Measures like public education committees and youth and children’s units within truth commissions, casting witnesses as national educators, rethinking truth commission names, and country studies centres can better integrate education into transitional justice, writes Baba G. Jallow.
Transitional justice processes are quintessentially educational processes. They speak to a society’s right to know and its right to live in peace and dignity. They seek to generate knowledge on what happened, how it happened, why it happened, what its consequences are, and how best to prevent its recurrence in order to build a better and brighter future for the affected communities.
While integrating transitional justice outcomes into formal education is an ongoing process linked to institutional reforms, we can also stand that concept on its head and explore ways of integrating education into transitional justice in the meantime, starting with truth commissions.
In this piece, I suggest that creating public education committees within truth commissions, casting witnesses in the role of national educators, creating specialised youth and children’s units within commission secretariats, rethinking truth commission nomenclature, and establishing country studies centres are some ways in which we can strengthen the nexus between transitional justice and education in Africa.
Public Education Committees
Just as truth commissions have human rights, amnesty, gender and other dedicated committees and units, they would benefit from including a public education committee. This body could be included in commission secretariats to assist in public education activities. Public education committees would work out ways and means of educating the general public about their past, their present, their future and other important and relevant aspects of African cultures and traditions, norms and values.
A key objective would be to enlighten and empower all citizens on the causes and nature of the transitional justice process. Popular civic education and empowerment is one good way of preventing the recurrence of human rights violations and helping citizens hold their governments accountable.
One of the enablers of dictatorship in Africa is the anomaly between the perception of government as a God-ordained institution and the reality of government as a constitutional republic and leaders as public servants, not lords and masters of the people. A public education committee can usefully explain the differences between government in the nation-state system ushered in by the advent of political independence and precolonial and colonial notions of government as kingship which remain a key aspect of African political cultures.
A public education committee would collaborate with other relevant units of the commission secretariat in conducting sustained outreach activities aimed at popular empowerment and the popularisation of transitional justice goals and processes.
Witnesses as “National Teachers”
Truth commissions provide a platform for witnesses to speak about their experiences not only as witnesses testifying before the commission, but also as public educators sharing useful knowledge with the general public. Encouraging witnesses to see themselves as “national teachers” would have the effect of raising witnesses’ sense of personal dignity, self-esteem and healing. It would encourage witnesses to expand their thinking to include lessons in traditional justice, morality, norms, values and other aspects of their culture that may otherwise not have been articulated.
In conducting outreach activities outside of regular public or closed hearings, a commission may invite witnesses to serve as “national teachers” in its engagements with women and youth groups, and wider social communities.
Youth and Children’s Units
Truth commissions could create youth and children’s units whose principal work would be outreach activities to schools and communities across the country, with a view to educating school children and young adults on the transitional justice process. Equally important, they would provide an education on the society’s history and how young people might help prevent recurrence as key and energetic actors in the national body politic.
Youth and children’s units could also encourage young people and students to pay attention to the unfolding transitional justice process by attending public hearings, as appropriate, or hosting commissioners and staff as guest speakers on their campuses and communities. Youth and children’s units could collaborate with popular musicians and other categories of artists to popularise the transitional justice process and promote civic awareness and empowerment.
The Gambian Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission (TRRC) secretariat had a Youth and Children Unit that proved instrumental in getting children and young adults actively engaged with the country’s transitional justice process, as well as in popularising the idea of “never again” and the need to prevent recurrence of dictatorship and human rights violations. The unit was headed by a young college lecturer on secondment to the TRRC and staffed by Youth Empowerment Officers who were university students, poets and social activists.
When young members of a society realise that power rests in the hands of the people, it becomes difficult for governments to act with impunity and commit human rights violations.
Rethinking Commission Names
State officials and other transitional justice actors might consider rethinking or expanding truth commission nomenclature. While we can continue to call these institutions truth commissions, truth and reconciliation commissions, national dialogue commissions and other common names, it might help to explore the significance and benefits of using such truth-seeking process names as Knowledge and Growth Commission or National Education and Peace Commission.
The benefits of this change in nomenclature are many and varied. For one thing, they might be more attractive and less threatening to ordinary citizens. Secondly, a Knowledge and Growth Commission or National Education and Peace Commission would still have truth-seeking as its core operating principle while at the same time leading witnesses and the general public to see the transitional justice process as an opportunity for knowledge sharing, self-improvement and peacebuilding.
While implicitly recognising the existence of victims and perpetrators, such a change of nomenclature will cast the truth-seeking process in the mould of an important national conversation conducted for the benefit of an entire society.
Country Studies Institutes
Truth commissions and other transitional justice measures present an opportunity to establish country studies institutes or centres. A country studies institute would be a permanent institution, either independent or affiliated with a national university, that focuses solely on the study of that country’s history, society, politics, culture and religion, as well as specialised subjects such as leadership, transitional justice, peacebuilding, negotiation, conflict resolution and a host of other topics relevant to sustainable development. The University of Witwatersrand’s Centre for the Study of the United States is a useful example of such an institute.
These diverse proposals on public and youth education are practical and manageable changes that would deepen the impact of truth commissions in Africa. They may also be copied by transitional justice projects outside the continent.
Baba G. Jallow
Baba G. Jallow is former Executive Secretary of The Gambia’s Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission.