When Memory Comes : Between...

“They unbuttoned my shirt and pulled my breast out of my bra, they emptied one drawer and my breast was squeezed in the drawer. They did this several times on each of the breasts up until white sticky stuff burst out of the nipples . . . I cried, but it was no use, because no one could hear me.”

What kind of man is it that can do this or can push an electrified rod up the anus of a teenage boy or can coldbloodedly kill an uncooperative detainee and then hold an all-night steak-and-beer barbecue while he and the other killers burn their victim’s body to ashes in a nearby fire? The details, if not the answers, are all there as I read page after page of the mesmerizing 3,500 pages of the official report of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

And then, finally, I break down on page 575 of Vol. 3. There on the page is the testimony of Deborah Matshoba. I remember Deborah well. It is 1976 and I am secretly shooting the first documentary about the Soweto uprisings. South Africa is in turmoil. Five hundred seventy-five people, mostly schoolchildren, have been shot dead in the streets by police and 2,380 have been wounded--and that’s just the official count. Deborah was a leader of one of the black consciousness student organizations owing allegiance to the philosophy of Steve Biko, himself to die a lonely and miserable death from brain injuries, naked, in a police cell a year later.

In her interview for the film, Deborah quietly explained what “the struggle” was about, what was the cost for opponents of the apartheid regime and how they--the student generation--would not give up until they had won freedom for their country. Deborah had just spent six weeks in detention. She was an attractive, slightly overweight young woman in her early 20s. The day after our secret chat for the cameras, she was arrested, and I never knew what happened to her.

Now I know. For here, as detailed in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, is what happened to Deborah. She was taken to a prison 300 miles away, where she spent 12 months in solitary confinement. She was given no explanation for her detention, and when she demanded to know why she had been detained she was severely tortured. “They held a braai (a barbecue) outside the police station. They manacled my ankle on a big iron ball. They made me stand the whole night. . . . The third night I started becoming delirious and my legs were swelling . . . this man started beating me up. He held a towel, strangled me with a towel and started bashing my head against the wall. . . . I could not sit down and when I collapsed they kicked me. Eventually I must have passed out. I was bleeding. I must have passed out because when I came to I was lying on the floor, all wet. They must have poured water over me and he threw a packet of sanitary pads at me. . . . The beating up lasted a week. I was asthmatic and they refused to give me medication.” After months of this treatment Deborah weighed just 95 pounds: “I had no hair, you know, my hair was just pulling out . . . you could just pick it out.”

Deborah was fortunate. She, at least, survived to tell her story more than 20 years later to the commission. Prominent attorney and longtime anti-apartheid activist Griffiths Mxenge did not. We now know, however, as much about what happened to Mxenge as we do of Deborah. In a chilling use of language, the commander of a police hit squad was instructed by his superior to “make a plan with Mxenge.” And what exactly was that? First, it involved obtaining strychnine for Mxenge’s dogs. A hit squad of four special policemen intercepted Mxenge in his car on his way home from work on Nov. 20, 1981. They dragged him from the vehicle and took him to a nearby cycling stadium, where they beat and stabbed him repeatedly. One of his assailants told the commission that “Mxenge had resisted his attackers fiercely until he was struck on the head with a wheel spanner. He fell to the ground, and the stabbing continued until he was dead. They disemboweled him and cut his throat and ears.”

That post-apartheid South Africa is a “miracle” is by now a commonplace. Just how miraculous that miracle was is confirmed by even a cursory glance through the pages of this extraordinary and indispensable document. It is a salutary and timely reminder of just how remarkable the transformation has been from the bad old days of apartheid, while at the same time confirming that however terrible one may have imagined those days to be, nothing could prepare one for the reality painstakingly described in such convincing and overwhelming detail in this report.

For that, more than anything else, is the truly extraordinary achievement of the unique experiment embodied by the commission, which sought nothing less than to effect a genuine reconciliation among those who had sought at the cost of much blood and treasure to destroy each other. It was a vast and hugely ambitious undertaking. In one sense it was always bound to fail. No amount of truth from whatever quarter could truly hope to effect total reconciliation in such a riven society. But that is to miss the point.

The commission itself eloquently summed up the society from which the “new” South Africa is emerging. For the vast majority of South Africans, human rights abuse was “for nearly half a century . . . the warp and weft of their experience . . . defining their privilege and their disadvantage, their poverty and their wealth, their public and their private lives and their very identity. . . . The system itself was evil, inhumane and degrading . . . amongst its many crimes, perhaps its greatest was the power to humiliate, to denigrate and to remove the self-confidence, self-esteem and dignity of its millions of victims. . . . Countless, nameless people had their rights trampled trying to save their homes from apartheid’s bulldozers. Hundreds died doing no more than demanding a decent education. . . . One did not need to be a political activist to become a victim of apartheid: It was sufficient to be black, alive, and seeking the basic necessities of life that whites took for granted and enjoyed by right.”

Against this, against recent examples of revenge and retribution elsewhere, the fact is that there have been no blood baths in post-apartheid South Africa, no acts of genocide, no officially or semiofficially sponsored acts of revenge. At the same time, though it is true that almost all of those who were responsible for gross abuses of human rights, whether from behind a desk or at the front line of such activity, go unpunished, no amount of war crimes trials, whatever their success or extent, would ever have achieved the degree of indisputable revelation--mostly from the mouths of the perpetrators themselves--of the grossest abuses of human rights on a scale affecting hundreds of thousands of civilians. As a result there will be no place in the decades and centuries ahead for the revisionist historian who might like to claim that apartheid was not so bad after all and that the killings, the maimings, the bombings, the foreign incursions, the torture, the mad schemes to poison water supplies of whole communities did not happen.

*

Created by statute shortly after Nelson Mandela’s election victory in South Africa’s first fully inclusive democratic election, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up to meet “the need for understanding, but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not retaliation.” It was assigned four tasks: to analyze and describe the causes, nature and extent of gross violations of human rights in the period 1960 to 1994; to make recommendations to the president on measures to prevent the same in the future; to aid the restoration of human and civil dignity of victims through providing a forum for testimony and recommendations for reparations; and to grant amnesty to persons who make full disclosure.

It was this last that perhaps created the greatest controversy, inducing the perception that the commission was making it possible for perpetrators to get off scot-free. In fact, once the ball started rolling, the commission received 7,700 applications for amnesty, which together provided, in intricate detail, as full a picture as it will ever be possible to create of the deepest workings of the abuses of individual rights throughout South African society. Would one ever have known with total certainty, for instance, that the teenage victims who complained of having their penises and testicles, or in the case of girls, their breasts, repeatedly slammed in drawers were not inventing their stories had not just this sort of thing been attested to by the very security men who had invented and perpetrated this ghastly torture?

Nonetheless, it is fair to ask whether it is just that the policemen should go free who tortured one man so grievously that he subsequently described himself as follows: “A part of my soul was eaten away as if by maggots . . . and I will never get it back again.”

Before it was wound up last year, the commission had received 21,296 statements involving 28,750 victims and 46,696 violations, of which 36,935 were deemed to be “gross”--in other words involving killings, torture, severe ill treatment and abduction. Though, not surprisingly, 90% of the victims were members of the black majority, and predominantly women, the greatest number of these on behalf of their dead men, the commission also provided a forum for the victims of anti-apartheid terror and members of the liberation movements who were tortured or killed by their own comrades. It also held special hearings into the events surrounding Winnie Mandela’s notorious Mandela United Football Club, in which she and her supporters were accused of a reign of terror and abuse in Soweto township outside of Johannesburg.

The commission’s investigations into 34 years of discrimination and abuse took place against an absolutely horrendous background of killings, torture, foreign invasion and, finally, a concerted attempt by those in power to cover their tracks by the mass destruction of literally tons of records. (In a six- to eight-month period in 1993, the National Intelligence Service alone destroyed approximately 44 tons of records, and in the same year the cabinet of Nobel Peace Prize winner F.W. de Klerk approved the destruction of all “state-sensitive” records.) As the commission puts it: “The story of apartheid is, amongst other things, the story of the elimination of thousands of voices that should have been part of the nation’s memory. The elimination of memory took place through censorship, confiscation of materials, bannings, incarceration, assassination and a range of related actions. . . . The tragedy is that the former government deliberately and systematically destroyed a huge body of state records and documentation in an attempt to remove incriminating evidence and thereby sanitize the history of oppressive rule.”

Inevitably, an exercise such as the commission’s raises the issue of what is “truth.” The commission deliberately chose to favor a non-forensic approach, introducing controversial concepts such as “personal and narrative truth,” and “healing and restorative truth” as well as “social truth.” As regards the first, the commission believed that it was building upon South Africa’s oral tradition. As the report puts it: “[B]y providing the environment in which victims could tell their own stories in their own languages, the commission not only helped to uncover existing facts about past abuses, but also assisted in the creation of a ‘narrative truth.’ In so doing, it also sought to contribute to the process of reconciliation by ensuring that the truth about the past included the validation of the individual subjective experiences of people who had previously been silenced or voiceless.” In the words of Antjie Krog, the Afrikaner poet and award-winning radio journalist who covered the commission, in so doing the commission “chose the road . . . of restoring memory and humanity.”

More controversially, the commission also relied on the novel concept of “social truth” as described by Albie Sachs, the South African jurist and writer, himself a victim of a parcel bomb while in exile in which he lost an eye and an arm and very nearly his life. Sachs talks of the distinction between what he calls “microscope truth,” i.e., the truth as required by law courts, and “dialogue truth.” The first, he said, “is factual, verifiable and can be documented and proved. ‘Dialogue truth,’ on the other hand, is social truth, the truth of experience that is established through interaction, discussion and debate.”

Finally, the commission talked of “healing and restorative truth.” Such truth, the commission asserted, was “the kind of truth that places facts and what they mean within the context of human relationships--both among citizens and between the state and its citizens. . . . It is in this context that the role of ‘acknowledgment’ must be emphasized. . . . Acknowledgment is an affirmation that a person’s pain is real and worthy of attention. It is thus central to the restoration of the dignity of victims.”

All of this variance from conventional views of “truth” and “subjectivity” has inevitably left the commission open to accusations of inaccuracy, distortion and partisanship. One critic has even castigated the commission as “Orwellian.” Certainly, many of its “findings” on individual culpability or on specific events would not withstand the scrutiny of a court of law. Already there are critics nit-picking over details: Did a lesser or greater number of people die in a specific horrific incident?--12,000 or more killings were left unexplained--and so on. These critics miss the point. The fact is that the commission may well have got some of its “truths” wrong, especially if one subscribes to the view of the devil being in the details, but fundamentally it has achieved more--far more--than a narrow and legalistic definition could ever have provided.

Not only have many of the far too numerous victims of apartheid been recognized and their experiences validated, not only have the victims of the African National Congress’ own abuses of human rights in its camps in Angola and Tanzania been given official recognition or the civilian victims of the Pan-Africanist Congress’ misguided land mine campaign in rural areas and the victims of the same organization’s attacks on innocent churchgoers been given the opportunity to tell their stories and to receive compensation, but the major elements of the state’s law of terror and abuse of law have been verifiably established.

*

Of its hundreds of findings on virtually every aspect of life, and in no particular order, the following stand out:

* The commission estimated that, between 1960 and 1990, about 80,000 people were held in prison without trial, of which 10,000 were women and 15,000 were children under the age of 18.

* The commission found numerous documented examples in which the police deliberately set out to provoke violence in order to kill black people indiscriminately. Perhaps most notorious of these were the so-called Trojan-horse killings, in which policemen would hide in disguised trucks near demonstrations before suddenly revealing themselves and opening fire at the same time into the crowd with live ammunition from semiautomatic weapons.

* During the 1980s under President P.W. Botha, the state moved from merely torturing (and thereby occasionally murdering) its opponents to a policy of extrajudicial killings. These are defined by the commission as assassination disguised to look like it was done by someone else, ambushes with a view to killing all the victims, entrapment killings and killing people after they were arrested.

The commission held that those responsible were the Security Branch of the Police, the chiefs of the Defense Force and the National Intelligence service, and that all members of the cabinet were indirectly accountable.

* The commission proved that the South African government trained and directed hit squads of supporters of the Zulu-based Inkhata Freedom Party during the worst periods of so-called black-on-black violence, both in the Johannesburg region and also in Kwazulu Natal. Thousands of ordinary people were killed as a result of this violence.

* The commission noted that the liberation movements failed to control many of their supporters both inside and outside of the country, and as a result many gross violations of human rights occurred. These included the torture and killing of mutineers and alleged informers in ANC camps in Angola and Tanzania, the barbaric practice of necklacing opponents (placing a car tire filled with gasoline around a person’s neck and then setting it alight) and attacks on civilians with bombs, land mines and AK-47s.

* The commission obtained the following admission from former Minister Leon Wessels, rare in its eloquence and sincerity and certainly unprecedented from any other member of a government accused of gross abuses of human rights: “I am now more than convinced that apartheid was a terrible mistake that blighted our land. South Africans did not listen to the laughing and the crying of each other. I am sorry that I had been so hard of hearing for so long.”

The commission’s huge report deserves the widest possible readership. For the issues of injustice and revenge and reconciliation, the deep wounds that history inflicts upon us all that make healing all but impossible, are issues that transcend the specific circumstances of the South African experience. Admittedly, its several thousand pages make it likely, alas, that only the most determined readers will take up the challenge.

Far easier to digest, although naturally less comprehensive, is Krog’s rather curious, but nonetheless compelling, meditation on her time covering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for South African radio. Not surprisingly, Krog concentrates on the commission’s public hearings, when verbal testimony was presented around the country, rather than on the far more substantial work performed behind the scenes by the commissioners themselves together with their researchers, investigation teams and statement takers. “Week after week, from one faceless building to another, from one Godforsaken town to another, the arteries of our past blew their own peculiar rhythm, tone, and image. . . . Week after week, voice after voice, account after account. It is not so much the death and the names of the dead, but the web of infinite sorrow woven around them. It keeps on coming and coming. A wide, barren, disconsolate landscape where the horizon keeps on dropping away.”

When she is not a reporter, Krog is a much-published poet, and it shows. In one quite wonderful passage, she transcribes and then analyzes the testimony of a humble shepherd describing the night his life was turned upside down forever:

“On that day

it was at night

a person arrived and he knocked.

When I answered, the door just opened

and I said, ‘Who’s knocking so terribly?’

He answered, he said ‘Police.’ ”

Krog is on strongest ground when she is using her considerable descriptive powers to chronicle her impressions of the victims and perpetrators whose evidence she witnessed. Less convincing are the passages in which she indulges herself in fictional dialogues with a nonexistent lover. She is also less than convincing on her own guilt as an Afrikaner.

For those who do not have the stomach or the tenacity to take on the thousands of pages of the full report, Krog’s book is nonetheless no bad substitute. More than anything, she highlights the extraordinary role of the commission’s irrepressible chairman, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. There can be no question that Tutu’s personality, beliefs and humor were all that stood between the commission’s success and its failure. Perhaps he himself summed it up best when he pleaded with Winnie Mandela when she was at her most recalcitrant during the hearings into the reign of terror by her and her so-called football club, including torture, kidnapping and killing: “We need to demonstrate qualitatively that this new dispensation is different morally. We need to stand up to be counted for goodness, for truth, for compassion, and not kowtow to the powerful.”

On the one hand, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has told the story of the extremes. The story of the doctor who could amputate the leg of Zandisile Ntsomi, who had been shot by a policeman, and then the following day release him back into police custody. Or the story of the torture of the Rev. Frank Chikane (the general secretary of the South African Council of Churches and a leading member of the black section of the Apostolic Faith Mission), which took place under the supervision of an elder in the white section of the same church, who then went off to worship. More important, it has told of how “people who considered themselves ordinary, decent and God-fearing found themselves turning a blind eye to a system which impoverished, oppressed and violated the lives of their fellow citizens.”

Tutu, his fellow commissioners, their staff, the victims who testified either in public or to the many statement takers and the perpetrators who came forward to shed light on the dark days of South Africa’s past have created something truly special in history and, undoubtedly, one of the most important documents of this century. Will it achieve its object of reconciliation of a nation suffering from post-traumatic stress? Of course not. Has it contributed to a feeling that South Africa is a society that will attempt to deal openly with the wounds of its past and thereby avoid the debilitating long-term avoidance syndrome and amnesia of postwar Germany, say? Certainly. In a sense, South Africans of all races and political persuasions are free to get on with the business of living again. It is true that nothing has been solved, that institutional racial imbalances are still endemic, that many white farmers still treat their nonwhite labor force quite appallingly, that the heights of capital are still largely dominated by the same people who dominated apartheid South Africa--but there is a confidence in the air, a feeling that South Africa has much to teach the world as well as to learn from it, and this is not merely because of the unique place in international affection reserved for its first democratic president, now in retirement, but also because of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

A mother whose son was shot dead by the police said this to the commission: “What we are hoping for when we embrace the notion of reconciliation is that we restore the humanity to those who were perpetrators. We do not want to return evil by another evil.” And then there is this from a man blinded by being shot in the face by the police. “Now I feel like I got my sight back by coming here and telling my story.” This is what the commission meant when it talked of “restorative justice,” and let those who carp at the commission’s “violation of the basic principles of due process” forever bear it in mind.