Antjie Krog’s book on the truth commission has been highly acclaimed. But, argues Claudia Braude, Krog is too creative with the truth
Fact, fiction or falsehood? The question is everywhere in reading poet and journalist Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull (Random House). It is the first book on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which was established to unpick apartheid’s lies. The National Party’s military might was accompanied by disinformation designed to rule hearts and minds. Liberties were brazenly taken with truth, on the assumption that what mattered was what people perceived to be true rather than truth itself.
The book’s celebratory acclaim is predictable. As the blurb reminds us, “reporting as Antjie Samuel, the author and her SABC radio team received the Pringle Award for excellence in journalism for their reporting on the TRC”, and Krog’s articles on the TRC in this newspaper won the Foreign Correspondents’ Award for outstanding journalism.
The reminder is important. Even while examining the media under apartheid, the TRC relied on media co-operation (including from journalists and editors amenable to winning hearts and minds for apartheid) to report its activities to the public. The book is significant not only as the journey to reconciliation by a prominent Afrikaans cultural figure, but as part of the production of the TRC story. Krog’s mediation of the TRC for public consumption needs to be assessed.
She allows fleeting glimpses into the story behind the story. We learn her radio team adapted “the full spectrum of hard news techniques” to make news headlines from victims’ testimonies. Providing two instances of manipulation in the newsroom, she hints at the media’s power to determine attitudes towards the TRC. Bulletin-writers and newsreaders refused to read “menstruation” or “penis”, or phrases like “they braaied my child on a fire”. A news producer changed the angle and consequently the meaning of Krog’s story on the TRC’s reparation policy.
More worrying than her failure to further illuminate how the media determine public opinion both then and now (the TRC’s special media hearing gets a scant paragraph’s mention) is Krog’s refusal to assist her audience to confidently differentiate between truth and falsehood. “I have told many lies in this book about the truth,” she says in a book confusingly littered with conversations that never occurred between people who don’t exist, including a partner in an extra- marital affair.
Krog hesitated before accepting publisher Stephen Johnson’s challenge to document her TRC experiences. “I initially said no, because when you tackle something as a writer rather than a journalist, you become a vulture,” she told Beeld. “Journalists are also vultures to a certain degree, but there are journalistic ethics. There’s also an editor who imposes this ethic on the journalist. It’s when one becomes creative that you reserve the right to do anything.”
Krog wasn’t exaggerating. Part of the book’s “creativity” lies in the liberties she takes with truth, presumably freed from (Samuel’s) journalistic ethical responsibilities by the switch to her (Krog’s) poet persona. (She and her publicists aren’t shy, however, to draw on Samuel’s credibility as TRC commentator.)
Krog’s technical assistant recognises her discomfort with truth: “Your voice tightens up when you approach the word `truth’. Repeat it twenty times so you become familiar with it. Truth is mos jou job!” he says. Instead, she resorts to plural “truths”, affirming different “versions” of and “perspectives” on the past.
“`Hey Antjie, this is not quite what happened at the workshop [for journalists covering the TRC],’ says Patrick. `Yes I know … I’m not reporting or keeping minutes. I’m telling …’ `But then you’re not busy with the truth!’ `I am busy with the truth … my truth … seen from my perspective, shaped by my state of mind at the time and now also by the audience.”
Beeld has her arguing that a significant accomplishment of the TRC is that it “created space for different versions of the truth”. This is an echo of the NP’s warning to the TRC of “the elusive nature of truth”. “Perceptions of what is true vary from time to time, from place to place and from party to party,” FW de Klerk argued in his party’s submission to the TRC. At best, Krog doesn’t distinguish her post-modern disbelief from De Klerk’s overtly political cynicism.
Despite her anger towards him, Krog represents the NP the way they represent themselves: as not knowing about the atrocities for which apartheid’s footsoldiers seek amnesty. Pondering De Klerk’s failure as “the Leader” she says: “Can’t he just say: `I didn’t know, but I will take responsibility’?” She is angry not that he denies authorising the acts, but for leaving those who acted in support of apartheid to fend for themselves. Promoting De Klerk’s denial of responsibility, she helps to decriminalise the NP.
She further diverts attention from apartheid’s criminality by associating the African National Congress with crime. Krog describes the ANC as “contemptuous of legality”. The book momentarily blames current crime on black anger. She quotes clinical psychologist Nomfundo Walaza: “When people say crime has increased in the townships, I say it could be expected. I’m sure it’s all due to a lot of pent-up anger that has been there for a long time.” Blacks, apparently, treat their rage at apartheid by perpetrating criminal acts against whites. The TRC, which deals with the hurt of the past, is immediately tainted. References elsewhere to the “Truth and Revenge Commission” are affirmed.
The pitfalls of Krog’s refusal to differentiate between true and false, fact and fiction, become clear. The strongest attempt to discredit the TRC by associating it with criminality provided an early instance of a growing number of contemporary disinformation campaigns. Dumisa Ntsebeza, head of the TRC’s investigation unit, was implicated by Bennet Sibaya in the Apla Heidelberg Tavern attack. Sibaya later admitted he’d lied.
Apparently unable to smell the rat, Krog argued on radio that not only must Ntsebeza be using his position to conceal his guilt, but that it indicated the possibility of other (presumably politically motivated) cover-ups within the TRC: “Haven’t we heard of this kind of investigating before? Doesn’t it smell like the past? Are we witnessing a cover-up? And… what else is being covered up?” Krog could perhaps be forgiven had she, in the book, critically reassessed her own role here in the light of Sibaya’s subsequent confession. Instead, she implicitly reneges on the apology she gave the commission. The non-existent lover has the final words on the subject: “What happened afterwards proved you right – and yet you apologised,” she has him say.
Krog’s assertion of her creative right to do anything in representing the TRC is naive or dishonest. Does she believe her credibility as a journalist doesn’t influence her readers’ reception of her interpretations of the TRC? Doesn’t she understand that irrespective of the veracity of what she writes, it will be perceived to be true by most of her readers? Do the responsibilities attached to shaping post-apartheid public opinion, in light of our history of disinformation, dissolve with the change of a name? How will Krog’s “perspective” affect local and international reception of the TRC’s soon-to-be-published final report?
What confidence should the public have in her capacity, as SABC parliamentary correspondent, to represent our complex political realities in an election year which, if the bizarre media events of the last couple of months (the Meiring report, McBride …) are anything to go by, will be fraught with manipulation of public opinion to achieve political results?