Alex Boraine: Architect of TRC, but then felt it failed SA 1931-2018
Former opposition MP played a leading role in initiating early talks with ANC in Lusaka and Dakar
● Alex Boraine, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 87, was one of the chief architects and deputy chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
TRC chairman Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu said Boraine’s administrative skills were crucial to the commission’s success.
The TRC began its hearings in April 1996 and presented its report in October 1998. It received international acclaim and was used as a model by other conflict-ridden countries.
But Boraine, whose proposal for a truth commission which he sent to president Nelson Mandela in 1994 set the process in motion, had serious reservations about its achievements, although he admitted its healing effects
He felt the TRC failed to uncover the full truth about the violations committed during apartheid, particularly by the security forces in the 1980s. The generals were “evasive and smart” and treated the TRC with “disdain and contempt”, he said.
He said the TRC did not secure even a minimal amount of justice for those who drew up the policies of apartheid that resulted in death squads, torture, detention without trial and assassinations.
Failed the victims
Because many of the incriminating documents were destroyed in the run-up to negotiations there was no paper trail linking senior politicians and generals to their crimes.
He said the TRC had failed to persuade the ANC government to grant swift and adequate reparations to the victims.
Although the TRC recommended that those who had refused to seek or been denied amnesty should be prosecuted, the government failed to follow up on cases the TRC referred to it, he said.
He thought the TRC’s demands for action against apartheid perpetrators should have been stronger.
Boraine was born in 1931 and raised in a housing estate for poor whites in Cape Town.
He left school after completing standard 8 without telling his parents and worked as a ledger clerk while they thought he was at school.
He became a lay preacher in the Methodist Church at 19, which turned his life around. He became a candidate minister at 20, serving in Pondoland East.
Went to Oxford
At 23 he went to Rhodes University in Grahamstown where he completed a BA degree in theology and biblical studies. Wealthy Methodists paid for him to go to Mansfield College, Oxford, where he got an MA. He was awarded a scholarship to Drew University in the US where he completed a PhD.
In 1970, at the age of 39, he became the youngest president of the Methodist Church. During his twoyear tenure he visited mining compounds, was appalled by what he saw and pulled no punches in his public criticism of the industry.
Anglo American boss Harry Oppenheimer invited him to join Anglo and put into practice his proposals on the reform of working and living conditions for mineworkers.
After two years at Anglo he was asked to stand for the Progressive Party in the 1974 elections and against all expectations won the Pinelands constituency by 34 votes. He swapped his Anglo Mercedes for a Volkswagen Beetle and went to parliament.
In 1985 he went to Lusaka with a Progressive Federal Party delegation including party leader Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert and spent several days with ANC leaders, notably Thabo Mbeki, discussing the possibility of a negotiated settlement.
The following year he and Slabbert quit parliament, which they believed had become irrelevant, and started the Institute for a Democratic Alternative for SA, which arranged meetings inside and outside the country between opposing political factions.
Meeting in Dakar
Their high point was leading a group of white Afrikaner and coloured intellectuals to meet the ANC in Dakar, Senegal, in 1987 to discuss a post-apartheid SA.
The event received massive press coverage internationally and in SA, where it inspired a furious backlash. Hundreds of armed and baying supporters of the far-right Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging met the delegation’s aircraft at the airport.
After the TRC Boraine was invited to develop a course on transitional justice in post-conflict societies on which he lectured at New York University law school and in Northern Ireland and Eastern Europe.
This led to the International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), which he set up in New York on the 54th floor of a building close to the World Trade Center. He was in his office on September 11 2001 when he saw the planes fly into the Twin Towers and watched people jumping to their death to escape the flames.
After running the ICTJ for three years he returned to SA and opened an office in Cape Town. As chairman of the organisation he travelled to conflictridden areas in Africa and around the world.
He became increasingly disillusioned about the situation in SA and in 2014 wrote a book, What’s Gone Wrong? On the Brink of a Failed State.
Boraine, who was in remission from cancer, is survived by Jenny, his wife of 60 years, and four children.