TRC Final Report

Volume 5

Chapter 9

Subsection 2

12 Mr Tim Ledgerwood, a former conscript in the South African Defence Force (SADF), went absent without leave in 1981 and later tried to join the African National Congress (ANC) military wing, Umkhonto weSizwe (MK). He was caught and severely tortured by the security police. At a special hearing on conscription in Cape Town on 23 July 1997, he said:

The [Commission] has deeply affected my life in a short space of time that has elapsed since I first came to their offices here in Cape Town and told my story to one of the investigators. It has begun a healing process in all sorts of relationships in my family and has enabled me to begin on my own road to inner healing. Having gone to the [Commission] with my story, it is almost as if it is all right to talk about it now. Slowly things are changing. As if I’ve been freed from a prison in which I have been for eighteen years. It is also as if my family has been freed.

My brother, who worked for Armscor [manufacturing military equipment for the apartheid state] for five or six years in the 1980s, is all of a sudden much softer, more human and more able to talk to me … It is almost as if the silence is ending, as if we are waking up from a long bad nightmare.

13 Storytelling activities, inspired by the work of the Commission, also took place outside the Commission itself. In the Western Cape, for example, the ‘Religious Response to the TRC’ held a number of ‘Healing of the Memories’ workshops. In different regions of the country, important work was done by, amongst others, the South African Council of Churches (SACC) and Khulumani, a victim support group facilitated by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in Johannesburg.

14 In June 1997, at the workshop that followed the human rights violation hearing in Sebokeng, Mr Duma Khumalo, representing Khulumani, expressed his appreciation of the Commission’s contribution:

We, as the Khulumani Support Group, the group that is mainly composed of victims based in the Vaal Triangle, would like to thank the Centre for Study of Violence for having considered the people of Vaal and, in that sense, having helped us to form this group that is existing today with a membership of more than 200 victims. I should say the Khulumani Support Group is very much aware of the objective of the [Commission], which is to promote healing, reconciliation and rehabilitation. We needed to consider the fear that was within the people in the Vaal Triangle of coming forward to tell of their experiences concerning the events and the incidents of the apartheid era. The [Commission] helped many of our people to break the shells of their griefs and fear that they had lived with in the past many years.

It’s the intervention of the [Commission] that brought about the dignity of the people that was lost during the political era in our country. People had no one to listen to their griefs or pay attention to some of those griefs until the establishment of [Commission] came into being. Then many of the victims came forward and started, for the first time, to talk about their past griefs… [edited]

15 The diversity of individual experiences was significant, certain of which vividly highlighted the long, difficult road to healing.

16 Ms Eleanor Juqu told the Commission about the killing of her son, Fuzile, by the police. Mr Juqu then testified about his painful search for his son:

Mr Juqu: I started at Tygerberg. I went through all the wards but I couldn’t find him there. I came back. I told myself, my wife, that I couldn’t find him. So, I went to Salt River. There I went to the police station. I asked them. They said no, they don’t know anything. They said no; you’re wasting our time. They said just go and sit over there. When I got to the police station, I was told that my son is in the mortuary… I saw him. Actually, he was lying on his stomach. His whole back was full of bullet holes. This policeman was a white man. I don’t even know his name. I didn’t even want to know his name because I was already hateful towards him.

Commissioner Ntsebeza: When you identified him, was he already dead?

Mr Juqu: Yes, they just told me that here he is, what do you think I should do?

Commissioner Ntsebeza: How did you feel during that moment when he said that?

Mr Juqu: If I had anything in front – in front of me or anything – any, any stick or any, any arm at all I will just throw it at him because my son was just lying there dead … [His clothes] looked like [they were] eaten by mice, and it was full of blood. There were many, many bullets. He had blood coming out of his nose. He was – he was just shot at the back by very many, many bullets.

Commissioner Ntsebeza: Were you called in to any court? Maybe in Wynberg?

Mr Juqu: Yes sir, I was called at Wynberg… They asked me, is this your son? I said, yes he is. He said, ja he is dead. So I said, so what should I do? He said: Oh! We are very sorry. So, I said, what are you sorry about? At that time I was already confused but I told myself no, let me just stand here and listen and this. [The] magistrate said, okay, there is nothing we can do. So I just turned around and I left. I didn’t give a damn what he was thinking about me, and I simply left.

Commissioner Ntsebeza: Do you know who can be blamed for this?

Mr Juqu: No. They just told me that they are sorry that my son has been shot; there is nothing then they can do. I said: Oh! Is that what you say? They said, yes, that’s what we say. So I just turned around and left.

17 When Mr Juqu was asked if the Commission could be of any help, his response was:

Ma’am, I am not here to get any compensation, I am just – I feel very hurtful for my shot son. It is the Commission that will see what it can do, but I am not here to tell the Commission what to do. I am not here to gain anything about that. I just feel very sore inside. My heart is broken. There is nothing else I am going to say now.

18 There were also, of course, people who were critical of the human rights violations hearings. These included survivors, who demanded justice and retribution, and activists who saw themselves as heroes rather than victims. Some psychologists and others expressed concern that adequate professional support was not provided after the hearings. The latter view was voiced by Ms Thenjiwe Mtintso, former Chairperson of the Commission on Gender Equality and currently Deputy Secretary General of the ANC, at the Commission hearing on women in Johannesburg:

I know, Chairperson, that the Truth Commission has got a programme of therapy, but I hope it can be sustained, because my own experience in the few months has been that some of the women whose wounds you opened – we did not pay enough time or give them enough opportunity to heal once they left these halls.

I have been to Cape Town where there were hearings, Chairperson. I have been to Port Elizabeth. I have been to King William’s Town. There are wounds that have been left gaping. It may not be the duty of the [Commission] alone; it may be the duty of the public, of all of us; but those wounds, they need to be addressed, Chairperson. You cannot open them in this hall and leave them gaping. Somebody has got to take responsibility.

19 A further cause of concern was the inevitably long delay between victims’ testimony at hearings and the implementation by the state of the Commission’s recommendations on reparations and rehabilitation. In a submission to the health sector hearing in Cape Town, Professor M Simpson, a psychiatrist specialising in post-traumatic stress disorder, raised a further concern:

There has been far too little genuine debate about the nature of social healing and what surely promotes it. Truth is one essential component of the needed social antiseptic which could cleanse the social fabric of the systematised habit of disregard for human rights, but it needs to be an examined truth; it needs to be considered, thought about, debated and digested and metabolised by individuals and by society. Failure to comprehend recent suffering is too often, in the studies I have made, the seed of future suffering.