David Beresford
A LONG NIGHT’S DAMAGE: WORKING FOR THE APARTHEID STATE by Eugene de Kock as told to Jeremy Gordin (Contra Press, R89,95)
The temptation is to recommend this book as required reading in South Africa’s schools, offering as it does an awful warning to future generations as to the consequences when society allows the security forces to get out of control. But the temptation is resisted with the realisation that we do not want our children hurling themselves en masse out of classroom windows, under passing buses …
One sympathises with Jeremy Gordin, who co-wrote A Long Night’s Damage with Eugene de Kock and who must have been excited at the opportunity to probe the activities and mind of (hopefully) South Africa’s most evil individual. Alas, the book merely underlines Hannah Arendt’s observations as to the banality of evil and leaves one groping for the anti-depressants.
It is, as much as the endless litany of atrocity, the sheer humourlessness of these confessions which makes them so depressing. Not that one would wish for Van der Merwe jokes to leaven the horror. But only a man totally lacking in humour could be capable of interrupting an account of himself and his colleagues busy machine-gunning a mini-bus full of passengers with the observation that it was at this point “I realised something fishy was going on.”
The purpose of the book is seemingly to show that De Kock was not alone in his guilt, indeed that he was following orders. Or, as he puts it mordantly: “When dirty work had to be done they called for Eugene de Kock.” Clearly determined not to sink alone, he proceeds to name names in plenitude, culminating in a tired swipe at FW de Klerk on the basis of his membership of the State Security Council. De Kock has a point, of course. If there was any justice in the world he would not be the only one languishing in C-Max for the crimes of apartheid.
Unfortunately – and in spite of Gordin’s helpful quotations to the contrary from the Eichmann trial – when all is said and done there is a distinction to be drawn between those who pull the trigger and those who give the orders. Apart from anything else the reminiscences of the latter are likely to be more interesting.