Even the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s fiercest critics cannot wish to claim that we have learned nothing from its exercises and their aftermaths – even if the lessons have not been particularly edifying ones.
The truth commission’s report and the ongoing hearings of its amnesty committee have not, of course, reconciled us with one another and with our past. They have not ”healed” us, so that what was once a society at war with itself is now a hopeful and harmonious whole. The discordant notes sounded by participants in last week’s parliamentary debate on the matter are evidence enough of that.
No, what the truth commission has done is to teach us something about ourselves which we are usually and understandably reluctant to recognise. It has shown us that, if we are indeed political animals as Aristotle said we were, then we are a pretty grubby and disgusting species of animal; that the pages of our political history are grimy and stained and that we have soiled ourselves in that endless pursuit of power which is basically what politics has come to be about.
Interestingly, the commission has done this as much because of its weaknesses as because of its strengths, as much by reason of the moral outrage many of its decisions have provoked as by its efforts to be fair, as much by the evidence it did not hear, the facts it failed to uncover, as by the criminalities its investigations brought to light.
Take the amnesty committee’s (perfectly legal) decision to grant amnesty to the self- confessed police killer and torturer, Jeff Benzien, whom I had the dubious privilege of observing at the commission’s headquarters as he mouthed his confession of the treatments he had meted out to young activists in the 1980s and implored them to shake his pudgy hand: he is now free of any threat of criminal or civil prosecution, free to drink what is left of his life away or to seek what solace psychiatrists or populist religious sects can offer him.
And we, the authors of his freedom, who voted into power the politicians who did the deals and passed the legislation that made the whole thing possible, must share in his degradation. For it is we who, with a tired shrug and, perhaps, a helpless sigh, get on with the dreary lives we hope will be the quieter for this betrayal of natural justice. It is we who, rather than facing up to the difficulties and dangers of putting Benzien and his ilk in prison where they belong, chose to pollute the purity of our hopes for post-apartheid South Africa in the interests of a cowardly compromise. That is the self- image the truth commission holds up to us.
But there are others – some of them certainly less culpable than Benzien – who were not amnestied or exonerated by the commission, simply because what they did or failed to do escaped its scrutiny.
One such is Anthony Hazlet Heard, personal assistant to Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry Kader Asmal and a former editor of the Cape Times. I was employed by this newspaper, under Heard’s editorship, when I was detained and subsequently tried and imprisoned as punishment for my part in the African National Congress and South African Communist Party’s combined underground resistance to the apartheid regime.
On November 22 1976, shortly after I had been sentenced to six years’ imprisonment, the Cape Times published an editorial distancing itself in no uncertain terms from me and my actions.
”In terms of the law of the land,” said the editorial, ”his actions were stupid and dangerous. Professionally, they were reprehensible, for Holiday betrayed the trust placed in him in a profession that has high standards, long traditions and heavy responsibilities.
”This newspaper obviously did not know that he was operating on two levels, nor was there anything in his reporting and analysis to suggest this. His original detention was a shock, and his subsequent incarceration for two months incommunicado and without charge was, and remains, obnoxious. But the law has belatedly taken its course, and the Cape Times can only concur with the conviction and the judge’s remarks – incidentally including those regarding as yet unproved allegations of assault on Mr Holiday.
”From the professional point of view, for a journalist to be pamphleteering clandestinely for a communist organisation abroad which seeks violent confrontation in South Africa, and at the same time writing for a newspaper which is firmly committed to anti-Marxist and non-violent answers, must seriously compromise his position and the faith that has been placed in him by colleagues.”
Heard’s present employers might be interested to know that the editorial – which as editor he must have approved, even if he did not actually write it himself – goes on to express ”special contempt” for those whom it says ”from the safety of other shores, and enjoying the considerable comfort of Kremlin expense accounts, have cynically exploited the emotions of young and intelligent people in present-day South Africa and in the process have sent them to personal ruin and tipped this country closer to conflagration”.
Let us be clear. I do not mention this matter in order to suggest that Heard and Benzien belong in the same category. They do not. The latter is someone whom, in more usual circumstances, would be judged to be a bestial criminal. The former is a decent, hard-working family man, trying to make his way in the snakes-and-ladders game careerists are compelled to play.
Yet there are connections nonetheless. Benzien confessed to the truth commission, sought to ”reconcile” himself with his former victims and gained immunity from prosecution in return. Heard made no such confession, ”reconciled” himself with people he would formerly have condemned as beneficiaries of ”Kremlin expense accounts” and received gainful employment in return.
The acts and omissions of both men are characterised by a certain veniality. They typify what the political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, called ”the banality of evil”. Both Benzien and Heard probably did what they did because they felt a need to ”get on with the job”, to silence with the routines of their work what they might otherwise have recognised as disturbances of conscience. Apartheid’s survival depended on this sort of littleness.
Dr Anthony Holiday teaches philosophy in the University of the Western Cape’s School of Government