Strange Courtesies San Jose Stagte Company (March 2021 ) Fiction Taylor, Jane. Ubu and the Truth Commission. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2007. Wicomb, Zoe. 2006. Playing in the Light Slovo, Gillian 2000. Red Dust. Virago Flanery, Patrick. Absolution. Poetry Some of Ingrid de Kok's poetry in Terrestrial Things (2002) deals with the TRC (e.g. "The Archbishop Chairs the First Session", "The Transcriber Speaks", "The Sound Engineer"). Criticisms A 1998 study by South Africa's Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation & the Khulumani Support Group, which surveyed several hundred victims of human rights abuse during the Apartheid era, found that most felt that the TRC had failed to achieve reconciliation between the black and white communities. Most believed that justice was a prerequisite for reconciliation rather than an alternative to it, and that the TRC had been weighted in favour of the perpetrators of abuse. As a result of the TRC's shortcomings and the unaddressed injuries of many victims, victims' groups, together with NGOs and lawyers, took various TRC-related matters to South African and US courts in the early 2000s. Another dilemma facing the TRC was how to do justice to the testimonials of those witnesses for whom translation was necessary. It was believed that, with the great discrepancy between the emotions of the witnesses and those translating them, much of the impact was lost in interlingual rendition. A briefly tried solution was to have the translators mimic the witnesses' emotions, but this proved disastrous and was quickly scrapped. While former president F. W. de Klerk appeared before the commission and reiterated his apology for the suffering caused by apartheid, many black South Africans were angered at amnesty being granted for human rights abuses committed by the apartheid government; local reports at the time noted that his failure to accept that the former NP government's policies had given security forces a "licence to kill" - evidenced to him personally in different ways - drove the chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu almost to tears. The BBC described such criticisms as stemming from a "basic misunderstanding" about the TRC's mandate, which was to uncover the truth about past abuse, using amnesty as a mechanism, rather than to punish past crimes. Critics of the TRC dispute this, saying that their position is not a misunderstanding but a rejection of the TRC's mandate. Among the highest-profile of these objections were the