Special Report Transcript Episode 38, Section 7, Time 21:56

If you’re going to build symbols that stand up there and all they do is remind me of my pain… // You’re watching it on TV, you see an old woman telling you that my son was shot and he died right in front of me and to me it just brings back a pain. It cause hatred inside me, you know there’s no way I can heal from that because every time I see it, it just keeps hurting me; it’s like not letting wounds to heal. I agree with him, if we could have positive ways of doing it like Mandela walking out of jail which is taking us a step further instead of going backwards, because, yes we have to live with our past but if we’re going that backward we’re going nowhere. // It is a statement by the nation to say we have been through this past. It’s a reality of our past. We need not repeat it. // There’s a real contradiction in the way that people speak about fixing or try in some ways to improve the lives of victims while saying that there are very limited resources to do that, and that’s I think where the notion of symbolic reparations comes in. Instead of material significance and economic reparations we offer symbols and those symbols can be powerful and they can be important. They are important at the level of acknowledging and recognizing what has happened in the past. But they are not going to go any way towards … // …like building any monuments or money is what people want. If you listen to a guy like Ribeiro, he’s mad that these people have no remorse. It’s got nothing to do with whether they can give him R2 million or they’ll build a monument to his parents or whatever. All he’d like to see is these people to say I’m genuinely sorry, I really feel bad. // It’s really the problem of the negotiations that brought us to the Truth Commission. Instead of a Nuremberg type prosecution exercise we have a Truth Commission which provides amnesty on the one hand and a certain degree of reparations on the other, and the anger, the very legitimate anger that Eric is expressing is being felt across this country, whether we’re seeing it on TV, reading it in the press or not, it’s there.

Notes: Eric Myeni (Actor); Joe Nina (Music Producer) ; Bheki Nkosi (ANC Youth League); Claudia Braude (Writer/Editor); Eric Myeni; Claude Braude

References: there are no references for this transcript