Democracy has been with us for ten years now. Yet the ghosts of the past have not been laid to rest, at least not completely. It will take something other than simple conciliatory words from leaders to break the cycle of hatred. In addition to creating economic equality, the dialogue that was begun by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission must continue, so that we are able to forge and strengthen a spirit of compromise and tolerance in our society.
Listening to one another and acknowledging the experience of loss on both sides would be a start. The task of picking up the pieces of a society shattered by violence is not easy. It needs patience. Our humanity is strongest when we are focused on that which unites us as human beings: compassion, and an ethos of care for one another, rather than giving in to fear and suspicion.
My mother experienced some of the injustices of apartheid as she grew up in rural KwaZulu-Natal: her family lost their land; they witnessed the humiliation of her father, who had to seek work in faraway Gauteng; and she and my father were married in Cape Town in 1951, the year in which more than 70 oppressive laws were passed by the apartheid government. They endured every single one of those laws. My mother, and many black people I know, have every reason to remember those experiences with bitterness, and could harbour a desire for revenge. But they prefer to live without that burden.
Reconciliation cannot be condensed into a quick-fix project, one that has to take place within a prescribed space of time. It needs work, on a personal and public level. Perhaps the most enduring effects of totalitarian rule and the systematic oppression under apartheid cannot be measured in terms of numbers of the dead, but in immeasurable losses of the human spirit. That is what has to be restored.
How does this society restore its humane fabric in the aftermath of a horrific past? By understanding why some white people feel a sense of loss in the new South Africa; by understanding why the liberation movement was necessary, and why human rights abuses were committed in the process. By having a dialogue about why so many white people supported apartheid at a time when the international community was issuing calls for its dismantling.
Was the refusal to take a stand against apartheid a reflection of an inherently evil characteristic among white voters? Did the majority of whites fail to apply their best judgment because the effects of apartheid on the oppressed were not sufficiently understood, because of the effectiveness of the propaganda, or because of the psychological denial that so often occurs in totalitarian regimes?
How should present society judge white compatriots who, by virtue of supporting apartheid, were therefore its public face? Do we judge them with the same revulsion as we judge the system which they supported? Or do we reserve such judgment for the ‘evil’ ones who executed apartheid’s opponents? How do white people who supported apartheid reflect on the past? Do they acknowledge any wrongdoing? Are they remorseful? And when they acknowledge wrongdoing and show remorse, what should our response be? Should we reject their apology and continue to punish them with our hatred? Or should we extend our compassion, and invite them to journey with us on the road of moral humanity?
Ordinary people, under certain circumstances, are capable of far greater evil than we could have imagined. But so are we capable of far greater virtue than we might have thought. To restore the human spirit in our society, to open the door to the possibility of transformation, we must be led by the compassion that unites us as human beings. That road to regaining our humanity, the true freedom from the ‘bondage of fear’, that Alan Paton spoke about so prophetically in his book Cry the Beloved Country, we will reach only through consistent dialogue, with one another, about our pasts.
The woman in Los Angeles spoke the truth of her heart. It was a simple communication of what she felt. We reached out to each other and shared a common idiom of humanity as South Africans, regretting our past, wishing to mend it.
When I shared this story at an event hosted by Njabulo Ndebele, vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town, he used a metaphor that best captures how this dialogue can be understood: making public spaces intimate. It is in these small steps, in the small spaces where we are, that we will be able to make a difference in our relationships and in our society. The challenge is to have the courage to start. To acknowledge. If memory is used to rekindle old hatreds, it will lead us back to continuing hatred and conflict. But if memory is used to rebuild, or to begin new relationships, that is where hope lies.
6. What we can learn from Nieuwoudt and De Kock
ThisDay, 4 August 2004
When, in July 2004, Eugene de Kock, incarcerated former commander of the notorious apartheid-era police counter-insurgency unit stationed at Vlakplaas, testified at Gideon Nieuwoudt’s second amnesty hearing, he apologised for his own involvement in the Motherwell car bombing to the families of the four victims. By contrast, Nieuwoudt presented evidence that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, which may have affected his previous evidence. It occurred to me that the difference between the two perpetrators’ responses to the past holds the key to our nation’s healing.5
EUGENE DE KOCK and Gideon Nieuwoudt, at once different and similar, have again entered the public discourse. These two crusaders for the apartheid state both snuffed out the lives of those who fought, in ways violent and non-violent, to bring us the democracy that we so proudly embrace today. But there is something that we miss in portraying these two men as ‘exceptional’, as ‘rogues’.
They, like many who kept the apartheid government in power, believed in the political order of the day. Moreover, De Kock and Nieuwoudt were characteristic of the majority of white voters during the apartheid years. They may individually represent the ruthlessness of that deadly era, when state enemies were ‘removed from society’, but many white families during the apartheid years collectively participated in the conscription of their sons into the army to fight openly in the black townships the war that De Kock and Nieuwoudt were fighting in the shadows.
The apartheid laws might have been conceived and debated in political and religious corridors of power, but their implementation was not hidden from view; black people were openly pushed away from any semblance of a shot at equal opportunity. White people, with a few exceptions, were happy to maintain the status quo and to continue enjoying the privileges that De Kock and Nieuwoudt fought to protect. I bring this up not to evoke white guilt, but to remind ourselves that in order for our reconciliation agenda to be effective, and to heal the wounds of the past, we must recognise our collective role in it. The success of an evil political system like apartheid, like Nazism, like the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, does not reside in one or two individuals.
The cry ‘Never, and never again’ will have meaningful significance only when we begin to realise that we would probably have been just like any ordinary South African who knowingly or inadvertently supported apartheid, a system that was declared a crime against humanity by the international community – as bystanders, beneficiaries, collaborators, or morally culpable in some other way.
Good and evil exist in all of us. Portraying De Kock and his ilk as the villains who should ‘hang’ for the sins of the past allows us to believe that we are morally superior. But, sadly, reality does not allow that kind of fantasy. Denouncing the evil of apartheid and identifying its villains in 2004 is easy. It is a far cry from taking a stand against it in 1984.
During last month’s public drama of Nieuwoudt’s amnesty hearing, we were reminded again of the choices that people can or cannot make when they are confronting their role in the evil of the past. De Kock seems to have crossed the threshold of guilt. He has done what most of his comrades have been unwilling or unable to do and admitted that apartheid’s war, what he fought all his life, was wrong and a waste. He expressed a public apology to the families of the victims of the crime that is the subject of Nieuwoudt’s amnesty hearing, and evoked a deeply moving emotional response. This may only be symbolic, but this is where hope begins. This is the kind of public dialogue we need to move our country forward onto the road of healing and reconciliation.
Nieuwoudt, in contrast, has become tangled in a web of memory loss. Not only that, he has experts claiming that he is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is as if he is saying, as the psychologically damaged victim of the past,