A Critique of South Africa Truth and Reconciliation in John Kani’s Nothing but the Truth
A Critique of South Africa Truth and Reconciliation in John Kani’s Nothing but the Truth.
ABSTRACT
The truth and reconciliation project was a major political undertaking in South Africa that has continued to offer the country’s creative writers a mine from which to draw materials and inspiration for thematic explorations.
Critical responses to such creative works have equally been numerous, but they have placed more emphasis on inter-racial dimensions of rapprochement in their works.
This paper critically examines the twin issues of truth and reconciliation in John Kani’s Nothing but the Truth from inter-personal and intra-racial angles in order to demonstrate that inter-personal and intra-racial reconciliation, though not without challenges, provides a model of genuine and lasting national inter-racial reconciliation.
Truth is depicted in different ways. The truth people tell in private and inter-personal conflicts appears more reliable, yet ambivalent because it is experiential.
The one told in the public is depicted as unreliable, yet tolerable in the spirit of forging national unity. It is also depicted as desirable but sometimes painful. It is politicised. However, genuine truth is depicted as necessary to engendering lasting reconciliation while reconciliation itself is predicated on earned forgiveness.
INTRODUCTION
Hundreds of publications have appeared on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation project. More continue to appear.
Although most of these publications are from non-literary optics, the contributions from the literary artists have also been bewildering, especially in the genres of drama and fiction.
Indeed, the connection between South African literature of post-apartheid era and the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been underscored by Shane Graham in a 2003 article entitled ‘The Truth Commission and Post-Apartheid Literature in South Africa’.
In it, Shane gives a panoramic view of how the TRC has influenced post-apartheid South African literature. He amplifies this later on in his book South African Literature after the Truth Commission: Mapping Loss, where the TRC is not only viewed as ‘a massive national project’ (2009:3) but one with serious implications for cultural productions.
Other critics such as Geoffrey Davis (2000), Salomi Louw (2004), Andre Brink (2005) and Dorothy Driver (2006) have also expressed similar sentiments.
In fact, Brink adds that the project should be ‘extended, complicated and intensified’ (30) in literature in order for South Africa to come to terms with her past. All these point to the impact of the TRC on the emergent post-apartheid literature.
The play is described in the blurb as ‘a story of two brothers, of sibling rivalry, of exile, of memory and reconciliation, of the perplexities of freedom’. The issue of truth is also foregrounded in the work, as signified by its title Nothing but the Truth.
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