TRC Final Report

Volume 5

Chapter 4

Subsection 4

40 At the Johannesburg hearing Ms Hawa Timol spoke of her pain after the death of her son, Ahmed Timol, at the hands of the security forces:

41 Another son, Mr Mohammed Timol, described her enduring pain:

I think it’s an indication, from what you see here, she has lived through this every day of her life for the last twenty-five years.

42 Ms Doreen Rousseau was shot and injured during an attack on the Highgate Hotel in 1993. At the second East London hearing, she described the lingering effects of trauma:

I still have terrible nightmares. I wake up in the night and I see this man standing in my doorway with a gun. I told them [the police] that if my body had a zip they could open the zip to see how I was aching inside.

43 Recurring thoughts of traumas that have been experienced continued to invade the lives of many South Africans. Mr Madala Andres Ndlazi’s sixteen-year-old son was shot by the police on 16 June 1986. At the Nelspruit hearing, he told the Commission that memories of his son’s death haunted him to that day:

I found my child brought to the home. I found him in the dining room. He was lying dead there in the dining room. When I looked at him, it was very painful for me to see how injured he was - and I controlled myself together with my wife as Christians. We knew very well that we will have to die one day but we know there are many ways to pass away from this earth. But the way in which my son, Sidney Ndlazi, was injured, it makes me very painful. I cannot forget this. It is almost ten years now.

44 Many members of the state forces, both conscripts and career officials, also described their experiences of post-traumatic stress disorder. Some perpetrators may also be considered victims of gross human rights violations and there is a need to address their struggle to live with the consequences of their experiences and actions. Others found themselves caught up in and traumatised by situations over which they had no control. Mr Sean Callaghan told the Commission at the health sector hearing:

[I was] confronted with a patient who had no arms or legs, was blind and was deaf. [He] had been in a mortar pit launching 80mm mortars when one of them exploded in the pipe. That was the first patient I ever saw in the operational area.

Right there and then I realised that, as an eighteen year old, I am not going to be able to handle this after six months of training. I had applied for medical school ... and I went for an interview with Wits medical school during [my] leave, and said to them, “I don’t want to be a doctor anymore, not after what I’ve seen” ...

I was hyper-vigilant. I was having screaming nightmares every night for at least six months. I was very anti-establishment, anti-social. I was cold. Whenever I heard a loud noise, I would dive to the ground. When I heard helicopters, I would look for somewhere to hide.

45 The tendency for the original trauma to reactivate after many years is a troubling and challenging aspect of post-traumatic stress disorder and reveals its persistence. The long-term relationship between physical disease and post-traumatic stress disorder in torture survivors is complex and presents a challenge for researchers in the field.

46 High rates of co-morbid (simultaneous) symptoms have also been found, including major depression, dysthymic disorder (a less severe form of major depressive disorder), antisocial personality disorder and substance abuse.¹¹ Surprisingly, few deponents referred to alcohol or substance abuse as an outcome. This could be due to the high levels of acceptability of the use and abuse of alcohol in South African society or a lack of probing by the Commission’s statement takers.