Stochastic collocational reading of "the truth and reconciliation commission"

Archbishop Desmond Tutu passed away on 26 December 2021. I was a school kid in the 80's and the anti-apartheid movement was one of the prominent issues of that era. I was starting college when Nelson Mandela was freed in 1990 that started the formal process of dismantling apartheid. Tutu was, amongst other celebrated roles, the chair of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). My understanding during that time was that TRC was a good thing. The TRC was part of the transitional justice process for moving to a formal democracy.

“Transitional justice,” an umbrella term coined in the early 1990s, describes a wide range of mechanisms and institutions – some local,some international – that deal with the past in the aftermath of a conflict or a time of repression." (Welz, 2021: 257).

Bill Louw (2005: 1) charged the TRC as a:

"fake institution 'invented' by the First world for the Third world to 'live' out."

He does this by what he calls a stochastic collocational reading of the term "the truth and reconciliation commission".

Louw (2005) demonstrates this in four steps, entering the two word sequences below as searches in the Bank of English corpus:

1. the truth

2. truth and

3. and reconciliation

4. reconciliation commission

For each search 200 (when available) concordance lines were examined and a collocational profile was produced. The collocational stats were simple counts. The table below shows the profile of collocation for "the truth":

Step 1 Collocational Profile

Louw (2005: 26) highlights "It is worth noting that the repeatable event associated with the+truth ineluctably involves telling the truth."

By comparison the collocational profile for "truth and" gives:

Step 2 Collocational Profile

And Louw (2005: 28) points out "Tell and its lemmas are, of course, still within the collocative window, but notice what has happened: between them, the lemmas of tell can now only equal, rather than surpass, the frequency of a new apparent interloper: reconciliation."

To further support the suspicious dominance of "reconciliation" Louw (2005: 31) shows in a corpus from 1985 (i.e. before the TRC) "that truth and reconciliation are utterly unrelated collocationally".

Step 3 is seen by Louw as a key point because here a positive prosody (which are much rarer than negative prosodies) is used. In describing the profile below of "and reconciliation":

Step 3 Collocational Profile

Louw (2005: 38) notes the large frequency of "forgiveness", and that "there is a sense that the victims are getting some form of reward." This is borne out by Marjorie Jobson, the National Director of the Khulumani Support group:

"Jobson believes that the TRC was never about the victims and its main purpose was to organise amnesty. Jobson complains that the dismal reality of reparations is “not what the victims were [originally] told, and [it’s] not what the world sees”. (Yates, 2018)

For the final Step 4 of "reconciliation commission" Louw (2005: 40-41) declares:

"The search for reconciliation+commission can almost be dispensed with. The TRC is resident in the corpus with so little variation that we may safely omit the list of collocates. The TRC is homogeneous, just as its architects planned. The damage has been done. The product now has to be given the seal of authority. Waiver is somehow fundamentally noble and has to be enshrined as a Commission! Of course, waiver has, by now, been cleverly equated with healing and forgiveness as part of the plan to manipulate the operation of everyone’s prior knowledge."

Louw (2005: 41) concludes:

"The need to write this paper might have been averted if the architects of the TRC had called their Commission by some other name. Spin doctors invent names every day. There would have been no fraud in calling it the New Dawn Commission or the Sunrise Commission. This paper had to be written because TRC, as a title, purports to offer the illusion of process and of precedent."

References

Louw, B. (2005). Dressing up waiver: a stochastic collocational reading of "the Truth and Reconcilitation Commission (TRC)". Retrieved from http://amsacta.unibo.it/1142/.

Welz, M. (2021). Africa Since Decolonization: The History and Politics of a Diverse Continent. Cambridge University Press.

Yates, A. (2018, September 5). Justice Delayed: The TRC Recommendations 20 Years Later. Daily Maverick. Retrieved from https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2018-09-05-justice-delayed-the-trc-recommendations-20-years-later/