AfriForum Want to Close the Book on History — and the People It Dispossessed

AfriForum’s request to the Khampepe Commission to investigate ANC leaders for “acts of terror” during apartheid cannot be taken at face value. Behind the legal phrasing plays out a well-worn drama of denial, projection, and historical role reversal. The move drags unresolved memories of apartheid back into the present — guilt that was never faced, fear of losing symbolic power, and the persistent urge to recast white history as morally clean.

Under apartheid, white South Africans lived inside an ideological cocoon. Daily brutality was seen yet disavowed — evident in segregated spaces, forced removals, cheap labour and state violence, then shrouded in theological and civilisational justifications. The white subject was positioned as virtuous and under siege, defending “order” from an imagined enemy. This identity depended on keeping the truth of their own violence either unconscious or buried beneath moral explanations.

The transition unsettled this structure without truly dismantling it. The TRC offered a limited space for confession, but without real consequences. Many white South Africans experienced it as a negotiated settlement that left their self-image intact. The fantasy endured: resistance was criminal, apartheid was defensive, and white morality remained sacrosanct.

AfriForum’s intervention gives these buried narratives a contemporary stage. The call to prosecute ANC leaders functions as a mirror turned outward, redirecting historical culpability onto those who resisted. The weight of apartheid’s crimes is split off and projected onto the liberation movement, which is then cast as the true aggressor.

Kallie Kriel’s language exposes the deeper wound. His insistence on “equality before the law” and “closing the book on the past” emerges from a place struggling with the loss of moral authority. Whiteness, long positioned at the centre of national judgment, now faces its own historical exposure. The call for symmetrical justice between apartheid and the liberation struggle works as a shield against that shift. If everyone is equally culpable, the singular weight of apartheid is softened, and the fantasy of innocence remains untouched.

This pattern is familiar. Fanon wrote of how colonial identity relies on dominance to hold itself together. When that dominance slips, anxiety surges. The push to prosecute liberation fighters reflects a need to reclaim control over the national story. Whiteness, long accustomed to issuing judgments, resists standing in the dock.

The focus on individual ANC operatives instead of the apartheid machinery shifts attention away from the architects and beneficiaries of structural violence. Select incidents are elevated to obscure the scale of dispossession, forced removals, assassinations and state killings. Structural crimes are reduced to scattered anecdotes, allowing those who benefitted from the system to sidestep their own accountability.

This defensive manoeuvre also reveals an identity crisis. As the legitimacy of whiteness continues to erode, there is a scramble to restore a sense of coherence and moral standing. Demanding prosecutions of ANC figures becomes a way to place whiteness back at the centre of the national narrative — not to confront history, but to dictate its terms.

History, however, always resurfaces. Repressed truths return in altered forms, often with an edge of aggression. AfriForum’s submission represents such a return: legal language carrying the weight of unresolved history. What appears as principle is shaped by the refusal to face historical responsibility. This turns into an unstable and dangerous projection onto the Black collective — a disavowal that seeks to wipe the slate clean, perhaps through the fantasy of a cleansing violence. The desire to be unburdened of guilt is not passive; it carries within it the potential to rationalise brutality. Such projections cannot be diagnosed into submission or managed through polite discourse. They must be identified, named, and excised by those they target, for only then can the cycle of displacement and inversion be broken.

Reconciliation depends on far more than symbolic acknowledgement. It demands structural redress, the return of stolen land, reparative justice, and material restitution to those who were brutalised and dispossessed. Anything less entrenches the very inequalities that AfriForum seeks to obscure. Their submission is not simply a gesture of denial; it is a political act aimed at blocking the path to genuine repair. Closing the book on history without repairing its wounds leaves the power relations of the past untouched, allowing projection to fester and re-emerge in more dangerous forms.

* Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, poet, and uncompromising social justice activist. Founder of Media for Justice and co-owner of handHeld Films, she is recognised for hard-hitting documentaries and incisive opinion pieces that dismantle whiteness, neoliberal capitalism, and imperial power.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.