GHALEB CACHALIA | Unlikely allies resist TRC’s ghosts

It is not often that Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma find themselves in the same trench. Their presidencies seemed to speak entirely different political languages: one in the clipped cadences of policy memos and philosophical essays, the other in the idiom of struggle, loyalty and survival.

Yet here they are pushing back together against the implications of judge Sisi Khampepe’s renewed excavation of Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC) era ghosts.

One is tempted to imagine how Essop Pahad — Mbeki’s famously blunt lieutenant — might have handled the moment. There would have been little of the lyrical “I am an African” about it. No expansive ubuntu, no soaring reconciliation. Instead, this matter was dealt with, filed, archived, and best left there.

All of which is at odds with the University of Sussex, the alma mater of both Mbeki and the Pahad brothers — an institution that prides itself on “Constructive Debate, Radical Enquiry, Independent Thinking”. A far cry from “we have debated, we have inquired, we are now done”.

It is also a long way from the spirit of Desmond Tutu, whose tears became one of the defining images of the TRC. Those were not procedural tears. They were an acknowledgement that truth, when honestly confronted, is messy, destabilising and unfinished. In that sense the TRC was never meant to be a filing cabinet. It was meant to be a beginning.

Mbeki’s political identity has always been bound up with the idea of a rational, disciplined movement, a liberation project that could transition seamlessly into legitimate governance. Re-opening questions about abuses in exile camps introduces an unwelcome untidiness. It replaces a curated narrative with something more jagged, more contingent. And Mbeki, for all his intellectual range, has never had much patience for untidiness.

For both Mbeki and Zuma, that is less a legal inconvenience than a conceptual one. It raises the uncomfortable possibility that history is not something that can be definitively concluded but remains, stubbornly, open to re-interpretation

Zuma arrives at the same place by a quite different route. Where Mbeki represents the ANC as philosophy, Zuma represents it as lived experience, forged in the murkier world of intelligence structures and underground networks. His political universe has always been one in which loyalty and survival are intertwined, and where the line between necessity and excess is, at best, blurred.

In that world, re-opening the past is not an abstract exercise. It is an invitation to revisit a culture in which many “paid their dues” in ways that were never meant for public adjudication. The cloak-and-dagger business of struggle politics does not lend itself easily to retrospective moral clarity.

If Mbeki’s instinct is to preserve coherence, Zuma’s is to avoid exposure. And so they meet, improbably, at the same conclusion: that the past is best treated as settled.

This, ultimately, is the substance beneath the procedural skirmishing. The TRC was not just about truth; it was about drawing a line. It allowed South Africa to move forward without becoming trapped in an endless loop of accusation and counter-accusation. But it did so imperfectly, leaving behind fragments of silences that were, at the time, politically necessary.

Khampepe’s process threatens to disturb — not dramatically, perhaps, but enough to suggest that the past is not quite as closed as everyone had agreed to pretend.

For both Mbeki and Zuma, that is less a legal inconvenience than a conceptual one. It raises the uncomfortable possibility that history is not something that can be definitively concluded but remains, stubbornly, open to re-interpretation. Which is, one imagines, exactly what Sussex had in mind. The difficulty is that nations, unlike universities, do not always have the luxury of radical inquiry without consequence.

And so, when confronted with the prospect, even the most unlikely of bedfellows may decide that some debates are better left in the past. Khampepe, honourably, begs to differ.

• Cachalia, a businessperson and management consultant, is a former DA MP and shadow public enterprises minister, and chaired De Beers Namibia.