Two days after South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) started to investigate apartheid-era crimes, Archbishop Desmond Tutu broke down in tears.
Before him sat a former political prisoner who had been tortured for years by South Africa’s notorious security police.
As Singqokwana Ernest Malgas described being suffocated with a mask, he wept, and Tutu wept with him.
It would be the first and only time Tutu would cry publicly during the emotionally-wrenching work of the commission that he chaired.
“It wasn’t fair,” he told a television interviewer years later.
“The media then concentrated on me instead of the people who were the rightful subjects. If I wanted to cry, I would cry at home.”
Between 1996 and 1998, some of the darkest days of apartheid repression were re-lived in a kind of public theatre at a series of hearings that Tutu held around the country.
South Africans gathered around their TV sets and radios each Sunday night to hear weekly summaries of the testimonies.
Many learnt for the first time about the brutality of their rigid, right-wing former government, through the words of torture victims or family members of missing activists.
It was “a space within which victims could share the story of their trauma with the nation”, Tutu would later write in the commission’s seven-volume report.
Full disclosure
Unlike the Nuremberg trials, he and his 14 fellow commissioners gathered “not to judge the morality of people’s actions, but to act as an incubation chamber for national healing, reconciliation and forgiveness”.
Perpetrators of horrific violence, often foot soldiers of the repressive regime, could come…
Source : france24
