Speak Out on Poverty: Hearing, Inaudibility, and Citizenship in Post‐Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

In 1998, Speak Out on Poverty held hearings across South Africa shortly after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) completed eighteen months of highly publicized, nationwide hearings at which victims testified. Speak Out challenged the TRC's focus on overt political violations, seen to occlude forms of structural violence central to apartheid's policy and practice, as well as longer legacies of colonialism. Reading Speak Out alongside the TRC puts pressure on supposed differences between official truth commissions or tribunals and those run by civil society. Discussing Speak Out in relation to the TRC signaled more than a set of comparisons. In a time of transition, Speak Out spoke from within and against the noise of the TRC. It aimed to make poverty and inequality the nation's priority rather than reconciliation, or at least to challenge notions of reconciliation that did not have inequity and poverty at its center. This intention failed to come to fruition, and Speak Out seemed paradoxically inaudible in public debate. In exploring this conundrum, this article considers particular strategic and organizational choices by Speak Out. These shaped the discursive terrain of operations and subjectivities in ways that unintentionally enabled inaudibility and constrained the organizers' transformative intentions. [People's tribunals, South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, structural violence, Speak Out on Poverty, testimony]In 1998, after some fifteen months of highly publicized victim hearings convened by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), public hearings dubbed Speak Out on Poverty (hereafter Speak Out) took place. A coalition of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), together with rights institutions established by the first post-apartheid parliament, organized the hearings. Speak Out hearings convened in urban and rural areas across South Africa and spoke to what is seen as a "blind spot" in the TRC's mandate: its focus on overt political violations. Critics saw this focus as occluding forms of structural violence, which were central to apartheid's policy and practice, and colonialism's longer legacies.With political negotiations center stage in the early 1990s, behind-the-scenes local and international businesses brought much persuasion and pressure to bear on the post-apartheid economy (Terreblanche 2012). Further, negotiations coincided with the end of the Cold War and an ascendant neoliberal global order, narrowing South Africa's economic options. Thus, while negotiations decisively ended white minority rule, these negotiations were less successful in addressing effects of colonial and apartheid rule, notably poverty and inequality. Indeed, in 1993, a Gini coefficient of 0.593 located South Africa among the most inequitable countries in the world. 1 In 1994, the year of the first democratic elections, South Africa's Human Development Index (HDI) score was 0.699 (United Nations Development Programme 1994, 94). Disaggregated by race, the HDI fell to 0.462 for black Sou...