Conditional Tense by Antjie Krog

Conditional Tense: Memory and Vocabulary after the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

cw: racism, apartheid, politics, institutional prejudice; also the whole thing a white english middle class poet summarising/commenting on legacies of colonialism,

Regular readers will know that a) I spent a week and a half in South Africa in the Summer and that b) whenever I visit anywhere with English language local publishing and/or book stores, I return to wherever I happen to be “living” (“living” as in location where I regularly sleep, not “living” as in having a meaningful life) with a bag bulging with intriguing (or not) new books to read. Conditional Tense – a 2013 book (or collection of essays?) written (and sometimes co-written) by Antjie Krog and published in a fucking beautiful hardback edition by Seagull Books – is an example of one of these books.

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I purchased Conditional Tense from an absolutely horrible Cape Town book store, one filled with condescending staff so fucking rude that had it not been for the fact that one of the books I was already holding in my hand/s (as I began to interact with the store’s bad manager/arrogant owner/self-important employee) was an extremely rare and long out of print James Baldwin text – A Rap on Race – that retails online for ~100USD and was here mispriced at around five, I would have put everything down and left the store. I didn’t do that, though, and while I do feel bad for giving a terribly run bookstore money (you should know if you have a fucking rare James Baldwin! (and you shouldn’t be a dick to clients, but that’s less disgraceful)), I did come away with several books I would never have picked up in any other circumstances – even that Baldwin, for example, is usually priced so high that it stands above even my much-higher-than-average book-buying budget. I didn’t have a good experience buying them, but I did come out with good books, so maybe it wasn’t such a bad bookshop after all?

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Conditional Tense, then, is a book by a poet, journalist and academic, a Boomer/early Gen X Afrikaner (though essentially a progressive, anti-apartheid one, though one with a “family farm” they feel an emotional attachment to) who was one of the many people who worked on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in the 1990s.

Krog, in a team with many others, helped to ensure the testimonies provided to the commission – which ran simultaneously in multiple different sites across South Africa and in multiple different languages – were recorded, translated, distributed and published while it was live.

If you don’t know much about South Africa’s TRC, it is both simple to describe in a sentence but complex to understand on any serious level (and I’m not claiming I have done the latter): it was a commission set up by South Africa’s first democratic government to look into, document and – crucially – use as a platform for beginning to heal from, the decades of the extreme institutionalised racism of apartheid and the increasingly violent ways in which it was maintained and – in the last throes – fought against.

The TRC, which was led by Desmond Tutu, explored and catalogued crimes against humanity, it detailed torture and murder and sexual assault and cruelty and systemic oppression. It asked people to admit to the heinous acts they had committed personally or ordered others to commit, they took testimonies from victims of torture and abuse, they took testimonies from the grieving survivors of those who were murdered and those who were disappeared, and they granted amnesty to the perpetrators of any and all acts when they were freely admitted to.

So, a person could detail publicly the war crimes they had committed, and then they could walk out of the hearing room with none of their material or legal freedoms removed.

There was no jail time ordered, there were no fines, there was no restitution or compensation and there was no punishment: there was merely the (successful) search for truth, with the belief that the only way to move forward, to find – Tutu’s preferred term – “ubuntu” (sort of translates to “togetherness”) in the “rainbow nation” (a phrase Tutu popularised) was to ensure everything that happened in the past was exposed, but with a firm line drawn underneath it.

We will not punish, was the idea, we will not perpetuate the cycle of violence and punishment, we will end it here and we will move on and we will reconcile the oppressor with the oppressed, we will choose to forgive (though not forget) and we will build a future based not on vengeance or score settling, but on consensus building, on forward movement, on mutual gain and on hope.

That was the idea, anyway.

Yet one does not have to spend long in (or reading about) South Africa to see that there remain systemic differences between the economic, political and socioeconomic opportunities afforded to the white minority and those available to almost everyone else.

It is not hard to see how the decision to not do any kind of wealth/property redistribution was arrived at; it’s something the democratic government could never have done without enraging the capitalist orthodoxy of the international community, who I think got a lot out of being able to claim the anti-racist credentials of opposing apartheid.

Yet, the people who live in poverty now were the people who lived in poverty under apartheid.

Had the promise of economic redistribution been part of the ANC’s (Nelson Mandela’s party) global pitch prior to government, maybe they wouldn’t have been able to forge a democracy with international backing… What is important to remember is that South Africa’s significant political shifts of the 1990s were not a revolution, they were a series of significant reforms, with laws and policies and procedures enacted through the existing legal, political and economic frameworks.

This difference, between revolution and reformation, is a key and meaningful one, and language and meaning and intention and result form the core focus of this significant book.

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Krog explores what happens when things are simultaneously transcribed and translated, then edited for broadcast or published in full or excerpted and sent to newspapers, and how meaning was often lost or obscured due to the speed and volume of all the many testimonies of the TRC… A particular problem looked at is how meaning is missed due to an absence of context afforded by translators and transcribers and editors and interpreters being from different places, backgrounds and cultures to those who spoke.

South Africa has numerous official languages and many distinct cultures within that…

An expert linguist, for example, is not necessarily an expert in the culture of the languages they can understand…

Someone who is, though, who is transcribing thousands and thousands of emotionally fraught words in a day may well mishear, miswrite or even not be able to keep up with words being spoken, and may miss things this way, too.

What Krog and her cowriters do here is focus on particular testimonies, and discuss the ways in which the sound and video recordings that exist differ from the publicly available published, “official” transcripts, focusing in great detail and looking at how missed or misheard or even mistyped syllables can shift meaning.

With the advantage of having the time to drill down, Krog et al are able to find and elevate emotional, political and personal truths that were previously somewhat garbled. Occasionally this can come across as a little patronising (e.g. – I’m paraphrasing – “this grieving mother said she was under a rock after her son was killed in politically motivated racist violence… but what if she didn’t mean literally and it was instead a metaphor for grief and/or powerlessness?”), but rare moments like this aside, there is a reverence and a respect afforded to those who testified which is something only all that extra time would be able to facilitate…

Could this be done for everyone who spoke at the TRC? Should it be? These questions are beyond the scope of the book, and of my ignorant blog, but they do bear thinking about…

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This post is already way too long and its composition has already stretched across numerous distracted commutes. I need to wrap it up before I accidentally imply that I think I know what I’m talking about. I know I don’t.

Krog’s book, then, continues to focus on language and the subtleties of meaning rendered by translation and transposition in the context of post-apartheid South Africa, and though it is in the chapters offering in-depth analysis of speeches from the TRC it is its most powerful, throughout it is interesting and engaging.

Krog looks at a Dutch Tintin knock-off that included Nelson Mandela as a character and explores the pop-cultural legacy of this politician and how he as an idea functions as many metaphors; she looks at the work of Nobel laureate JM Coetzee; she explores an Afrikaner rock song that wasn’t explicitly racist but racists seemed to love; she discusses the differences between nomenclature in the TRC of two slightly different methods of vigilante execution by fire, “death by burning” and “necklacing”; she discusses politics and history and literature and culture and thought…

In here is commentary on visual art, comic books, film, music, speeches, novels, news broadcasts… Krog casts a wide media net, and has something interesting to say about all of these topics.

There are a variety of focuses, and all are tied to these avenues of thought and exploration that link and mesh, neatly. The book does unfortunately lack any kind of concluding chapter that focuses on the ideas of the book rather than on the ideas of the texts it is discussing, and though I did feel that was an oversight, I think this is likely me doing that thing (again!) where I read an academic text and then find the ways in which it conforms to normal standards of academic texts frustrating.

I don’t know lol.

I thought Conditional Tense was almost always interesting, and often deeply moving, so I have to say it’s a text that was – for me – an important and powerful read.

Highly recommended – if it sounds like something you might like, I reckon it probably is…

More details from the publisher here