PUMLA’S BOOK: I’m writing this, sitting on Amtrak train 94, traveling from Washington DC to Philadelphia. Beforehand, on the connecting bus from Charlottesville up to DC, I read a most amazing book, that I want to write these notes on before I forget. Also, I’ll probably be giving my copy of it to my friend Emily Mnisi soon, before she returns to South Africa. I learned when I was there earlier this month that the book isn’t out there yet.
Well, the book is Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s book, “A Human Being Died that Night: A South African Story of Forgiveness.” I’ve been looking forward to reading it for quite a while. I’ve read a few of her shorter articles, and enjoyed them. But the book goes to a whole new level of insight and inspiration…
Dr. G-M is a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Cape Town. (I tried to get hold of her when I was there, but was unable to.) Back in the apartheid days, she was occasionally called on to do psychological evaluations of youths being tried for various violent crimes. Then, with the transition to democracy, she joined one of the committees of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. One of her tasks was to set up hearings and outreach programs for former victims of apartheid-era violence throughout the Western Cape region.
In September 1997, she was present in a TRC hearing where one of the most notoriously murederous apparatchiks of the apartheid repression apparatus, Eugene de Kock, was present at a hearing into an incident called the Motherwell incident in which five white security police men had been involved in killing three black policemen (and one passer-by). G-M doesn’t give many details about that incident except to suggest that the black policement needed to be “silenced” because they knew too much… Anyway, De Kock was there as the person who had given the five perpetrators the order to carry out their task.
Afterwards, he astonished G-M by asking to meet privately with the widows of the slain men. Two of them agreed. G-M doesn’t give us any details of what he said to them during that meeting (where his lawyer, and a lawyer supporting the two bereaved women were also present.) A few days later, G-M met the two women, Pearl Faku and Doreen Mgoduka:
“‘I was profoundly touched by him,’ Mrs. Faku said of her encounter with de Kock. Both women felt that de Kock had communicated to them something he felt deeply and had acknowledged their pain. ‘I couldn’t control my tears… I hope that when he sees our tears, he knows that they are not only tears for our husbands, but tears for him as well… I would like to hold him by the hand, and show him that there is a future, and that he can still change.'” (pp. 14-15)
That account from Mrs. Faku sent G-M off on a quest of her own. Using her own professional skills, she determined she’d try to contact de Kock and talk to him to try to understand him and his actions better.
At that time, de Kock’s nickname in the South African media was “Prime Evil”. In fact, he was already in jail, serving a sentence for other murderous “excesses” he’d committed while he was head of the notorious Volkplaas security compound, located on a farm of that name near Pretoria.
G-M must be a pretty good clinical interviewer. (How does a psychologists evaluatory/investigative interview differ from a journalist’s, I wonder? Or a historian’s? Or a police interrogator’s?) But evidently, from that very first, three-plus-hour encounter with him in his cell in “C-max” maximum-security prison, she knew how to draw him out, and get him to describe the explanatory and justificatory world he had lived in during the apartheid era. Some of what he told her rings incredubly true regarding the actions of the Israelis towards the Palestinians, today. Here is what I assume to be her paraphrasing of some of what he had told her:
“‘Preemptive killing’ at the time was designed to build strust among whte voters and to show apartheid politicians that the country’s security police were doing their job efficiently.
“‘We had to be seen to be on top of the ANC threat at all costs, de Kock explained. ‘If there was a lot of trouble in an area, I would send my men to contact sources to come over. We would start phoning, say, a chap, a source, back in Botswana. We would cover all bases in order to hit back hard. At the same time– you see, there had to be something happening.'” (p.30)
This idea of “pre-emptive killing” being carried out mainly to satisfy the (perceived or real) political demands of one’s own side– rather than necessarily serving any well-thoughout-out political-military strategy– is one that once you think about it, truly boggles the mind. People must DIE for that?? Well, I guess it’s bad enough that they die, that they ARE KILLED, anyway, for whatever reason… But somehow, what de Kock told G-M can easily be translated almost directly to the kinds of brutal policies that the Sharon government has been following. Policies that include, of course, what is called “targeted killing” (as though that gives ity some kind of pseudo-scientific justification– but that remains, like apartheid’s ‘preemptive killings’, just a policy of quite extrajudicial killings-in-cold-blood.
Well, moving right along here. G-M’s book is a profound reflection not just on what made Eugene de Kock into a cold-blooded murderer– in fact, she doesn’t go into that in anything like the depth I was expecting, at least, not at the level of his own individual biography, his history of abuse at the hands of his father when young, etc., etc. (I think her concern was much more with what it was in the kind of thinking that dominted Afrikaner culture and society during the apartheid years that had led to him being who he was, and acting as he did. To that extent, she seems to accept much of his own argument that, evil though he might have been, in fact he more like a ‘foot soldier’ who did those things under implicit or near-explicit orders from those higher in the government than he, than he was a ‘general’ in his owen right.)
But in addition to exploring that whole complex of issues, G-M is also prepared to go to more challenging, difficult places. She is not afraid to look at issues of violence committed by black South Africans, as well as violence committed by whites. With huge honesty, she describes (pp.10-11) her own role as a supportive bystander during an incident in 1990, in Umtata, the “capital” of the apartheid-engineered “bantustan” of Transkei, when an army officer alleged to be acting on behalf of Pretoris was thwarted by pro-ANC troops and activists from launching a pro-Pretoria coup there:
“Gunfire echoed in the streets and over our heads… Depite the fact that it was clear that people could be seriously injured, despite all of that, I was waiting for the moment when I would celebrate victory with those multitudes watching in the streets. The moment of victory did arriove. The officer who was leading the coup, Captain Craig Duli, was ‘captured’. There was jubilation throughout Umtata. My car was filled to the brim; soldiers perched wherever there was space, hoisting their R1 rifles in the air through the windows as I honked and drove in circles in a spirit of celebration…
“As the true nature of the events emerged, and we heard how the mutilated body of Captain Duli had been thrown into the trunk of any army vehiclke, and how he later either died of his wounds or was shot along with others who had sided with him, I realized that I had beern party to the killing of another human being. I had knowingly participated in an incident that would certainly result in the taking of a life. In my moind the point was not whether I could have done anything to stop it or not, but simply that I had been there, celebrating.”(p.11)
In this same spirit of relentless examination of both self and in-group, G-M explores the issue of ‘necklacing’, that is, the “punitive” action young black militants would take against suspected regime informers in the 1980s, when they would put a tire around thei suspect’s neck, fill it with gasoline, and then ignite it.
“In relation to the necklace murders, were black people who were bystanders to these gruesome human burnings really in a similar situation to that of the South African white community, who chose to believe official reports in the newspapers about the war that South Africa was fighting? Are the roles of perpetrator, victim, and bystander so mutually interchangeable?
“‘We failed our children,’ said oone [presumably black] woman during interviewsd I was conducting in Mlungisi, an Eastern Cape township once devastated by apartheid’s war and by necklace murders. ‘We failed to protect them, not just those who were burnt by the necklace, but those who did this terrible thing. We sat here and watched. We did or said nothing. The whole community. We sat here hoping somebody will do something to break this cycle of insanity. It has left us with this terrible unhealable scar, knowning that we could have, but we didn’t.'” (p.75)
… Anyway, this post comes to you from the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia, where I’ll be for the rest of the weekend.