Truth Without Reconciliation. Abena Ampofoa Asare
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documents stored at the University of Ghana’s Balme Library, I immersed myself in the 4,240 petitions that Ghanaians brought to the NRC, eventually processing approximately 1,020 of these files. I also listened to digital recordings of the public hearings held in the Balme Library and in the Human Rights Archive at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library. In the decade since beginning this research, I have come to believe that the stories called into being, preserved, and organized by the truth and reconciliation imperative are simultaneously the most valuable and the most frequently overlooked product of Ghana’s NRC.
This national truth commission did not produce unimpeachable truths. Nor did it fix the country’s politics. But it did lead to an unprecedented public accounting of Ghana’s past, by Ghanaian people, at the turn of the twenty-first century. Although more than a decade has passed since the NRC began its work, the stories remain as glimpses of Ghanaians’ political and historical consciousness. The testimonies and petitions banished to the stacks are more than partisan wrangling, more than sentimental catharsis, and more than the jockeying of citizens for scarce goods. Each of these assumptions—that the Ghana NRC was simply a place to cry, to lie, or to play politics—masks the richness of the stories therein. When the tour guides into the past are the self-described victims of the state’s machinations, they fix the spotlight squarely on Ghana’s people, the approximately twenty million human beings who survived the tumult of the first fifty years of postcolonial independence.
It has been said that until the lion writes history, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. This study amends the proverb—until the gazelles, the weaver birds, the baobab trees, and even the tsetse flies write history, the story of the savannah will always be a tale of the hunt. The NRC stories teach us that when historical production is democratized, there is a fundamental shift in the subject and content of political history. In Truth Without Reconciliation, I hold the NRC records up to the light, turn them this way and that, and consider what was created and what was undone by Ghana’s encounter with the TRC. In this public human rights review, participants shared stories about the moments that shattered their intimately held aspirations for self, family, and nation. Entering Ghanaian political history in this way, as a matter of particular moments, people, and places, ushers us past “big men” and political parties toward a meditation on the relationship between citizen and state in Ghana. How did diverse people experience the turbulence of the past half century? How did they survive? The NRC records create a people-centered narrative; Ghanaians locate national political turmoil within individual, family, and local histories of suffering. Against a backdrop where politicians, traditional rulers, and wealthy families have usually been at the center of the national politics, these citizen stories of harm across scales mark a shift in Ghana’s public record.8
Beyond Ghanaian borders, these records also suggest new possibilities for the language and practices of international human rights that are utilized, domesticated, and transformed in local soil. Here, human rights victims are more than objects of pity or rescue, they are experts whose voices illuminate the dilemmas of poverty, inequality, violence, and injustice in Ghana. Critics, especially those sympathetic to the inequalities of the international political and economic order, challenge the moral solidity of human rights initiatives that reflect the imperatives, priorities, and epistemologies of powerful global actors.9 Truth commissions that amplify and preserve citizen voices complicate this picture. This study asserts that the potential of human rights is not contained in a parade of sterile documents delineating abstract ideals but, instead, is hidden in the mouths of everyday people gripping tightly to human rights as a sturdy platform from which to narrate their past, present, and futures. Only as local communities breathe life into the hollowness of human rights—claiming it as a method of organizing people, a means to combat marginalization, and a language with which to debate the premises and content of political justice—does “rights talk” find roots and wings.10 Below, I use concepts of archive, cacophony, and democracy to sketch the contours of Ghana’s encounter with the truth and reconciliation commission.
The TRC Phenomenon
This is the conundrum from which this study began: How could a truth commission that drew out thousands of statements and petitions have such limited political impact? How could this remarkable public review so swiftly and effectively disappear? A sense of intertwined possibility and deficiency extends beyond the Ghana case and troubles the TRC phenomenon at large. In the past twenty-five years, thirteen (and counting) of Africa’s fifty-four countries have used these quasi-judicial instruments to confront diverse experiences of historical violence.11 The TRC has become “all but obligatory” in the effort to enshrine peace, democracy, and stability in the aftermath of conflict.12 The United Nations, regional organizations like the African Union, and institutional donors champion and support these commissions as a matter of global policy.13 Truth and reconciliation commissions are rooted in an ascendant international human rights framework and the part displays the contradictions of the whole.
TRCs capture the world’s imagination by suggesting that alignment of the political and moral order is possible. If the Nuremberg trials anchored the principle of global accountability for atrocity, South Africa’s TRC promised that the evils of modernity might yet be made whole.14 It was, in the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a “beacon of hope” for a “tired, disillusioned, cynical world hurting so frequently and so grievously.”15 By publicly condemning the devastation of apartheid and simultaneously safeguarding political stability, a “barbaric society” might “become minimally decent.”16 An element of magical thinking has always shadowed the TRC dream of formulaically substituting a ghastly past for a bright future. With the proliferation of commissions around the world, the gap between rhetoric and reality has begun to first yawn and then gape. A palpable whiff of disappointment has come to surround the truth commission ideal of extracting forgiveness, remorse, and political progress from the ashes of historical violence.
In the last years of the twentieth century, Michael Ignatieff quipped that the sum of a truth commission’s power was simply to reduce the number of lies that circulate unchallenged in public. At the time, this notion was a corrective to the starry-eyed optimism holding that TRCs would battle impunity, knit together deeply divided political communities, heal and relieve victims, and establish definitive accounts of historical violence.17 Two decades later, scholars and victims challenge even this minimalist vision of what TRCs may accomplish in South Africa and beyond.18
The supposed catharsis that victims of violence gain from TRC public testimony has proven elusive.19 The Khulumani Support Group, a community of South African survivors of apartheid violence, perhaps put it best: “At the end of so much digging for the truth in the TRC so many people found themselves still bleeding from open wounds.”20 A number of empirical studies also challenge the assumption that TRCs always expand the public record; by commissioning truth, transitional justice instruments may actually construct silences.21 Even the premise that TRCs guard against political impunity by levying a cost on leaders who oversee atrocity now seems naïve. The scenario in Liberia, where political elites condemned and dismissed a freshly-released TRC report, appears much more likely.22 Freed from the deluge of a priori and optimistic praise, the TRC is a form both politically and analytically contingent, with uncertain futures and complicated outcomes. From this vantage point, the disappearance of Ghana’s NRC is less of a mystery; a government that is invested in creating a truth commission may also be decidedly uninterested in that commission’s conclusions. Still, there are the voices. In Ghana, the thousands of stories gathered up by the national reconciliation experiment are the remnant that is more valuable than the whole.
On the TRC as an Archive
If “people study history in order to participate in contemporary politics,” they write history for much the same reasons.23 We gather up, represent, and inscribe the past in order to carve out new futures for our family, community, and nation. In TRCs, diverse individuals enter into this history work. By describing the NRC documents as an archive, I highlight the historical relevance of the records; this designation also illuminates the complex mechanisms of “inclusion, exclusion, forgetting, remembering, construction