There was this Goat — investigating the Truth Commission testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile by Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press)
On April 23 1996 Mrs Notrose Nobomvu Konile testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) about the death of her son, Zabonke.
Konile’s evidence was different from those of the other mothers whose sons were brutally murdered by the security police in Cape Town’s Gugulethu township on the morning of March 3 1986. While they spoke about what their children wore on the day and how they waited for them to come home, the interpretation of Konile’s isiXhosa testimony into English sounded incomprehensible and strange.
She spoke about a goat “looking up”, a bad dream and being pinned down by a rock.
Amid the “vivid and visceral” testimonies of other relatives of the Gugulethu Seven, Konile “seemed to have disappeared”.
The “strangeness” of her evidence was what inspired the three authors to walk back in the footsteps of Konile’s testimony and “figure out” what she meant when she gave her testimony.
The result is a gripping, meticulously researched work that provides some answers, but more importantly highlights the enormous challenges South Africans still face in understanding one another.
Antjie Krog is a poet and journalist (who had covered the TRC), Nosisi Mpolweni is a Xhosa linguist and Kopano Ratele is a psychologist. Together they have attempted to unpack and uncover the true meaning behind Konile’s words and symbols.
Not only did they uncover the flaws in the interpretation of Konile’s TRC testimony, but also discovered how the vastly diverse experiences and histories of South Africans continue to complicate understanding and the ability of South Africans to hear one another.
Together they have struggled to find a shared humanity, divorced from race, language and background.
In a chapter on how African people might have reacted to Konile’s evidence, Ratele writes: “To fully appreciate our [African people’s] words you have to understand a whole history of fear, hiding, running, evading and still try to maintain a sense of dignity and a life worth something.”
Further on the authors ask: “How do we ‘hear’ one another in a country where the past is still so present among us? How much of what we hear can we translate into finding ways of living together? How do we overcome a divided past in such a way that ‘The Other’ becomes ‘us’?”
The book is centred on Konile’s dream about a goat shortly before she was told about Zabonke’s death. In the official TRC records publicly available, her evidence about this episode was recorded as: “We went and came back from getting our pensions. I said oh! I had a very — a very scary period, there was this — there was this goat looking up, this one next to me said oh! Having a dream like that with a goat looking up is a very bad dream.”
Mpolweni went back to the original audio tapes of Konile’s testimony and made some significant discoveries.
In the official TRC transcripts Konile’s place of residence is indicated as “indistinct”. Mpolweni discovered that she said: “I am Mrs Konile from Indwe,” which is a small village close to Queenstown in the Eastern Cape.
“The discovery of the word ‘Indwe’ was a revelation,” writes Mpolweni. “It swung the whole testimony from the realm of the incomprehensible to the comprehensible and was the single biggest contributor to making the testimony coherent.”
The author also discovered an interpretative mistake in the goat episode. In her original evidence Konile referred to a dream about a goat and not an incident.
“Mrs Konile constantly interrupts her testimony by talking to herself in the way that rural storytellers do. Although these references may seem irrelevant, they are the markers that reflect pain and desperation, indicating the extent of loss and distress that she had to go through in the absence of her son.”
By re-examining Konile’s evidence, by considering her rural surroundings and culture and by interviewing her on her testimony and feelings about Zabonke’s death, the reader is left with a much clearer and more thorough understanding of her grief and the way she explained it to the TRC.
This prompted the question of whether the TRC process served any purpose for relatives of victims, such as Konile. During the authors’ interview with her, she says of her child’s murderer: “I ended up not forgiving him.”
The authors write: “As we worked together, we realised that the dominant discourse at the Truth Commission had no way of ‘hearing’ Mrs Konile.
“Her narrative defied all the elements that render narratives ‘audible’ within what we considered to be the dominant discursive framework operative at the hearings.”
But they conclude that from the changes they’ve noticed between Konile’s first testimony and the interview at her home in Indwe, it was those first TRC hearings “however slow and incomplete” that had “compelled Mrs Konile into processing her intense experience of loss — [She] could start to integrate the real facts of Zabonke’s killing into something that made sense to her own isolated, impoverished life in Indwe.”
There was this Goat is an extremely valuable addition to and expansion of the existing body of TRC literature. May there be more where this came from.