Public evil

In my last post I wrote about it being wrong to make public entertainment out of private evil. In this one I write about stories from the truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa, a commission which did its work between 1995 and 2000. The stories appear to be mainly about events which took place in the 1980's. I was shocked at how little I had remembered of events of this recent past.

Events which might better be called atrocities, white on black, black on white and black on black - with quite a lot of black people having been drawn into the white security apparatus - a large part of which last was still in place at the time the commission did its work.

Work which took the form of public hearings up and down South Africa, hearings in which perpetrators were supposed to tell the truth about what they had done, in front of the people involved, in return for a good chance of being amnestied.

The stories drawn from some of these hearings have appeared in a sort of picture book which I, quite by chance, happened to buy in a sale of art books from Epsom Library. The author, Jillian Edelstein, is a South African born photographer, presently based in London.

The book is illustrated by black and white photographs of some of the people involved: perpetrators, victims, relatives and other people who were part of the process. It is introduced by an introduction by Michael Ignatieff and an essay by Pumla Gobodo-Madilizela.

So far, I have turned the pages rather than read the book, but I have been shocked by the awful things I found. How can people live with this kind of stuff? A problem to which the commission was a response.

Ignatieff in his introduction tells of an African proverb: truth is good, but not all truth is good to say. A proverb in which I see much wisdom. But he goes on to say that there are truths which must be said, truths which must be told, to protect the world to come. The Germans, for example, had to be made to face up to the evils of their Hitler regime, and to the lesser evils of their Stasi regime which replaced half of it. Burying this stuff is the wrong answer; burying allows all kinds of lies and half-truths to flourish in the future. He points to the bad example of Russia, where they have not properly faced up to the evils of their communist regimes - Stalin and his successors - which allows nostalgia for the past glories of the Soviet Union to flourish. Past glories, some of which were real enough - as were the evils.

For the moment, I am with Ignatieff. But I may have more to say on the subject.

PS: I am also reminded that you cannot flick a switch and flick from being a society full of violence to a society full of peace and light. This is a process which is going to take time.

Reference 1: Truth and lies - Jillian Edelstein - 2001.

Reference 2: https://www.jillianedelstein.co.uk/.

Reference 3: https://www.michaelignatieff.ca/.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumla_Gobodo-Madikizela. Curiously, this page is reported as having just been deleted - but luckily the search index contains the following: 'Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela (born 15 February 1955) is the Research Chair in Studies in Historical Trauma and Transformation at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. She graduated from Fort Hare University with a bachelor's degree and an Honours degree in psychology. She obtained her master's degree in Clinical Psychology at Rhodes University. She received her PhD in psychology from the University of Cape Town. Her doctoral thesis, entitled "Legacies of violence: An in-depth analysis of two case studies based on interviews with perpetrators of a 'necklace' murder and with Eugene de Kock", offers a perspective that integrates psychoanalytic and social psychological concepts to understand extreme forms of violence committed during the apartheid era. Her main interests are traumatic memories in the aftermath of political conflict, post-conflict reconciliation, empathy, forgiveness, psychoanalysis and intersubjectivity. She served on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). She currently works at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein as a senior research professor'.