ONE way of talking about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has been to use the language of learning and teaching. Those who delivered their testimonies were sometimes described as the teachers, or the Commission itself was described as a teaching machine; those who listened were the learners. In this understanding of testimony, listening and learning ideally bring about a transformation in the listener. The transformation, in turn, will lead to nation building through this collective exercise of learning and teaching. The book There was this Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile was published in 2009. In There was this Goat, we read an account of testimony as pedagogy, as formulated by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub in their influential book Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History:

This chapter explores who the beneficiaries are of teaching and learning: in the first place the learning and teaching of the TRC that is the subject of There was this Goat; but also the learning and teaching involved in the research project that became the book There was this Goat, a multilingual and multidisciplinary research project based at a South African University, the University of the Western Cape. The project has an autoethnographic component: we read not only the findings of the report but also the researchers’ individual and collective reflections on the nature of the knowledge contained in it. Discussing the book in this chapter, I highlight one theme in particular: who is to benefit from learning. In the case of the research project that means thinking about who will benefit from reading and from writing the book; and who will benefit from what listeners and readers can learn from the testimony of Mrs Konile.