The worldwide interest in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has generated a vast literature in political science, psychology, philosophy, and conflict resolution. So far, however, few full-length ethnographic studies of the TRC’s work have been published. Fiona Ross’s Bearing Witness begins to correct this imbalance in a finely grained and humane account of women’s experiences during apartheid and of their “testimony” during the TRC’s “victim hearings.” The chance to offer testimony at these hearings was supposed to give apartheid victims an opportunity to “set the record straight” about the historical facts of apartheid. It was also meant to help them (re)claim a “voice” they were presumed to have lost through their violation. This voice was supposed to emerge through a particular kind of testimony about the gross violation of human rights. And it was supposed to “empower” victims, psychologically, socially, and politically.

In this ethnography, however, Ross critiques “conventional ways of attending to suffering and recovery” (p. 1) and argues that the TRC’s “grammar of pain, couched in terms of violations of human rights, permitted the expression of certain kinds of experience while eliding others” (p. 1). Building on the growing recognition that human rights discourse is unable to express the many forms of human suffering, Ross provides a useful case study of how the “testimonial practices” (p. 27) promoted by the TRC were particularly unsuited for expressing the experiences of women during apartheid.

Her fieldwork was conducted with women who had not only suffered in various ways from apartheid’s violence but had also been politically active in their own community’s (Zwelethemba) long resistance to apartheid. Like all lives under apartheid, the lives of these women were complex, composed of “layers of experiences” (p. 42), and cut through with both the “everyday” and the more spectacular forms of violence and suffering. And their stories spoke as much, if not more, about resilience and overcoming as about victimization. At the TRC, however, these women were transformed into victims of physical harm, especially, of sexual violence. In the process, the TRC “elided [the] political activism” (p. 93) of these women and the social character of their suffering, concentrating instead on moments of passive individual violation.

Ross examines the constitution of the category “woman” as a particular kind of passive and sexually vulnerable subject at the TRC, unpacks the form and content of women’s testimonies at the TRC, and highlights how the TRC was unable to provide an adequate vehicle of expression for the experiences of this group of politically active women. Particularly effective in bringing together these many themes is the chapter in which Ross examines how the complex experiences during apartheid of one specific woman were told and retold, packaged and reinterpreted over a three-year period by the TRC, by journalists, by academics, and by members of her own community. In the process, Ross demonstrates vividly that “testimonies do not exist intact, awaiting an opportunity for expression, but emerge from interactions shaped by… race, class, gender and conventions of speech” (p. 162).

Ross’s account of how women narrated their experiences, both at the TRC and in their own community, offers a much-needed ethnographic rendering of the promises and pitfalls of “transitional justice” mechanisms like the TRC. She argues persuasively that the historical account of apartheid produced by the TRC was limited in its ability to express and account for women’s experiences and that the TRC, in its narrow focus on individual, physical forms of harm, “effaced certain of power’s historical dimensions” (p. 16). There is a further question, however, that lingers at the edges of her account, a question about the relationship between this kind of testimony and power in its present-day dimensions. Why, for example, has this brand of testimony, so evidently insufficient to express women’s experiences—or any person’s experiences, for that matter—become such a widely popular form of postconflict intervention? In her epilogue, Ross advocates for the development of “a new language of social suffering” (p. 165) that would more adequately express women’s experiences. Developing this more appropriate and expansive model, however, will first depend on explaining, in terms of the dynamics of power in the present, why the “inadequate” model has proven so persistent. Any answer to this question, though, must start in the same ground that Ross has so carefully explored here—women’s lived experiences (and ever-changing expressions) of the violation, resilience, struggle, suffering, and recovery that continue to shape and reshape their lives.