We have to ask: did Nieuwoudt suffer a life-threatening experience? Or is the truth too threatening to his Christian self, to his perception of himself as morally human? What the court may have to deal with in Nieuwoudt’s trial is a denial of memory rather than its loss. If he does show aberrant symptoms, the question has to be asked: are they symptoms of PTSD, or anxiety about the public shame and humiliation he has to endure? Are the truths he is forced to face about himself too threatening for him, so that he has to protect himself against internal rupture of his perception of himself as a moral human being, and undoing what he believed in for his entire life too frightening to confront?
The public behaviour of Nieuwoudt and De Kock represent two options in terms of how we may confront the past in our society. Let us make the choice that will uphold the vision of reconciliation and social change in our country.
7. The power of forgiveness
Mail & Guardian, 23 March 2005
In February 2005, I was one of five South Africans, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who were invited to address an international symposium on Restorative Justice and Peace in Colombia. Attended by more than 1 000 people, it was meant to be a threshold moment in the history of Colombia, which had experienced nearly 50 years of conflict.
CALI, THE THIRD-LARGEST city in Colombia, is set in a beautiful green valley, amid mountains that stretch as far as the eye can see. From a distance, it looks like a tropical paradise, with palm trees stretching into the sky, warm weather, and a refreshingly cool evening breeze. But beauty is not the reason why we are in Colombia. We are the first to arrive of a group of South Africans invited to speak at a conference on restorative justice and peace.
It is late evening. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, his assistant Dan Vaughn and I are being driven to our hotel, an hour’s drive from the airport. As we near the hotel, evidence of the tragic devastation suffered by ordinary Colombians unfolds before our eyes: shanty quarters flank the road, many of them built on top of each other, stretching for miles and covering the bottoms of the beautiful hills, their lights dotting the area and cascading down into the valley in what would otherwise have been a ‘prime location’, against the backdrop of the elegant mountainside that is typical of the Colombian landscape.
Colombians are tired of the cycles of violence that have dominated their lives and plunged them into the doldrums of poverty and fear. They want peace, and freedom from fear. That is why we were in Cali last month, five South Africans invited to address the first international conference on restorative justice and peace in Colombia: Albie Sachs, Tutu, Penuell Maduna, Tokyo Sexwale and I.6 One could say we were in Colombia as ambassadors of South Africa’s peaceful transition.
In my international travels and public lectures on forgiveness and dialogue, I have been amazed by how much South Africa continues to enjoy respect globally as the country that successfully carved out a unique approach to democratic transition, and created a new language for dealing with past conflict, the language of reconciliation.
No one epitomised the role that South Africa has come to play in countries emerging from conflict more than Tutu. When he spoke about hope as only he can, hope as something we can all touch, the audience in the full-to-capacity conference hall rose to its feet, applauded, and shouted cheers of excitement. The hunger for peace was palpable. It reminded me of the excitement and hope generated at once by the South African negotiation process, the 1994 elections, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). ‘We belong in a moral universe,’ Tutu said in his opening address. ‘There is no way in which evil can prevail.’ And to a standing ovation that reverberated throughout the huge hall and echoed far beyond, he concluded: ‘Ultimately, goodness, joy, laughter and peace will prevail – these are God’s gifts to you.’
All the South African speakers had one message for the Colombians: to tell the story of a country that was ravaged by years of violence, fear and anger, but sought dialogue instead of revenge. Sachs spoke about the importance of the South African constitution and ‘the honour of being the generation that broke the cycles of violence and domination’. He related his own encounter with Henri, the apartheid security policeman who tried to kill him, Henri’s quest to meet him to ask his forgiveness, and the first time he shook Henri’s hand after he had testified before the TRC. Sachs movingly described the process of creating a constitution that captures the essence of transformation, and explained why the Old Fort in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, was chosen to house the Constitutional Court.
‘The site of pain, the site of negativity, is the very site we chose to build a Constitutional Court that defends the rights of everyone. We took negative energy and turned it into something capable of creating beauty,’ he said, referring to the role of the Old Fort as a prison from the late 19th century until 1987, and the cycles of hatred that the building had come to embody over the decades. That these cycles of hate were broken, Sachs said, was owed to the ‘spirit of humanity, the sense of humanity that can be found anywhere in the world’.
The spirit of humanity was indeed present among Colombians themselves. Every Colombian we met could tell of family members who had been kidnapped or killed during a kidnapping, or the children of friends or neighbours who had been forced to join one of the parties involved in the Colombian war. There seemed to be some urgency among family members of victims of kidnappings to tell their stories; they wanted to speak to anyone who would hear their tales. Patricia, a young mother of two teenage sons, was among them.
If the wounded can be healers who can bring peace in a land torn by violence, Patricia, whose husband was kidnapped by members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, would be one. She was one of many voices calling for peace in Colombia: ‘I do not want these people who kidnapped my husband to go to jail,’ Patricia said through the simultaneous translation. ‘That will only lead to more violence; their children will revolt. All I want is for my husband to return to us, alive. If peace negotiations are not implemented, if this decades-old problem in Colombia is not resolved, I fear my children might become vengeful. I pray that this does not happen.’
Patricia had highlighted a well-known psychological consequence of trauma: how mutable the roles of victim and perpetrator are, and how easily cycles of violence are repeated and passed on intergenerationally, transforming victims into the embodiment of what they hate in the other.
At the end of a workshop I held at the conference on trauma and forgiveness, two women came up from behind and tapped me on my shoulder. One of the participants in the workshop immediately volunteered to act as translator between their Spanish and my English. The first woman wanted to talk about her husband who had been kidnapped three years previously. It was hard for her to mention his name; she hadn’t done so for a long time. The last time she had heard from her husband’s capturers was shortly after he was kidnapped. ‘Having your husband captured is the most unbearable thing that could happen to anyone. But there is nothing worse than not hearing from those who are keeping him captive,’ she said, her voice breaking.
The second woman’s two young sons had been kidnapped. She tried to describe how she had heard about the kidnapping of the younger, who was 10 at the time, but the more she tried, the harder it was for her to tell his story. She began to choke up, and as she tried to continue, she broke down in uncontrollable sobs.
Silence about one’s pain, I thought to myself, is a heavy burden that no one should carry. Earlier at the conference, Sexwale introduced Mpho Hani, who had been widowed when Chris Hani