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Content
A listing of transcripts of the dialogue and narrative of this section.
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Structure
The list provides the transcript, info about the text, and links to references contained in the text.
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Special Report
Transcripts for Section 2 of Episode 54
| Time | Summary | | | 01:33 | It all began here on 15 April 1996 in the Eastern Cape, the womb of apartheid resistance over decades. Here, in the glare of the world’s media they stepped where no one had gone before and they spoke the first words in the great telling of our shameful and proud past. There were the wounded and the pained. // ‘And I was still twenty at the time and I couldn’t handle this, so I was taken to Nyami‘s place and when I got there Nyami was crying terribly.’ // And then there were those with great loss in their hearts and anger in their veins. // ‘I don’t want to cry, really I don’t want to cry but I’d like the Commission to help me.’ // They were the brave pioneers of the Truth Commission, those who led all the others to sew their truths into the patchwork quilt of a new history. // There’s been a lot of evil. There’s been a lot of evil in this country. It’s being exorcised. | Full Transcript | | 03:19 | The Commission sat in noisy cities and quiet dorpies. They sat in big imposing town halls and dingy schools and churches, from Messina in the north to Cape Town in the south and from everywhere the victims came. Some were dignified, silver haired elders, others impassioned young lions. Sometimes they were even small, little lions. The stories were of torture and abduction, rumours that became reality. // ‘This is Siphiwo’s hair, this is the scalp’ // They spoke about massacres and wars; they spoke about death of a single child and about the killing of whole families. // ‘I heard their voices, no one screamed twice, each one screamed just once then I’d hear the next one and another one until they finished them all.’ // There were those who wept about loved ones who disappeared without a trace. // ‘They must give him back to me even if it is just the bones so that I can bury him.’ // There were those who saw loved ones return // as corpses. // ‘And just to see that he ...more | Full Transcript | | 08:16 | There were the cynics of course, some called it the crying commission, but often they were white or old allies of apartheid and scared of the guilt that came with hearing the truth, but then there were those who became part of the telling and through that some sort of reconciliation. // ‘You have looked into the hearts of wounded, sometimes broken people. My story and that of my children is small in comparison with so many others for whom our hearts bleed. Our pain is simply a drop in the South African ocean of pain.’ // But what did all these who came to bear their souls seek? For many it was simply enough to tell their story to a nation whose time it was to listen. Others wanted to lay the past to rest. Again and again they asked for the remains of those who had disappeared. For some, like the family of murdered ANC cadre Phila Ndwandwe this became a terrible reality. For others, the bones were lost forever, dumped into this river, but knowing this was the beginning of the ...more | Full Transcript | | 10:42 | Over the fourteen months the South African truth process developed its own unique identity. Even while listening to the most harrowing testimony people could still laugh. People also sang, gave comfort to others and when there was nothing more to say, they prayed. | Full Transcript |
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