to spell out all three pillars of a TJRC. South Africa’s was a mere TRC (performing better on receiving cathartic victim testimonials than on promoting sustainable reconciliation), while Ghana’s was largely – and pretty unsuccessfully – limited to reconciliation.

So, asked Wachira in 2008, what was there to make us optimistic that Kenya’s imminent and ambitious journey into its past and future would reveal enough of the truth and result in enough of both justice and reconciliation?

Track record

“Is it Kenya’s moral leadership, our maturity, our will to move forward? Is it our patriotism, our goodwill, our love for our country, our spirit of honesty, of confession, of repentance? Is it the depth of our coffers, which we will dip into to fund reparations? Is it our track record in implementing the recommendations of previous commissions?”

Even if each of these questions could be answered with a resounding “yes”, we should not of course imagine, I wrote, that a TJRC could of itself resolve all of our problems.

“The commission’s objectives must be aligned to those of other related commissions, within an overarching and visionary context, and our expectations of it must be tempered by an understanding of the realities of power.”

“It would be too tempting, too easy, to shove the sorting out of all our unfinished business into the TJRC basket,” I suggested. “So we must focus at least as much attention on building strong institutions; on formulating policies that take care of inequalities....”

I appealed for realism about what we could expect from our TJRC, asking “Who will be able to tickle in both victims and perpetrators to tell their stories, their many truths? Who will find that elusive path to satisfying those two unlikely bedfellows, justice and reconciliation?”

That is how I channelled the wisdom and prescience I had absorbed from the wise ones, and in my next column I’ll write more about the new book and its recommendations.