Truth Without Reconciliation. Abena Ampofoa Asare
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testimony. Ambulances were also stationed outside the venue, ready to rush people to the hospital if necessary.38 Joseph Kwadwo Ampah’s death was a corporeal reminder of the uncertainty and risk associated with the NRC’s work. Inasmuch as delving into the past could create restoration and renewal, it might also reap disorder and even destruction.
The nine commissioners were guides and arbiters in these public hearings. They questioned witnesses, urging calm when anger threatened to erupt, scolded the audience, and offered their sympathies and words of wisdom.39 Faced with a sobbing witness, a commissioner might advise counseling and urge that he “forget the past, forge ahead and build a bright future, instead of dwelling on the pain.”40 Confronted with a recalcitrant witness who would not answer the NRC summons, the commissioners could levy a fine.41 Since Kufuor had personally appointed all the commissioners, criticism of their comportment or objectivity was laid at the feet of the president.42 A Ghana Review article described a scene during the Accra hearings when the commissioners “descended heavily” and “expressed their disgust” at the actions of an ex-military man accused of brutally beating a market woman.43 There were moments when the commissioners’ tone and comments drew disapproval from some quarters; eventually the NDC party officially filed a complaint stating that supporters of their party were rushed, humiliated, and generally treated poorly during the NRC hearings.44
Beyond this partisan critique, civil-society organizations also expressed concerns that the public hearings “inappropriately resembled courtroom proceedings.”45 The nine commissioners sat on a raised dais peering down at witnesses, who transported the conventions of the Ghanaian courts to the NRC and addressed the commissioners formally as “my lord.” Lawyers could participate in the proceedings, and high-profile and affluent witnesses, accused persons, and victims often retained an attorney. Individuals who had been named or implicated in a prior presentation were given the right to cross-examine witnesses. As such, accused perpetrators were given the right to publicly question alleged victims. This, according to the commissioners, ensured that those Ghanaians who were skeptical or hostile to the NRC’s work would trust in the fairness of the process. However, when the accused perpetrator was a military men or business owners with wealth and standing, a well-heeled lawyer might publicly harangue nervous victims armed only with their words and convictions.46 This was what befell Aku Sabi, a petitioner who described suffering a miscarriage due to the brutality of hired soldiers paid to enforce a company’s privatization of disputed land. At the NRC, the company lawyer publicly cross-examined Sabi, at one point blaming her for the miscarriage and saying that “she did not take good care of [the pregnancy].”47 Although the psychological and social consequences of subjecting alleged victims to this manner of public cross-examination has not yet been reckoned with in Ghana, there is a growing recognition that TRC practices may reproduce and reinscribe trauma.48
By cottoning to this veneer of legalism, the NRC seemed to imply that the truth it pursued was similar to that utilized in Ghanaian courts.49 In reality, accessing the past’s violence through individual human rights testimony is inevitably a journey into the vagaries of memory and representation. People’s recollections and stories are based on the life they are currently living. Their perspectives on the past are shaped by the present’s desires, secrets, and hopes. In valorizing victim testimony as a way of knowing the past, truth and reconciliation commissions cannot also adhere to the strict evidentiary standards that prevail in courts of law. And yet, because legal scholars and practitioners have been central to the global TRC phenomenon, the pretense that TRC truths are or should be objective continues to stand. Truth commissions should stick to “facts, which can be proved,” says José Zalaquett, a lawyer and member of the Chilean truth commission; “this is not the place for an historical analysis of class struggles.” “Let historians take over later” is how Susan Slyomovics reads Zalaquett’s legal positivism, “and let them talk to each other.”50 The problem with this approach, of course, is that the historians are already involved. In Ghana, everyday people were acting as historians, interpreting and analyzing the past as they lodged petitions and presented testimony.
In the introduction we met Joseph Kwadwo Nuer, the former soldier who subverted the commissioners’ demands for evidentiary truth by cheekily explaining that Ghana’s grinding poverty had destroyed material evidence that would corroborate his story. Given Ghana’s economic situation, Nuer explained, most of his documents had long been used as toilet paper.51 The message is clear: attempting to fit the NRC archive into the mold of evidentiary fact and public proofs is a misstep. Knee-deep in this capacious NRC archive, the deceptively simple mandate to find out the truth about past human rights violations and abuse becomes a riddle.52 What is the single knowable truth amid the multiple and divergent stories about the past? If anything, this archive telescopes just how difficult it is to find consensus about what happened to whom, and why, in the Ghanaian past.53
Oral-history theory is a way to navigate the NRC archive without falling prey to the sterile debates about the veracity of individual stories. Antjie Krog’s dizzying observation that the truth is closest at the moment when the lie rears its head is a guide for reading these newly proliferating human rights archives.54 Historians, Luise White insists, should approach secrets and lies as opportunities to observe how information is constructed, valorized, and marshaled within a particular social imaginary.55 If “the invented account is at least as good as the accurate one,” the unruliness of TRC records need not be reframed as legal evidence in order to be read or respected.56 As Alessandro Portelli reminds us, the importance of oral testimony “may lie not in its adherence to fact, but rather in its departure from it, as imagination, symbolism, and desire emerge. Therefore, there is no ‘false’ oral source.”57 After all, the past is always being reconstructed and reframed according to the changing social and psychological needs of individuals and communities.58 At the intersection of human rights and history, these scholars challenge the premise that narratives produced from within the belly of conflict must be objective to be useful.
Civil society and legal practitioners have been slower to step away from the vision of TRC history as a corrective to propaganda, error, and erasure. Zalaquett’s legal positivism echoes Michael Ignatieff’s quip that truth commissions may, at least, reduce the number of lies that are able to circulate unchallenged in public.59 However attractive this vision of setting the historical record straight may be, in reality, TRCs around the world have been unable to banish the lies that power tells. The minimalist, facts-only approach ignores the reality that in the house where conflict lives, consensus is out of the question. No bare rendition of evidence, no profusion of tears, can convince some of us of histories that we cannot emotionally assimilate or psychologically bear. Even now there are those in South Africa who cannot accept the weight of the TRC testimony about the violence of apartheid. Still they insist “we didn’t know, we didn’t intend.”60 For these skeptics, individual testimony can be only partial, emotionally manipulative, calculated, exaggerated, or myopic. Oral history’s methodology directs us to the truths that emerge within this lack of consensus: we are urged to ask who is rejecting stories of apartheid suffering, on what grounds, and why? The stories offered in the NRC archive elide, skirt, and flit in the spaces between fact, memory, rumor, and lie. They contradict one another, sometimes directly and vehemently. Nevertheless, the archive’s narrative is still “true” as a mapping of the versions of the Ghanaian past deemed useful by citizens at a particular moment. Instead of seeking to adjudicate between conflicting petitions, approaching the NRC archive as the work of many authors pursuing diverse goals renders the disputes comprehensible and legible.
On February 12, 2004, J. J. Rawlings appeared at the Old Parliament House to testify before the NRC. The whole of Accra seemed to stand still. In the streets, pedestrians, hawkers, and shopkeepers clustered around their nearest television screen to watch the former president’s questioning by the commission. Undoubtedly, this was one of the NRC’s most dramatic days. The period of Rawlings’s rule covered by the NRC mandate (1979–1992) included heinous crimes of torture, assault, and murder. Twice, Ghanaian families came to the NRC begging for help to locate and exhume the remains of their relatives lost during these years. Rawlings, as a name and an icon, animated many of the NRC petitions;