Soweto township in Johannesburg, one of the enduring legacies of apartheid. DocDee/Wikimedia. Some rights reserved.
Over a period of almost three months in 1998, Speak Out on Poverty (Speak Out) convened ten public hearings across South Africa. These hearings took place shortly after the South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) completed some two years of highly publicised, nation-wide hearings, in which deponents provided dramatic testimony of violations committed during the political struggle to end apartheid. Speak Out addressed what was regarded as a ‘blind spot’ in the TRC mandate: its focus on a narrow band of violations–torture, killing, enforced disappearance and the ill-defined category of severe ill-treatment–was seen to occlude the larger violence central to the policy and practice of apartheid itself.
According to Speak Out, “[nearly] 600 people made oral submissions and over 10,000 people participated in the process either by making written submissions, attending the hearings or mobilising others to participate.” But despite the success of the hearings, and a veritable industry of scholarship, art, literature and music concerning the TRC, Speak Out is barely remembered, even by scholars and practitioners of transitional justice. This is doubly ironic given the widespread poverty: South Africa continues to rank as one of the most unequal countries in the world and recent government statistics suggest that in 2011, 54% of South Africans lived below the poverty line, of whom 22% (10.7 million) struggled daily to procure adequate food. Indeed, the failure to address legacies of poverty and structural violence is widely regarded as the key fault line of South Africa’s transition. By extension, the TRC itself is seen to have failed.
