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SAIS Review 20.2 (2000) 241-249



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Review Essay

Democracy in a Land of Resentment

John-Paul Ferguson

Historical Lessons

Reconciliation through Truth: A Reckoning of Apartheid's Criminal Governance, by Kader Asmal, Louise Asmal, and Ronald Suresh Roberts. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1997. 231 pp. $17.95.

Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa, by Antjie Krog. New York, NY: Times Books, 1999. 382 pp. $24.75.

Coming to Terms: South Africa's Search for Truth, by Martin Meredith. New York, NY: Public Affairs, 1999. 370 pp. $27.

The burning of a body on an open fire takes seven hours. Whilst that happened, we were drinking and braaing (barbecuing) next to the fire. I tell this not to hurt the family, but to show you the callousness with which we did things in those days. The fleshier parts of the body take longer...that's why we frequently had to turn the buttocks and thighs of [the informer]...by the morning, we raked through the ashes to see that no piece of bone or teeth was left. Then we all went our own ways. (From the TRC testimony of Dirk Coetzee, quoted in Coming to Terms)

When South Africa held its first democratic elections in 1994, everyone knew that the country had taken only the first of many steps. Every side in the struggle had committed gross violations of human rights. In addition to stealing land and votes from the black majority and denying them access to jobs, the National Party (NP) government had detained without trial, tortured, and killed untold thousands of its own citizens; the victims were of all races, but mostly black. The African National Congress (ANC) had killed white [End Page 241] civilians during the liberation struggle, and groups of young "comrades," nominally under ANC control, had dealt vicious justice to their political opponents in the black townships. Under the slogan of "One Settler, One Bullet," the black racialist Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) 1 had machine-gunned white bars and churches. And Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) had fought a miniature civil war with the United Democratic Front (UDF) 2 in KwaZulu-Natal.

In a country bleeding from so many wounds, where was one to start bandaging? In a unique "post-amble" to the 1994 Constitution, the negotiators of the transition acknowledged the need for "South Africa to transcend the divisions and strife of the past, which had generated such gross violations of human rights, the transgression of humanitarian principles in violent conflicts, and a legacy of hatred, fear, guilt, and revenge." 3 That same post-amble laid the foundations for South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In the name of "reconciliation and reconstruction," the drafters empowered the new parliament to draft a law defining the necessary "mechanisms, criteria and procedures, including tribunals" for granting amnesty for "acts, omissions and offences associated with political objectives and committed in the course of the conflicts of the past." The South African government would attempt to enshrine forgiveness, not retribution, in its new corpus of law.

This all sounds noble. The polysyllabic words, though, disguise the real task. The question of how one forgives crimes committed in the past, including torture, may be difficult enough for society to answer. Individual South Africans, however, face questions far more personal and traumatic: How does a woman forgive the police officer who forced a live rat into her vagina? How does a man forgive the police officer who first smothered him with a wet sack, then electrocuted him with a metal pipe shoved up his rectum? How does a white father forgive the black guerilla who shot his teenage daughter while she sat next to him in a restaurant? This is the kind of forgiveness that, through the TRC, the South African government hoped to achieve. The Commission's designers, the commissioners, and the witnesses were left to decide if forgiveness was truly possible, and how they could achieve it.

Three early studies of the Truth...

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