Underlying the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was an ontological imperative. Reconciliation was not simply to be achieved through a process of catharsis through truth telling. More importantly, the TRC sought to provide a principle of commonality that would ground South Africans, despite their differences of culture, religion, language and race, as a people. In other words, reconciliation was not simply to be achieved by ‘help[ing] the nation both to deal with its painful past and to move on to a more democratic future’ (Gibson, 2004); it was to be achieved by determining the basis on which to found South Africans as a nation in the first place. We might recall Immanuel Wallerstein's famous question about India: ‘Does India exist?’ (Wallerstein, 1991). In a similar vein, we might say that the challenge of the TRC was to overcome the worry that the South African people did not actually exist.

Citizenship and its limits

Shortly after the transition from white minority rule, once the process of working out the constitutional and political arrangements for the new dispensation was completed, and the first democratic election was concluded, there was an urgent drive to define the basis for South Africa's unity as a people. On what grounds, in other words, were South Africans a single people? Nor was this question trifling: it cut to the heart of the political settlement.

Firstly, the idea that South Africans formed a people made it sensible to think about the time after apartheid as the time of a single, unitary state. Secondly, it was self-evident that the people of Namibia, say (or a citizen of any other country) were not South Africans. In other words, and inversely, South Africans were their own people seeking self-determination in their own state. South Africa belonged not to everyone, but to South Africans.