South Africans will on Friday mark a decade since the birth of its historic Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which exposed the brutal excesses of apartheid and for the first time gave mainly black victims a voice.
On December 16 1995, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and 16 human rights activists, lawyers and religious leaders who agreed to serve as commissioners gathered at his Cape Town home for the first meeting of the TRC, barely a year after South Africa emerged from 46 years of white supremacist rule.
”We are charged to unearth the truth of our dark past, to lay the ghosts of our past, so that they will not return to haunt us,” said Tutu, the TRC’s chairperson and already a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
”None of us had any idea of what was to follow,” said famed writer Antjie Krog, who covered the TRC as a journalist and later wrote Country of My Skull, a critically acclaimed account of her experiences.
The first hearing opened four months later in a slightly dilapidated city hall in the south-eastern port of East London, where the first witness to testify, Nohle Mohapi, told how her husband, Mapetla, a black consciousness activist, was taken into police custody in 1976. He was never seen alive again.
Tasked with investigating human rights abuses between 1960 and 1994, when apartheid officially ended, the commission heard the harrowing testimony of about 21 000 other victims and perpetrators.
The commission’s findings, including that white South Africans ”were badly let down by their leaders”, were handed over in seven hefty volumes to President Thabo Mbeki in March 2003.
Sea change
A decade after the launch of the TRC, many agree that its work marked a sea change in South Africa.
”We learnt a lot about ourselves and about our country,” said Mary Burton, one of the commissioners.
There were accounts of police brutality, torture and of loved ones gone missing, mainly militants from the African National Congress, which was banned up until 1990.
”It taught us that there is a real need to be vigilant to ensure that structures are in place to ensure that those things never happen again,” said Burton.
”I cannot see that we would have been where we are today, if we did not go through the TRC process,” said political commentator Max du Preez, a former Afrikaans newspaper editor and one of the few white voices speaking out against apartheid.
”In terms of whites in South Africa — they saw the true face of apartheid, in other words those who knew and those who did not know about what had happened were confronted and they had to look it in the eye,” he said.
Flaws
But the TRC was not without its own flaws.
Many of apartheid South Africa’s senior leaders, including former president PW Botha and military chief Magnus Malan, refused to testify, thumbing their noses at the process that was dismissed by some whites as the ”Kleenex commission” for the tears that the testimonies drew.
But these leaders never faced prosecution even though the TRC had vowed to put those who declined to take part in the process before the courts.
”It’s a shame that these people have never been prosecuted and it may be getting too late to do so,” added Du Preez.
Another bone of contention is the small amount that victims finally received in compensation, prompting ”disappointment and victims feeling let down by the process”, said Burton.
But all agree that at the end of a harrowing process, which saw people as diverse as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the flamboyant ex-wife of former president Nelson Mandela, and apartheid killer Eugene ”Prime Evil” de Kock appear on the same stage, the TRC had achieved mostly what it had set out to do.
”It was the key to the stability and tolerance that we have in the country today. We are a stable democracy,” said Du Preez.
”Partly, we have Nelson Mandela to thank for that, but mainly also the TRC. It took the sting out of people’s anger and resentment,” he said. — Sapa-AFP