Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela on an Invaluable Result of the TRC
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela is a psychologist and
author from South Africa. In 1991, after teaching for 7 years in the
department of psychology at the University of Transkei,
Gobodo-Madikizela started the first Children's Rights movement in the
former Transkei, where she was appointed chair of the first
UNICEF-sponsored situation analysis on the state of children in South
Africa. In 1996, South African President Nelson Mandela appointed
Gobodo-Madikizela to the Human Rights Violations Committee of the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), on which she served until the
Commission completed its inquiry in 1998. Gobodo-Madikizela's most
recent book, A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Story of Forgiveness,
chronicles conversations she had with Eugene de Kock, South Africa's
most notorious perpetrator of atrocities during the apartheid era.
At the 1997 Harvard/Facing History and Ourselves conference, Human Rights and Justice Conference Collective Violence and Memory: Judgment, Reconciliation, Education, Gobodo-Madikizela spoke with other scholars about the capacity of truth commissions to lay the foundation for a democratic future after collective violence. Gobodo-Madikizela discussed the humanity that the TRC brought to the history of apartheid in South Africa by letting victims' voices be heard. This humanness, she said, is often overlooked in recorded history, and is what connects events like the Holocaust to apartheid in South Africa. (Please note: The final paragraph, in italics, is the video clip transcription.)
At the 1997 Harvard/Facing History and Ourselves conference, Human Rights and Justice Conference Collective Violence and Memory: Judgment, Reconciliation, Education, Gobodo-Madikizela spoke with other scholars about the capacity of truth commissions to lay the foundation for a democratic future after collective violence. Gobodo-Madikizela discussed the humanity that the TRC brought to the history of apartheid in South Africa by letting victims' voices be heard. This humanness, she said, is often overlooked in recorded history, and is what connects events like the Holocaust to apartheid in South Africa. (Please note: The final paragraph, in italics, is the video clip transcription.)
Transcript:
"There is a certain distancing of the human factor sometimes, when you write history. But when you have experienced history, there's a thin line between what is history and what is reality. I watched some of the clippings from the Nuremberg Trials, and the clippings from what happened in the Warsaw ghetto-the death, the killing, the children, the maiming of children, the marches by Jewish people to the death camps-and it aroused a certain emotion [that] I could identify, not so much as something that belongs to the story of the Holocaust, but something that belongs to the South African story, to my story.While participating in a panel discussion about truth commissions, Gobodo-Madikizela remarked that despite the lack of unanimous support for the TRC, one invaluable result of the Commission's work has been the validation victims have received from testifying before the TRC.
"And so I think it's important to realize that sometimes there's a very thin line between history and reality. And what we're trying to do in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is to make real that history. Not to make it just an object of the past but something that is real. There's a lot of controversy about how the Truth Commission is embracing reconciliation, and sacrificing justice for truth, and how, in fact, reconciliation is an embrace of evil. But being in the Truth Commission and having watched several victims walk up to the witness box and talk about their story, I'm reminded every day how the way we define concepts such as justice, for example-the way we frame those definitions-decides the conclusions we make about those concepts. Justice, as far as many victims who have come to the Commission are concerned, is something totally different from what someone who has not had that experience would define as justice.
"I have been struck many times at the Truth Commission [by] how, in fact, victims look at justice as a validation of themselves, as a reaffirmation of themselves, something that tells them that, 'You were right. You were right. The system that demonized you, the system that took away all that you had was wrong, but you were right!' And the opportunity for these victims to come and tell their stories, to talk about their loss and their pain-in fact, the pain of silence about talking about the pain-that is broken for the first time at the hearings of the Truth Commission, is, on its own, sufficient validation for family members. And that, for me, is superior to any quest for justice because that embodies justice in a very meaningful way. It is reparative justice; it is justice nonetheless."
"These are stories, real stories from people who . . . seem not to have any trace of personal vengeance, but the satisfaction that my story has been heard. One woman said, very eloquently, that 'While I came to the commission, my intention was not to cry, but once I was on stage, I wanted the world to see my tears. I wanted the commission to hear my pain.' And for her, that was the ultimate in being validated."
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Video length:
00 min 42 sec
Date filmed:
Apr 10 1997 
