TRC Final Report

Volume 5

Chapter 9

Subsection 4

24 Thus on many occasions, the Commission was able to help restore the dignity of victims and their loved ones by respectfully acknowledging their contribution to the struggle against apartheid. Archbishop Tutu’s response to testimony by family members of the ‘Cradock Four’ at the East London hearing provides an example of this:

I wanted to say this when Miss Mhlawuli was here – but perhaps I should speak and you will tell her. I said after Ms Mazwai that I was deeply proud of the fact that I was black and that we had people of her calibre. We are proud to have people like you and your husbands, and the reason why we won the struggle is not because we had guns; we won the struggle because of people like you: people of incredible strength. And this country is fortunate to have people like you… We have a tremendous country, which has tremendous people, and you are one example of why we make it in this country. And that she, your daughter, should say, “I want to forgive, we want to forgive”, after what she has experienced and seen what happened to her mother and to her father, and she says, “we want to forgive, but we want to know who to forgive”. We give thanks to God for you, and thank you for your contribution to our struggle, and thank you, even if it was reluctant in a sense, rightly, thank you for sacrificing your husbands.

25 The work of the Commission also highlighted the impact of decriminalisation on those who always believed that the security forces were upholding the moral order and legitimately enforcing law and order against ‘terrorists’, ‘hooligans’, ‘vandals’, ‘arsonists’ and ‘murderers’. Those who supported the previous state or were conditioned by ‘total onslaught’ propaganda needed to come to terms with the painful truths uncovered by the Commission. This is illustrated in the following extract from an interview with a white Afrikaner victim of the St James Church massacre:

Coming from the apartheid era at my age, forty-three, I was never a supporter – an active supporter – of apartheid. But it’s something that you grew up with, and things changed quite fast in the last couple of years. All of a sudden you start hearing from the blacks how they’ve been ill-treated, exploited, all kinds of words, and all of a sudden you start seeing the bad side of it, and I think the media ran away with it. I think the media, from the one extreme, they went to the other extreme where we were hearing this on a constant basis. At first, it was an eye-opener to hear of it then, after a while, my feeling was, gee! when are they going to stop moaning? We’re just hearing the same type of thing all the time. It’s just sort of the names [that] change, but it’s the same thing all the time and was it really that bad?

You know, coming from a background where everything was fine for all these years, now all of a sudden the picture [is] changing, that the police were the ‘baddies’.

I don’t have a lot of contact with blacks myself in every day life, so your perceptions aren’t always a hundred per cent correct, and you tend to believe what the media tells you. And all of a sudden, the media turns around and [makes] the white guy, the police … the bad guy.

I started questioning the whole [Commission process], I think the role of the media – I think they went overboard and that created the impression that they just want to keep on highlighting that side of things. Yes, I think that’s why I called it a circus; that’s why I wasn’t keen on going at first. But then, because of my personal involvement, I thought, “no, let me just see”.

And I think it was a sort of initial resistance that came about, which I think if I think of my friends and so on, it’s a fairly natural reaction.