A new post-conflict chapter characterized not by bigotry but by national unity is being written in South Africa. Playing a key role in the rewriting, representation, and remembering of the past is the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission which, in 1996, started the process of officially documenting human rights violations during the years 1960-1993. This nation-building discourse of reconciliation, endorsed by both the present government and South Africa's ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), has been a crucial agent of a new collective memory after the trauma of apartheid. But the confession of apartheid crimes proved beneficial mostly for perpetrators in search of amnesty rather than a genuine interest in a rehabilitated society. Thus, the amnesty system did very little to advance reconciliation. It is for these reasons that the South African TRC was cynically regarded by its critics as a fiasco, a "Kleenex commission" that turned human suffering into theatrical spectacle watched all over the world. There is, in fact, little that is "new" or "post" in a country that retains apartheid features of inequity. What is often overlooked in this prematurely celebratory language of reconciliation is South Africa's interregnum moment. Caught between two worlds, South Africans are confronted with Antonio Gramsci's conundrum that can be specifically applied to the people of this region: an old order that is dying and not yet dead and a new order that has been conceived but not yet born. And in this interregnum, Gramsci argues, "a great variety of morbid symptoms appear" (276). Terms like "new South Africa" and "rainbow nation," popularized by former president F.W. de Klerk and Desmond Tutu, the former chairperson of the TRC respectively, then, not only ignore the "morbid" aspects of South Africa's bloody road to democracy, but also inaccurately suggest a break with the past. This supposed historical rupture belies the continuities of apartheid.
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