Jacob Dlamini (Princeton University): The Archive Machine: The Truth Commission and the Archaeology of Apartheid

Public lecture in the framework of the course Africa, Method, Theory, followed by refreshments

It has been 26 years since South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) delivered its final report to then-President Nelson Mandela, and 21 years since the TRC’s Amnesty Committee presented its findings to Mandela’s successor Thabo Mbeki. There has developed during that time a range of views about the commission, most of them critical. In my lecture, I aim to present the TRC as an archive machine, a device that sought (and succeeded more than its critics are prepared to acknowledge) to make possible new lines of historical inquiry, to set the conditions for the posing of new questions about the past, and to help many gain a better understanding of apartheid while imagining new futures. Building on Adam Sitze’s notion of the TRC as an impossible machine, I draw attention to the thinginess of the commission, to its status as a machine, a contrivance designed to produce certain effects. These effects include the tracks, the leads, the traces and the suspects whose actions, names and whereabouts the TRC flagged but about which it did or could little. The lecture, then, is a guarded defense of the TRC and its legacy.

Jacob Dlamini is Associate Professor of History at Princeton University. He is a historian of Africa, with an interest in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial African History. Dlamini obtained his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2012 and is also a graduate of Wits University in South Africa and Sussex University in England. He held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Barcelona, Spain, from November 2011 to April 2015, and was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University from August 2014 to May 2015. As a qualified field guide, he is also interested in comparative and global histories of conservation and national parks.

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