TRC Final Report

Volume 1

Chapter 11

Part OtherDepts

Subsection 27

3 The work of the Department began with a series of workshops held during the first months of the Commission in the geographic areas covered by the Cape Town, Durban, East London and Johannesburg regional offices. These events brought together a range of community-based people, historians, journalists, human rights activists and others.

4 The purpose in each case was to identify gross violations of human rights that occurred in the area, moments of liberation and significant occasions of resistance – including events both well-known and documented, as well as lesser known events in danger of being lost to public memory.

5 The outcome of these workshops was the beginning of a national chronology and four regional chronologies.¹ These early workshops and chronologies provided a preliminary overview of the thirty-four years under review by the Commission.

6 The chronologies (often disparate in form and substantially developed as a result of statement taking, human rights violations hearings and amnesty applications) provided a framework for the information gathering work of the Commission, the corroboration and investigative phase of its work and the findings process.

■ RESEARCH THEMES

7 The early chronologies were carefully scrutinised and analysed in a joint workshop involving the Research Department and the Investigation Unit. This resulted in the preliminary identification of fourteen strategic research themes:

a Normative and moral questions, conceptual issues and causal/social analyses.

b The Commission in historical context (1960 – 1994).

c The development of the security establishment.

d The judiciary and the legal system.

e Imprisonment and detentions.

f The ‘homelands’.

g KwaZulu-Natal.

h Liberation movements.

i Opposition groupings inside South Africa.

j White right wing extremism in South Africa.

k Vigilantes.

l Gender concerns.

m Children and youth.

n The health sector.

8 These themes were researched on the basis of available material to provide a context within which the primary data of the Commission could be understood and interpreted, as information became available. The appropriateness of the themes was subsequently confirmed on the basis of primary data available to the Commission and, in some instances, adjustments were made to the themes.

9 Hypotheses were established largely on the basis of secondary material and the lived experience of the Commission, and the primary data were interrogated on the basis of the questions arising from these hypotheses. In the process, the questions asked of the database were often modified. This dialectical encounter between primary and secondary material provided an enriched understanding of the cases under scrutiny by the Commission.

10 The integrity of the Commission was dependent as much on its process or methodology as on its actual findings. Each of the statutory committees of the Commission (the Amnesty, Human Rights Violations and Reparation and Rehabilitation Committees) devised appropriate structures to promote their work. The Research Department sought to service the Commission at the levels of data gathering, the verification or corroboration of data and the findings process – which phases are outlined in the chapter on the methodology of the Commission. (See chapter on Methodology and Process)