Special Report Transcript Episode 74, Section 4, Time 37:16

I was trained as a minister of religion and have spent time in two congregations in Riviera, also in Linwood Ridge in Pretoria. I also spent some time at the theological faculty at the University of the North, at Turfloop. Since 1998 I served as Professor in Theology and Missiology, the science of missions and science of religion, at the University of Pretoria. And then as I told you early last year, I was called to the Truth Commission. My wife Inza, I met her when I returned from Holland. I was lonesome, all my fellow students were married, I had no wife. I met her in the library. I had a problem because she was engaged to somebody else, but fortunately it broke off and I got my hand into it and we were married. I do a bit of writing; I do a bit of gardening on Saturday mornings. I especially like my CD collection and quite a substantial amount of my money, my pocket money, goes into CD’s. Apart from Tutu and a few other people Beethoven and Mozart are the heroes of my life. I often tell my wife that sitting and working in the office or going to the different hearings, travelling through the country, is like daily sitting in front of a photo album, paging through the history of South Africa and each of the victims, some of the perpetrators, come and they paste yet another picture of the history of South Africa. Sometimes they paste it with their tears, but it is a very rewarding, a very humbling experience to be there, to sit, to listen, to look, to be part of the process. If you look at the thousands of victims who come, who present their stories, who leave light hearted, who leave with a feeling of healing then you say, yes it was worth our while. If you look at the many perpetrators who need also healing to be reintegrated into society and if you look at the light in their eyes when they receive pardon, it’s worth our while. By the end of November the different churches and the faith communities of South Africa will come together in East London, and the Christians and the Jews and the Hindus and the Muslims, all of them, will have to sit and say what have we to offer from our own experience, from our own histories, what is our commitment towards reconciliation? I’m looking forward to that because they have a lot to offer. There have been a number of Truth Commissions in the world. The past 20 years there have been 16 Truth Commissions. Some of them succeeded, others failed, but the communal wisdom of all the Truth Commissions is that for a truth commission to succeed there are three prerequisites. The first one is that the nation should own the process; I think we still have to work hard on that. The second one is that the government of the day should have the political will to carry the process through, from instituting the Truth Commissioners to implementing the proposals at the end. The last one interestingly is that the Truth Commission has to stop. It’s like a patient in surgery with a very poisonous boil, the boil has to be drained otherwise he’ll die, but you can’t leave him in surgery for too long otherwise he’ll die anyway.

Notes: Piet Meiring

References: there are no references for this transcript