Truth Commission hearings discredited whites’ denials but left apartheid’s architects untouched.

Evidence

The performativity of individual expressions of remorse notwithstanding, the hearings especially disabled white South African deniability about the depth of apartheid’s abuses. But they also produced, if not a numbing effect, certainly the public disposition especially among whites to equate perpetrators on both sides, identifying wrongs done by street activists and liberating forces with the intense abuses of human sacrifice touched upon above. It left the bereaving families, often poor and almost invariably black, whose loved ones were horribly killed or maimed, with little or no restitution beyond an individual apology in a public forum, however heartfelt. And perhaps above all, it left the leaders of apartheid’s worst atrocities, its architects and arbiters – not least former President P. W. Botha, the quintessential symbol of apartheid abuse, aggression, and arrogance – pretty much completely untouched. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1576

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the discussion of ritual sacrifice as a stabilizer of stratified societies in the published article ‘On Sacrifice’ — Goldberg here frames the TRC’s religious/purification logic as a parallel mechanism.