The Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Business and Apartheid: A Critical Evaluation

Unlike truth commissions elsewhere, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) investigated the role of business in its exploration of the past. In so doing, it moved beyond its brief to examine gross human rights violations by individuals acting with political motives. The TRC found that some sectors of business were more involved with the apartheid regime than others, but that most businesses were culpable by virtue of having benefited from operating in a racially structured environment. Whereas apartheid agents were granted amnesty in return for full disclosure and encouraged to seek reconciliation with their victims, the TRC proposed that wealth taxes be considered as appropriate restitution with regard to business. The TRC thus shifted from a focus on individual perpetrators, to a systematic analysis that equated any profitable activity with prospering under apartheid and drew a link between benefiting from the system and moral culpability for it. This systemic approach directed attention away from those whose involvement with the apartheid regime was of graver moral concern than that of others, and took the heat off wealthy individuals who, by virtue of personal contacts and financial muscle, might have been able to effect change faster had they acted more decisively.