The political instrumentalization of religion in the South African truth and reconciliation commission

Kumordzie, Beatrice

The political instrumentalization of religion in the South African truth and reconciliation commission

Master Thesis

2019

Abstract

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has been subject to numerous debates across a wide range of disciplines, including peace and conflict studies, justice and transformation studies, as well as religious studies. In political science, the debates concerning the TRC have mainly revolved around the peace versus justice dichotomy, and more recently - the heated question of whether symbolic measures as opposed to socioeconomic measures can pave the ideal path to justice and reconciliation in post-conflict societies. Arguably, the debates that have dominated the discourse on justice and transformation in South Africa so far has failed to acknowledge and unpack the central role that religion played in the country’s process of transition. My argument is that religion was instrumentalized politically in the TRC, and thereby used to morally justify certain political compromises that were made during the negotiations between the apartheid National Party (NP) and the African National Congress (ANC) in the early 1990s. By political instrumentalization, I am referring to the strategy of using an identity marker, in this case Christianity, to achieve political ends. I propose that that the Mandela administration purposely employed religious elements in the political nation-building-tool of the TRC with the intent to create an atmosphere of “spiritual healing”. This symbolic and inter-personal understanding of justice in turn, it can be argued, came at the expense of retributive and/ or socio-economic justice. The influence of religion within the TRC can be seen most strongly in the identity of the key people involved (the chairperson Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and four of the commissioners who were theologians), the overt biblical rhetoric employed both in the hearings and in the final report, as well as in the design of the commission. The constructivist theories in which this paper will frame its understanding of “the religious” suggests any space can become holy through the performance of religious practices. In this regard, I propose that the TRC, while appearing to be a court-like body, became a sacred space through practices including prayers, lighting of candles and singing of hymns.

Keywords

religion

political instrumentalization

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