The ghosts of apartheid, plus five talking points from ‘Vrye Weekblad’
Here’s what’s hot in the latest edition of the Afrikaans digital weekly
· TimesLIVEThe past still messes with us. Often.
A Vrye Weekblad reader approached columnist Piet Croucamp because she wants to know the truth about her parents and their role in apartheid.
Her father was a police officer, one of stature in the previous dispensation. Her parents’ environment and their role in the time frame of apartheid haunts her. It’s as if they lived in an alternate universe with secrets from which she was excluded.
She is trying to map an understanding of her parents’ motivation for, and justification of, being part of the apartheid state’s repressive machinery.
Croucamp writes he got the impression his answers will never be satisfying nor convincing. The reader would rather want to talk to Eugène de Kock, the former police colonel, torturer and assassin active under the apartheid government.
By the time De Kock arrived in cuffs at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there was only one question in his mind: “How do I accept responsibility?” He had already been found guilty and was behind bars.
De Kock grappled with the genetics of his past and his warped moral judgement, but he dared not speak about it in public. It would be tantamount to him looking for justification for his actions rather than taking responsibility for them.
In the grey area between forgiveness and justice is Madeleine Fullard of the National Prosecuting Authority’s Missing Persons Task Team, whose thoughtful, yet pragmatic approach doesn’t necessarily include forgiveness, but rather that a claim to justice could be made by assuming responsibility. In a democracy, justice is a higher order aspiration than forgiveness.
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South Africans often fixate on the familiar names of activists who were tortured and murdered. However, as Fullard has said in the past, the evil of apartheid was also the impoverishment of the homelands, the exponential trauma of child deaths, the breaking up of black families and the alienation and dehumanisation of an identity.
Former NP cabinet minister Leon Wessels, who recently launched his new book Encountering Apartheid’s Ghosts, told the TRC in 1997: “I do not believe the political defence of ‘I did not know’ is available to me because in many respects I believe I did not want to know.”
His words were an introduction to a search for truth and reconciliation. He wanted to understand, clarify and explain.
Gen Johan Booysen, former head of the Hawks in KwaZulu-Natal, asked at Wessels’ book launch if his entire career spanning 40 years should be seen in the idiom of a crime against humanity. Was he a “monster” despite the fact that his job focused on crime, with the aim of protecting South Africans against each other?
In some of the old police structures the Vrye Weekblad reader’s father is referred to as someone with unusual integrity.
In the context of an unjust system, integrity may not be all-important, but for a child looking for her father’s soul it should at least be something.
Read the full article and more news, analysis and interviews in this Friday’s edition of Vrye Weekblad.
Apartheid se spoke neuk steeds met ons
Must-read articles in this week’s Vrye Weekblad
>> Browse the full March 25 edition
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CBD 101 | Dagga made her paranoid once and made her fall in love another time so Anneliese Burgess realised she didn’t know much about the world of cannabis and went to speak to someone who could explain how we got to CBD.
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Die mal idees waarvoor Rusland nou nog ’n prys betaal
PINK PODS IN THE SKY | When the PlayStation generation become architects, they design fun buildings such as the Uxolo in Cape Town with pink marshmallow balconies.