The Weaponised Witness in Apartheid's Political Trials: Shame, Terror, and Storytelling in the Waging of Lawfare

This study investigates the role of story in creating, maintaining, and researching political violence. It focuses on the lived experience of captured guerrillas and their defence teams in the political trials of apartheid-era South Africa, and in part draws on the researcher's experience (during the period 1987 to 1993) as an expert witness in these trials.

The exploration is multi-focused, addressing the role of male shame in political violence, the unique part played by expert witnesses in apartheid's terrorism trials, and the role of storytelling in this setting. Story is understood as not simply a passive tool, but as having the power to act. It is through this lens that the study examines some of the extant scholarship, showing how the power of story can drive research in ways that might benefit or warp it, and potentially negatively impact groups and individuals in society.

The thesis is comprised of an exegesis and a creative component, and employs a mixed-method approach of autoethnographic, textual analysis, and creative nonfiction methodologies. It asks how creative nonfiction methods might be used to generate knowledge regarding the density of human experience, and positions story as a method for conducting social enquiry. The use of language in the political trial, from confession to testimony to memoir, is examined with regard to, inter alia, power, truth, authenticity, and the 'rewriting' of the self.

The 'relational model' of Foster, Haupt, and de Beer presented in The Theatre of Violence: Narratives of Protagonists in the South African Conflict (2005), is put forward as one that addresses the static and siloed perspective of many others, and which allows for the dynamic complexities of multiple identities, power relations, and emotional and cultural experience, amongst other discussed constructs. The current exegesis offers a contribution to this model by exploring the role of shame and its relationship to humiliation, rage, the need for justice, and political violence. The textual material analysed in the exegesis highlights this contribution and builds on excerpts from interviews with guerrillas, trial evidence, and published memoirs.

The study presents a picture of terrorism trials as a seamless thread from the moment of the guerrilla's capture through to sentencing, in which the guerrilla is 'storied' by the partnership of interrogator, magistrate (who takes the guerrilla's confession), prosecutor, and judge. These trials constitute pieces of political theatre rather than justice-seeking endeavours, events in which 'lawfare' and storytelling take centre stage - including the counter-narratives put forward by expert witnesses to contest the state's narrative of the evil communist intent on destroying all good South Africans.

An extract from a work of creative nonfiction, The Guerrillas' Witness: A Psychologist at the Frontline of a Terror Trial, constitutes the creative component of this thesis. This work mobilises the memoir form to explore the links between male shame and political violence, and the role of the expert witness as weaponised storyteller in apartheid's terrorism trials, and to demonstrate the rich affordances and knowledge-making efficacy of the creative nonfiction method.