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On Unchopping A Tree

A South African Experiment in Healing
by Charles Villa-Vicencio 1

I am indebted to W.S. Merwin's prose poem 2 for the title of my address. It provides a powerful metaphor, reminding us of the limitations of any human attempt to heal. The author describes the incredibly difficult process of how one could go about unchopping a tree – placing each fallen branch, withered twig and dried leaf in its appropriate place, as well as relocating birds' nests.

Herewith the final lines of the poem:

The first breeze that touches its dead leaves…. You are afraid
the motion of the clouds will be enough to push it over. What
more can you do? What more can you do?
But there is nothing more you can do
Others are waiting
Everything is going to have to be put back.

Have the leaves been placed in the correct place? How many twigs are missing? Will the birds recognise their nests? Will the tree take root and grow? Perhaps endurance, not restitution, never full recovery, not even full healing, is all that survivors can strive for. Some dare to hope – as they remember the great tree that once was.

I tell the story of a South African experiment in healing. It involves a conscious exercise in memory – the recalling of the gross human rights violations of the apartheid years, through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I shall end this address by asking the question whether the South African experiment has any relevance for healing and reconciliation of individuals and groups in other contexts.

The South African Context

Largely for the benefit for those who are guests to our country, allow me to offer a very brief comment on the historical context that gave rise to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The long political conflict, marked by colonialism and fifty years of apartheid, began to come to an end with the release of Mr Mandela from jail and the unbanning of the liberation movements in 1990. Few had expected a relatively peaceful, negotiated settlement to one of the modern world's most repulsive exercises in legal repression – a practice which was with good cause condemned by the international community as a crime against humanity.

When the negotiations that led to the birth of the South African democracy got underway, a pertinent question was how to deal with the past. Three options were considered:

Over 22 000 victims and survivors made voluntary statements to the Commission and 7 500 applied for amnesty, indicating a willingness to make full disclosure about the past. Not all these 30 000 persons who chose to remember or indicated a willingness to make full disclosure about the past did so to the satisfaction of the Commission. The outcome has, however, been an exercise in which the nation has been confronted with its past in a manner that few other countries have voluntarily chosen to do. Stephen Ellis, writing in Critique Internationale , states that the Report of the Commission “represents probably the most far-reaching attempt by an official body to come to terms with the human rights abuses committed by a previous government anywhere in the world since the Nuremberg trials of the late 1940s.” 4 Others have trashed the Report and still others pointed to its academic limitations. Suffice it to say – despite the failures of the Commission, it is largely as a result of its work that few, if any, South Africans can ever again either deny or say “we did not know”.

The Pain of Memory

Bad memories do not easily go away. Timothy Garton Ash, the Oxford based historian reminds us that “often it is the victims who are cursed by memory, while perpetrators are blessed by forgetting.” 5 In South Africa it is primarily those who suffer least (and prospered most) who wish to forget the pain of others. Those who survived the nightmare of suffering, torture and death can do no other than remember.

Why does a nation remember?

Is it merely because some cannot forget? Can it serve any good? Does time not eventually heal? Hear the words of President Roman Herzog on the occasion of the Deutscher Bundestag in 1996:

The pictures of the piles of corpses, of murdered children, women and men, of starved bodies are so penetrating that they remain distinctly engraved, not just in the minds of survivors and liberators, but in those who read and view accounts of [the holocaust] today ….Why then do we have the will to keep this memory alive? Would it not be an evident desire to let the wounds heal into scars and to lay the dead to rest?….History fades quickly if it is not part of one's own experience. [But] memory is living future. We do not want to conserve the horror. We want to draw lessons that future generations can use as guidance. … In the light of sober description the worst barbarous act shrinks into an anonymous event. If we wish for the erasure of this memory we ourselves will be the first victims of self-deception. 6

The implication is that we remember in order not to repeat past atrocities. The problem is that there is not much evidence to suggest that history equips us not to repeat past abuses. Terrence McCaughey, President of the former Irish Anti Apartheid Movement, tells of his student days at Tübingen University in Germany in the late 1950s. 7 There has been a week long film series on German politics from the Weimer Republic to the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler. Academic life almost came to a standstill. He tells of his Old Testament lecturer, Professor Karl Elliger, addressing his class on the morning after the final presentation: "You young people no doubt think we were all stupid not to have seen what was happening,” he said. “We have no excuses. But learn this, evil never comes from the same direction, wearing the same face. I hope you will be wiser and more discerning than our generation when the threat of evil next comes around. You need to be vigilant." The professor turned to his notes and lectured his students on the Book of Joshua.

We remember in the hope that we will not repeat past atrocities. But primarily we remember because we cannot, while the past remains unresolved, lay its ghost to rest. The words of Rebecca Hanse, a relative of Fezile Hanse; who, together with Andile Majol and Patrick Madikane was shot dead by riot police on 17 June 1985 in Bongolethu, a black township on the outskirts of Oudtshoorn; are pertinent: “We must preserve the bones of our children until they can rest in peace. We cannot forget. We must keep our children alive. They were not ready to die. There is much for them still to do. We are not ready to let them go." 8 ”Maybe a time will come when their bones will rest in peace. In time, hopefully, the past will no longer be with us in as excruciating a way as it is at present.

Why do we remember? Ultimately the nation is called to remember for the sake of those who suffer. It is a manner of restoring the dignity of victims and survivors by ensuring that their suffering does not pass unnoticed. It is to say to victims and survivors, “your suffering is part of our healing as a nation. We remember you.”

But, how reliable is memory?

Memory sometimes plays tricks on us. Bad memories are fraught with trauma and often with incomprehension. It gives expression to the inability of language to articulate what needs to be said. What are the implications of this healing and reconciliation?

Memory is perhaps always incomplete. Its very incompleteness is what cries out to be heard. There is the testimony of silence. There is body language. There is fear, anger and confusion. There is a struggle between telling what happened and explaining it away. Mxolisi (Ace) Mgxashe struggles with the very question of truth. “Inyani iyababa,” he observes. In Xhosa it means, “truth is better.”…. It is so bitter [that] sometimes we find ourselves quarreling over whether it should be told at all. Even when there has been some consensus that the truth should be told…we invariably disagree on the extent to which it must be told.” 9

Sometimes we involuntarily hide the truth as much from ourselves as others Antje Krog prefers not to even use the word “truth”. “I prefer the word lie,” she says. The moment the lie raises its head, I smell blood. Because it is there …. where truth is closest. 10 Truth rarely leaps forth to introduce itself unmolested by lies, confusion, forgetfulness and evasion. It needs to be dug out!

What then is the relationship between truth and fiction? Testifying at a Cape Town hearing of the TRC into the killing of the Guguletu Seven in April 1996, Cynthia Ngewu, the mother of Christopher Piet, one of those killed, wrestled with what had in fact happened. “Now nobody knows the real-real story” she noted. 11 The ambiguity of memory is real. It is a reality that is frequently exploited by people who seek to discredit those who have suffered and struggle to find words to articulate their deepest experience of what happened. Thus Anthea Jeffery attacks the Commission because (according to her) insufficient attention was given to the importance of factual or objective truth, by recognising the importance of what the Commission called personal or narrative (dialogue) truth, as well as social truth and healing or restorative truth. The Commission deliberately chose to wrestle with these notions of truth in relation to factual or forensic truth. 12 The Commission was not a court of law and (for good reason) it did not subject victim and survivor testimony to cross-examination. 13

Albert Camus has defined truth as being “as mysterious as it is inaccessible” and yet, he insisted, worth “being fought for eternally”. 14 Its discovery involves a long and slow process. It often involves conflict, arising from stories that contradict one another. This is part of the process of national reconciliation. Donald Shriver's words are compelling: “One does not argue long with people whom one deems of no real importance. Democracy is at its best when people of clashing points of view argue far into the night, because they know that the next day they are going to encounter each other as residents of the [same] neighbourhood.” 15 The difficulties of creating democracy out of a culture of gross violations of human rights are immense. It can be facilitated through what the Chileans call reconvivencia – a period of getting used to living with each other again. Above all it involves being exposed to the worst fears of one's adversaries. It requires getting to know one another, gaining a new insight into what happened as well as an empathetic understanding of how a particular event is viewed by one's adversaries.

Story – telling.

Getting to know one another and building relationships between former enemies involves many things. Important among these is welding together a story that unites rather than one that divides. This involves the difficult process of moving beyond testimony which, I have suggested, is frequently fraught with trauma, incompleteness and sometimes incomprehension.

This is perhaps where poetry, music and myth can contribute more to healing than any attempt to explain in some rigid forensic way ‘who did what to whom'. Anjie Krog's celebrated novel on the work of the Commission, Country of my Skull , 16 weaves fragments from different testimonies and interviews into a semi – fictional historical account of events. The Commission was obliged to both more and less than what she accomplished. It was, above all, obliged to be more comprehensive and thus compelled to reduce or translate the richness of raw memory, or what has been called first generation testimony, into historical narrative. This material awaits a dozen poets, musicians and story-tellers to be retold in a healing way. Silences in testimony need to be heard if not interpreted. There needs to be reading between the lines, behind the words and within the context of the moment. The testimony is to be heard for what it is – a cry from the heart. It is difficult to conceive how any historical text can capture that. And yet, the healing of the nation requires that it be heard.

Getting on With Life

Is it ever possible, for those who truly suffered, to put the past behind us? The words of holocaust victim Primo Levi can only haunt the soul of any person of compassion:

This is the awful privilege of our generation and of my people, no one better than us has ever been able to grasp the incurable nature of the offence, that spreads like a contagion. It is foolish to think that human justice can eradicate it. It is an inexhaustible fount of evil; it breaks the body and the spirit of the submerged, it perpetuates itself as hatred among survivors, and swarms around in a thousand ways, against the very will of all, as thirst for revenge, as a moral capitulation, as denial, as weariness, as renunciation. 17

Clearly some show a resilience to rise above the anguish of past suffering better than others. Testimony that witnesses both to a willingness or desire to “get on with life” as well a reluctance or inability to do so is there to be heard and analysed. I offer rather the comment of a young woman named Kalu that highlights the internalised emotions inherent to the transition from the old to the new: 18 “What really makes me angry about the TRC and Tutu is that they are putting pressure on me to forgive....I don't know if I will ever be able to forgive. I carry this ball of anger within me and I don't know where to begin dealing with it. The oppression was bad, but what is much worse, what makes me even angrier, is that they are trying to dictate my forgiveness.” Her words capture the pathos involved in the long and fragile journey towards reconciliation. No one has the right to prevail on Kalu to forgive. The question is whether victims and survivors can be assisted to get on with the rest of their lives in the sense of not allowing anger or self-pity to be the all-consuming dimension of their existence. Reflecting on the response of Kalu, my colleague, Wilhelm Verwoerd, refers to the response of Ashley Forbes to his torture at the hands of the notorious torturer, Jeffrey Benzien. Although critical of the decision to grant Benzien amnesty, arguing that he failed to make full disclosure, he observed: “I forgive him and feel sorry for him. And now that the TRC has showed what happened, I can get on with the rest of my life.”

Not every victim deals with his or her past in this way. It is important, however, for their own sake , that victims and survivors are assisted (to the extent that it's possible) to indeed get on with life . This does not mean forgetting the ghastly deeds of the past. This is usually not possible and probably not helpful. There is indeed a place for righteous anger, which can be a source of self-worth and dignity. To get on with life does not mean necessarily becoming friends with the person responsible for one's suffering. Very few accomplish this. It does mean dealing with the “ball of anger” that prevents one from getting on with life.

And yet the graph of the journey forward is rarely a progressively even one. Such progress that is made in getting on with life tends to take place in concentric circles. Progress can be made. Time and circumstances of different kinds do assist the healing process. But there is also deep memory that reminds us that the past is never quite past. Bernard Langer, reflecting on the suicide of Primo Levi, forty years after his release from Auschwitz, speaks of the “painful and uneasy stress between trauma and recovery.” 19 Levi's prolific writing at no time fails to portray the presence of melancholy. Langer argues that:

Levi, as a suicide, demolishes the idea that he had mastered his past, come to terms with the atrocity of Auschwitz, and rejoined the human community healed and whole. Life went on for him, of course, though it is probably a mistake to think of his writings as a form of therapy, a catharsis that freed him from what he called the memory of the offense. It is clear from everything he wrote that survival did not mean a restored connection with what had gone before. The legacy of permanent disruption may be difficult to accept, but it lingers in his suicide like and abiding parasite. 20

Levi's testimony is that of one who seeks to wash his conscience and memory clean. Refusing to reduce the immensity of his particular ordeal to “a capacity for evil buried in human nature somewhere,” he is angry at society's apparent indifference to the question as to what makes killers resort to the depths of humanity that they do. And yet he insisted, “to a greater or lesser degree all were responsible.” The “greater majority of Germans,” he writes, “….accepted [the persecution of the Jews] in the beginning out of mental laziness, myopic calculations, stupidity and national pride…..” 21

Wrestling with memories of suffering and questions concerning the nature of evil, he killed himself. The concentric circles of others in the quest to get on with life are less decisive. Joe Seremane is angry with the Commission for failing to probe deeply enough into the death of his brother Timothy Tebogo Sermane in the ANC Quatro Camp in 1981… “You owe us a lot,” he told the Commission. “Not monetary compensation, but our bones buried in shallow graves in Angola and heaven knows where else.” He quotes words from Langston Hughes's Minstrel Man : 22

Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter
And my throat deep with song,
Do you not think
I suffer, after I have held
My pain so long?

Whatever the truth of the various allegations (by Seremane and the counter charges by the ANC) the pathos of his words should not be missed. The question is what can society do to help those who suffer to move on? In Ndebele's words, the question is how to promote “visible measures for improving the lives of the victims of the past, who even while they are still in a state of severe disadvantage ought not to experience themselves any more as victims?”

Are There Lessons to be learned from the South African Experiment in Healing?

Situations and contexts differ. It is insensitive to dare seek to impose one's own attempt at a solution onto others. I leave the question to the reflections of an audience more skilled in psychological counselling and healing than myself.

But this much we can learn: Where people suffer, healing is needed. And yet healing is often never complete. It involves moving on in concentric circles. This means that compassion, support and understanding is required. This constitutes the acid test of the Commission and indeed of the entire South African transitionary process. It involves the question whether our reflection on the past will succeed in making us a more compassionate, supportive and understanding people. And the jury is still out on this one.

Bluntly put. Unless the South African experiment in healing reaches not only victims and survivors of the apartheid years but also heals the hardened hearts of both direct perpetrators of gross violations of human rights as well as the benefactors of apartheid, the healing process that is taking place is likely to be incomplete. This would be a huge tragedy for a nation that has done so incredibly well in seeking to heal itself in so many other ways. I return momentarily to the title of my paper. The unchopping of the tree is incomplete.

References:

  1. Professor of Religion and Society, University of Cape Town. Former Director of Research, South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
  2. In W.S. Merwin, The Miner's Pale Children (New York: Atheneum, 1970, 85 –88)
  3. Richard Goldstone, The Hauser Lecture, New York University, 22 January 1997.
  4. Stephen Ellis, “South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Critique Internationale, October 1999.
  5. In Timothy Garton Ash, The File (London: Flamingo, 1997), 201
  6. Presse und Informationsdienst der Bundesregierung, 23.01.96. Translated and quoted in Undine Kayser, Improvising the Present narrative Construction and Re – construction of the Past in South Africa and Germany, Honours Thesis, Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, 1997/98.
  7. Dublin, Ireland, March 1999.
  8. In conversation at the grave of the Bongolethu Three, June 1996. See also TRC Report, Volume 3, pp. 437 – 439.
  9. Argus, 14 June 1996.
  10. Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull (Johannesburg: Random House, 1998), 36.
  11. Human Rights Violations' Committee Hearing, Cape Town, 22 April 1996.
  12. Anthea Jeffrey, The Truth About the Truth Commission (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1999).
  13. It did, however, through its corroboration assess such testimony on the basis of a balance of probability. Graeme Simpson is correct “….….. most of the legal and jursiprudential dilemmas presented by the TRC process are actually rooted in its own almost bi – polar roles as both a “fact - finding” and a “quasi – judicial enterprise on the one hand, and as a psychologically sensitive mechanism for story telling and healing on the other.” In “A brief Evaluation of South Africa's TRC: Some Lessons for Societies in Transition,” Paper delivered at Commissioning the Past Conference, University of the Witwatersrand, June 1999.
  14. Cited in Janet Cherry, “Historical Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” in C. Villa – Vicencio and W. Verwoerd (eds.), Looking Back/ Reaching Forward (Cape Town: UCT Press, 1999). Forthcoming.
  15. D.W. Shriver, An Ethic for Enemies : Forgiveness in Politics (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 230.
  16. Johannesburg: Random House, 1998.
  17. Primo Levi, “The Truce” in Albert A Friedlander (ed), Out of the Whirlwind: A Reader of Holocaust Literature (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 426. Italics are added.
  18. See Wilhelm Verwoerd, “Forgiving the Torturer but Not the Torture,” in Sunday Independent, 14 December 1998. See also my “Getting on With Life,” in C. Villa – Vicencio and w. Verwoerd (eds.), Looking Back/Reaching Forward (Cape Town: UCT Press, 1999).
  19. Lawrence Langer, Preempting the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998) xv.
  20. Ibid.
  21. Ibid, 23 – 42.
  22. Ibid.