On Not Apologising: Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and the TRC Hearing into the Mandela United Football Club

This chapter examines the appearance of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela at South Africa’s Truth And Reconciliation Commission, and specifically her refusal to make a full apology to the victims of the actions of the Mandela United Football Club. The chapter makes two arguments. First, that there is an implicit gendered script apparent in the hearing, in the ways in which apology was demanded, as well as in the affective moves at work in Madikizela-Mandela’s testimony. The chapter argues that the strategy of discursive reattribution at work in her testimony placed responsibility fully on the apartheid state as well as on the patriarchal double standard by which Madikizela-Mandela was judged. Second, the chapter argues that reattribution rather than apology was an effective device for the intended audience for the apology. In standing her ground, Madikizela-Mandela became the figure around whom a narrative rupture of the reconciliation project coalesced. In resisting the demand to provide a narrative of culpability, Madikizela-Mandela disallowed the TRC’s own narrative of truth-telling and personal accountability. This stance illuminated the emerging fault lines in democratic South Africa, between those who accepted the terms of the transition and those for whom the TRC side-lined justice in favour of reconciliation.