When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up in South Africa, two hundred people were expected to apply for amnesty. In the event, 7,700 applied. The ANC's applications included one from President-elect Thabo Mbeki as well as from four hundred MK members. The commission travelled the country listening to statements from victims and perpetrators. Covering it for South African Broadcasting Corporation was Antjie Krog. Her book charts the progress of the commission. Through its pages walk the voiceless people of South Africa, many, now dead, brought to life again by grieving mothers and fathers, comrades and colleagues.
A woman asks for the hand of her husband to be returned to her for burial. Someone had seen his body, minus the hand, being disposed of. The daughters of Bram Fischer, the Afrikaans lawyer who managed to save Nelson Mandela from being executed but who himself ended up on Robben Island, asked for his ashes to be returned to them: the police took them away after his cremation.
Krog weeps but notes that the black journalists rarely do. "We are used to all this," they remind her. A woman tells of how the police made her lean over a desk so that her bare breasts fell into an open drawer. Then they repeatedly slammed it shut. Men tell of being sodomised by their captors. On Robben Island, criminals were invited by the guards to rape the political prisoners. Bodies were disposed of by braiing (bar becueing), though the security forces finally started burying people instead because it was quicker: it could take eight hours for body fat to melt, and you had to keep turning the body. Victims ask the commission to help them locate graves, uncover bones, identify killers. They break down, cry, apologise. "However hard it is," Archbishop Tutu tells them, "we carry on." And they do.
The perpetrators explain why they acted as they did. Some are sorry. Some only appear to be. The healing process continues. A man blinded by the police says that today, knowing that someone is listening, he feels he can see. A white woman whose daughter was killed in a shooting tells how she had to treat her daughter's black killers when they were brought to her hospital in Cape Town. She forgives them.
Krog and her colleagues continue their reporting, working a polyglot miracle of broadcasting, indispensable in a country with eleven official languages, where some cannot read let alone afford to buy a newspaper, and where a radio is the only contact with the world beyond the township or the boss's farm.
The court lawyers, mainly white, grow rich, confidently and carelessly mispronouncing their black clients' names. Big corporations state that they never prospered under apartheid. Archbishop Tutu listens, admonishes, encourages, and prays.
The journalists develop coping strategies: when the victims' voices become too hard to bear, start checking your recording levels. They squabble among themselves. Krog rows with her husband. Yet she comes up a survivor, tempering the hearings with humour. As Chair, Archbishop Tutu has to have a bodyguard. When he retires as Archbishop of Cape Town, his brother bishops hold a farewell service, processing down the aisle in front of him in their purple robes. And right behind Tutu, solemnly in step, comes the bodyguard, his holster bulging under the unfamiliar purple cassock.
Krog is deliciously assiduous, poking about in drawers and desks when no one is looking, hanging out with politicians, cosying up to philosophers and intellectuals - to anyone who will discuss with her the many faces of truth. Her book is a must-read, says Archbishop Tutu, so that's got to be true.
Mary Russell is a writer who has worked and travelled in South Africa
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