I bring this up not to evoke white guilt, but to remind ourselves that in order for our reconciliation agenda to be effective, and to heal the wounds of the past, we must recognise our collective role in it. The success of an evil political system like apartheid, like Nazism, like the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, does not reside in one or two individuals.
The cry ‘Never, and never again’ will have meaningful significance only when we begin to realise that we would probably have been just like any ordinary South African who knowingly or inadvertently supported apartheid, a system that was declared a crime against humanity by the international community – as bystanders, beneficiaries, collaborators, or morally culpable in some other way.
Good and evil exist in all of us. Portraying De Kock and his ilk as the villains who should ‘hang’ for the sins of the past allows us to believe that we are morally superior. But, sadly, reality does not allow that kind of fantasy. Denouncing the evil of apartheid and identifying its villains in 2004 is easy. It is a far cry from taking a stand against it in 1984.
During last month’s public drama of Nieuwoudt’s amnesty hearing, we were reminded again of the choices that people can or cannot make when they are confronting their role in the evil of the past. De Kock seems to have crossed the threshold of guilt. He has done what most of his comrades have been unwilling or unable to do and admitted that apartheid’s war, what he fought all his life, was wrong and a waste. He expressed a public apology to the families of the victims of the crime that is the subject of Nieuwoudt’s amnesty hearing, and evoked a deeply moving emotional response. This may only be symbolic, but this is where hope begins. This is the kind of public dialogue we need to move our country forward onto the road of healing and reconciliation.
Nieuwoudt, in contrast, has become tangled in a web of memory loss. Not only that, he has experts claiming that he is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is as if he is saying, as the psychologically damaged victim of the past, that he cannot be expected to account for it. The diagnosis of PTSD in cases of perpetrators who came before the TRC has become something of a growth industry, and Nieuwoudt’s claims of PTSD send a wrong message. The essential feature of PTSD is a life-threatening experience, or one that threatens one’s physical integrity. The fundamental element of the experience is that it overwhelms the senses, and evokes a response with the following main components: intense fear, helplessness and horror. For PTSD to be diagnosed, there must be a clearly identifiable life-threatening experience, commensurate with the response of fear, powerlessness and helplessness. I have not seen Nieuwoudt’s psychiatrist’s report, but based on what I know about Nieuwoudt’s role in the security forces, being in full control and inflicting harm and risking little or no danger to himself, I doubt that he could claim that he endured these cardinal features of PTSD.
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
