Complicit and Implicated Testimonies: Exploring Limits and Opportunities for Transitional and Transformational Justice through South Africa’s Institutional Hearings

In seeking to reorient a newly democratic nation within which those who were wronged and those who perpetrated wrongs would need to coexist, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission created a much-critiqued moral equivalency between perpetrators from all political affiliations, as well as a stark victim-perpetrator binary. The commission’s focus on gross human rights violations precluded meaningful discussion of structural violence or colonial legacies; relatedly, it also left little room for recognition of complicity or implication in its many forms. Michael Rothberg refers to the positionality of ‘the implicated subject’ as ‘violent innocence,’ which suggests the difficulty of addressing such a position within mechanisms like the TRC. The TRC did, however, hold institutional hearings at which people could voluntarily testify about their roles in apartheid. These hearings provide terrain for exploring testimonies from complicit and implicated subjects, which this article does through the lens of the television news series, Truth Commission Special Report. The series constituted a primary news source for most South Africans on TRC happenings; many viewers would have been implicated subjects themselves. Examining complicity or implication as it appears within the TRC institutional hearings and their media coverage allows for discussion on the language of complicity and implication in testimony, its media representation in a transitioning South Africa, and the role of these testimonies in transitional justice. The mediatized nature of these testimonies also allows for reflection on how engaging with testimonies of complicity and implication may influence viewers’ understandings of their own culpability after violence.