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Trc

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TRC

Former NIA legal adviser says she cannot remember key TRC events as cross-examination sought

Advocate Howard Varney, representing victims from the Calata Group, has applied to cross-examine former National Intelligence Agency legal adviser Yvonne Mabule. Mabule…

  • Kenneth Kgwadi
3 min read
NPA

NPA 'dismally failed' – Advocate Matzke

Advocate Trish Matzke, testifying before the TRC Cases Inquiry in Johannesburg, reiterated her 2018 assertion that the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) has 'dismally failed'…

  • Kenneth Kgwadi
4 min read
Mirroring the past: At times, the actors in Under the Shade of a Tree I Sat and Wept step out of their roles entirely, debating the material they are performing, questioning its meaning or even its validity. It’s here that the play’s meta-theatrical dimension comes into focus. Photo: Thandile Zwebanzi
APARTHEID

What does it mean to forgive? A play asks, 30 years after the TRC

Drawing from archives and lived experience, the international production probes the emotional and political complexities of reconciliation in a fractured world

  • Kibo Ngowi
6 min read
Members of the Black Sash and Movement for Colonial Freedom and the Black march to South Africa House in London to deliver a memorandum to South African prime minister JG Strijdom. Photo: ulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis/Getty Images
APARTHEID

Apartheid, crimes against humanity: How the law remembers the past

The 80th anniversary of WWII is an opportune moment to reflect on the future of justice in South Africa

  • Tebelelo Lentsoane & Letlhogonolo Mokgoroane
4 min read
Justice: President Cyril Ramaphosa has ordered a commission of inquiry into ANC governments’ role in possibly delaying investigations.
CRADOCK FOUR

New inquiry into whether prosecutions of apartheid-era crimes were blocked

Successive ANC-led governments have been criticised by some for prioritising national reconciliation ahead of justice for victims

  • Gerald Imray
3 min read
An image from Zimbabwe back in 1960 when colonial powers ruled the nation. (Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
DEEP SCARS

How colonialism shaped modern leadership styles in Africa

The violence, poverty, and oppression left deep psychological scars on future leaders, driving some to channel their trauma into a relentless pursuit of justice and equality

  • Namatai Munyuru
5 min read
Members of the ANC give testimony in Cape Town about human rights abuses committed during apartheid. (File photograph by Gallo Images/ Oryx Media Archive).
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU

Truth commissions are lessons for societies in transition

South Africa and Colombia attempted to deal with a violent past through telling truths about human rights violations – even if both processes faltered one some measures

  • John Bonilla-Aranzales
6 min read
Winnie Mandikizela-Mandela (L) hugs Limpho Hani (C, back) the widow of the late South African Communist Party, Chris Hani, as former Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu (R), Chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), greets ANC veteran Walter Sisulu, during a break in the TRC’s hearings of apartheid-era human rights abuses allegedly committed by Mandikizela-Mandela. Hani’s husband’s killers are currently appearing at a TRC amnesty hearing in Mamelodi. (Photo by Denis Farrell/POOL/AFP)
ANC
Video

Lest we forget Tutu’s anger, and our own faces

The hardest part of reckoning is the reckoning and where the archbishop is resented it is not for the ways in which the TRC failed but those in which it succeeded and brought an…

  • Elisha Kunene
11 min read
Archbishop Desmond Tutu delivers a speech during a conference for “One Young World”, the Worlds largest gathering of Young Leaders, in London on February 8, 2010. (Photo: Carl de Souza/AFP)
DESMOND TUTU

Archbishop Tutu — a man of God who liked to laugh

‘The Arch’ never stopped joking as he fought oppression locally and globally, writes Thembisa Fakude.

  • Thembisa Fakude
4 min read
South African anti-apartheid icon Desmond Tutu, described as the country’s moral compass, died on December 26, 2021, aged 90. (Photo by Jennifer Bruce/AFP)
CYRIL RAMAPHOSA

Desmond Tutu passes at 90: A man of justice and faith

Nobel Peace Prize winner and TRC chair hailed by President Cyril Ramaphosa as a ‘patriot without equal’

  • Eunice Masson
3 min read
Ismail Haffejee and Sarah Lall with a portrait of their brother, Hoosen Haffejee.
APARTHEID

Inquest magistrate covered up Haffejee killing – lawyer

The reopened inquest into the death in detention of Dr Hoosen Haffejee in 1977 has heard that the “pliant” magistrate at the original inquest, Trevor Blunden, ignored evidence…

  • Paddy Harper
3 min read
Curious about complexity: Prof Gobodo-Madikizela remembers herself as an inquisitive child, and that as an adult she is still asking uncomfortable questions, specifically about trauma and the TRC
ANC

Q&A Sessions: Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela: ‘How do we repair this brokenness?’

Author and academic Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela spoke to Nicolene de Wee about the government’s failure to heal a broken country

  • Nicolene de Wee
6 min read
Justice delayed: A poster outside the Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg calls on people to share their stories at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. (Photograph by Gallo Images/ Rodger Bosch)
AHMED TIMOL

A renewed commitment to TRC cases

The NPA and the Hawks are allocating people and resources to investigate apartheid-era crimes that have gone unpunished, but not everyone is altogether happy about it.

  • Tymon Smith
9 min read
Former apartheid security police officer João Rodrigues, who was charged with the murder of anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Timol in 1971, died at his home on Monday. (Anthony Schultz/M&G)
AFRICAN COMMISSION ON HUMAN AND PEOPLES RIGHTS

João Rodrigues, apartheid-era crimes and the question of a blanket amnesty

The former Security Branch officer is asking the SCA for a permanent stay of appeal in the prosecution of the murder of Ahmed Timol in 1971

  • Atilla Kisla
6 min read
The Ashley Kriel Detachment was among the most successful in Umkhonto weSizwe (MK), the seven units having carried out more than 30 operations between 1987 and 1990. (Courtesy of Nadine Cloete)
ACTION KOMMANDANT
Video

‘Voices from the Underground’: in service for our liberation

These 18 stories from members of MK’s Ashley Kriel detachment teach the meaning of sacrifice

  • Nadine Cloete
8 min read