Violent Accounts: Understanding the Psychology of Perpetrators through South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission

2. Apartheid and Amnesty: Managing a History of Sustained Oppression

28 > 29 destructive reprisals by the government security forces, with the violence on all sides escalating unabated. It is the testimony from these perpetrators—on all sides of this violent struggle—that forms the basis of this study. Thus, to provide the necessary context and detail for presenting a comprehensive psychological analysis of this testimony, this chapter reviews the history of apartheid, outlines the goals of the TRC, elaborates the procedures and difficulties of the Amnesty Committee that gathered the perpetrator testimony, and highlights several prominent cases. The chapter also discusses apartheid South Africa as a paradigmatic example of an oppressive government fighting an organized resistance, with generalizable patterns of influence that exist in other systemically repressive countries , past and present. The chapter begins with an overview of how apartheid came into being and how it was maintained for nearly half a century. A Brief History of Apartheid As World War II was ending in Europe, the Afrikaner leadership in South Africa directed its efforts to organizing and consolidating its political power within the National Party. (The term Afrikaner refers to the South African descendants of Dutch, German, and Huguenot settlers who came to South Africa beginning in the mid-seventeenth century and who speak the language Afrikaans.) At this time, the National Party began designing a policy of rigorous segregation, including the abolition of political representation for all nonwhites, the establishment of separate educational systems for whites and nonwhites, and the forceful regulation of labor, including the separation of migrant African workers from their families. While developing this policy, the leaders of the National Party chose to label their policy of segregation apartheid, literally meaning apartness—a word introduced into the national discussion of race by Afrikaner intellectuals in the 1930s. In the first postwar election in 1948, the National Party ran against the incumbent United Party on its newly developed policy of apartheid and managed to win a plurality of seats in the South African Parliament . As a result of the election, the National Party gained control of the South African government and maintained this control for nearly 30 > 31 person who is not a white person or a Bantu,” an Indian person was one whose family came from the Indian subcontinent, and an African or Bantu person was one who was “generally accepted as a member of any aboriginal race or tribe of Africa” (TRC 1999a, 30). The Group Areas Act specified the areas of the country for exclusive use by each of these four racial groups, demarcating the entire country into zones for each designated racial group.1 Effectively, the act enabled the apartheid government to evict nonwhites from their own property and to force them into undesirable areas that were less developed and more poorly serviced than the whites-only areas. Many nonwhite South Africans living in cities were deported from their neighborhoods to specific areas on the periphery of the cities known as townships, which soon swelled into overcrowded urban residential areas.2 In many cases, residents of the townships worked in the affluent whites-only areas during the day and returned to the townships only at night, forced by legal restrictions and economic necessity to abandon their families. Some of these townships became the sites for violent clashes with the state police, resulting in killings of unarmed residents—later investigated by the TRC, including Alexandra, Boipatong, Guguletu, Katlehong, Mamelodi, Sebokeng, and Sharpeville. Soweto was actually a group of townships.3 The designation of four racial groups (White, Colored, Indian, and African) became part of everyday life in South Africa and part of the common parlance of the country, with only the white minority able to participate fully in the electoral process. This division of humanity in South Africa was motivated by four ideological principles of apartheid policy: (1) the physical reality of distinct racial groups in South Africa; (2) the destiny of white people to maintain absolute control over the state; (3) the primacy of white interests, with no obligation to provide comparable facilities for “subordinate races”; and (4) a single nation of South Africa for white people only, with Africans assigned to smaller areas outside the larger nation of South Africa (Thompson 2000, 190). In tandem, the Population Registration Act and the Group Areas Act effectively segregated the entire country and forced nonwhites into crowded, underserved townships, as part of the larger system of separate and fragmented homelands. In keeping...