National Reconciliation and its performative limitations: John Boorman's in My Country and Fanta Regina Nacro's Night of Truth.(Critical essay)

Introduction:

Reconciliation--A Very Different Final Solution

After living under an apartheid government since 1948, on May 10, 1994, South Africa witnessed the presidential inauguration of political prisoner and human rights activist Nelson Mandela, officially ending an era characterized by racially-motivated atrocities and human rights abuses. (1) As a means of beginning to contend with the weight of the nation's violent past, and looking forward to a future in which citizens, formerly divided as black and white, victims and perpetrators, would be united, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established in July 1995 when President Mandela signed into law the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act. (2) Presided over by Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the TRC and its ambitions were strongly informed by Christian notions of reconciliation, confession, guilt and forgiveness. Given the prominent role that theological discourse has traditionally played in the nation's political matters, and that the "vast majority of South Africans are church members for whom Christianity is the most important ideological frame of reference", the Commission's institutional basis in Christian virtues is unsurprising. (3) What does seem surprising, however, is the TRC's advocacy of a discourse of reconciliation and forgiveness in response to a historical period characterized by extreme and divisive violence. As a means of achieving such national unification, the TRC sought to bring together the perpetrators and victims of apartheid violence in hopes that, ideally, the perpetrators would repent for their acts and the victims would offer forgiveness, thus leading to reconciliation between individuals and ultimately for the nation at large. (4)

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Cristobal Krusen's Final Solution (United States, 2001) deals extensively with these issues of reconciliation and forgiveness in South Africa in the late- and post-apartheid period. Produced by the Christian production agency Messenger Films, the title Final Solution invokes the National Socialist plan to engage in systematic genocide as the "Final Solution to the European Jewish Question." (5) Krusen's film initially conforms to the genocidal implications of its title, applying it to the intentions of Gerrit Wolfaardt (Jan Ellis), an Afrikaner white supremacist in South Africa at the end of the apartheid period, whose "solution" to the growing racial tensions between the white minority and black majority is the systematic extermination of the latter. However, Final Solution goes further than simply extracting the "Final Solution" from its spatiality and temporality in mid-20th century Europe. The film ultimately inverts the murderous intent of the "Final Solution" after Wolfaardt meets his future wife, Celeste (Liezel van der Merwe) and the Rev. Peter Lekota (John Kani), through whom he abandons his hate-filled intentions. After this "conversion" of sorts, Wolfaardt becomes a staunch advocate of racial reconciliation as a "final solution" that fully conforms to the goals set forth by the TRC. While this about-face attracts seething anger from Moses Moremi (Mpho Lovinga), a black man that Wolfaardt had previously beaten nearly to death during a violent raid, the optimism adopted by Final Solution towards the possibility of transformation from genocidal hatred to compassionate reconciliation is manifest in the protagonist's ability to overcome his hatred, and is alluded to in the film's tagline, "Hate was the Problem ... Forgiveness was the answer."

However, as Richard A. Wilson notes, the version of restorative justice that was repeatedly invoked by national political figures and the TRC was at dissonant odds with widespread popular understandings of retribution and punishment as appropriate judicial responses to apartheid. (6) As such, it is clear that the TRC's mandate of reconciliation through forgiveness, optimistically advocated in Final Solution, was far from wholeheartedly accepted by the South African population at large. Such dissonance suggests practical limitations to a theoretically utopian ideal that seeks the unification of a heterogeneous population that invariably comprises countless conflicting opinions regarding the goals of the TRC and its understanding of what South Africa should "be" (reconciled and unified).

In My Country (United Kingdom, John Boorman, 2004) and Night of Truth (La Nuit de la Verite, Burkina Faso, Fanta Regina Nacro, 2004) both approach this challenge in distinct ways. Both represent the goals of reconciliation as challenged by individual discrepancies over the viability of reconciliation as a mode of collectively confronting traumatic histories that had very concrete impacts upon individuals. In My Country is more critical of the idealistic possibilities of the TRC's approach to reconciliation, portraying this reconciliation as a viable solution on a level of abstraction, but ultimately unsatisfactory in terms of its unifying potential for actual individual persons. Night of Truth also portrays the challenges that a traumatic past poses to national reconciliation, but ultimately offers an alternate solution whereby the divisive past and a hopeful, united future are brought together in a site of memory (lieu de memoire) that suggests reconciliation can only truly be achieved when efforts are made to keep the traumatic past in the sight of the present, rather than attempting to simply "forgive and forget." (7)