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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 4 of Episode 79
| Time | Summary | | | 35:25 | Let’s turn our attention to something else now. Before we go to the heartbreaking story of the people who lost their heritage, we continue our series of short profiles on the people who make the Truth Commission process happen. Tonight we look at Deputy Chairperson Alex Boraine. | Full Transcript | | 35:44 | I was born in Cape Town and went to school here. It was a very long time ago obviously, it was towards the end of the war and I had lost two brothers in the war. They were very young, 17 and 19 and as a youngster, myself about 14, I didn’t understand really what was all happening. So, I left school at 14 and bluffed my age and went to work, there didn’t seem to be any point I thought I was the next in line to go and die, and then the war ended obviously. And when I was about 16, 17, I thought this is crazy I need more education. | Full Transcript | | 36:42 | Boraine matriculated at the age of seventeen and went on to study theology at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. After a few years the young parish priest went to England and the United States to further his studies in the fields of theology and philosophy. | Full Transcript | | 36:57 | I think it was that that opened my own eyes to what was really happening in my own country, the dehumanization that was taking place, because of the policies of the government. I became head of the Methodist Church in this country when I was very young. But that meant that I went all over the country and wherever I went I saw evidence of oppression and suffering and obviously that makes one very angry. And how to translate that into creative opposition rather than simply bemoaning the fact made me think well perhaps the church has to be in the marketplace, it ought to be where power is. | Full Transcript | | 37:40 | So in 1974 Boraine joined the then Progressive Party and swopped the pulpit for Parliament. // ‘I look for that turning of the corner, that movement away, to take a new direction in South Africa, which will give us hope for the future. I believe that the people of South Africa are ready for that; I believe they are hungry for that.’ | Full Transcript | | 38:05 | By 1986, after 12 years in opposition politics, he quit Parliament. // I decided that there’s no point staying there, that the military seemed to be dominating the country, it was a state of emergency, and started a thing called the Institute for the Democratic Alternative, IDASA. Was there for quite a long time and then into justice in transition, how do you cope with the past, how do you build for the future? And got very interested in the whole question of the Commission and now I’m in the Commission. | Full Transcript and References | | 38:42 | All of us were involved in this wretched past of ours and I don’t think you can build a better future unless you actually deal with that past, because if you don’t learn from your history you are destined to repeat it. So yes I want to turn the page and I want South Africa to turn the page. And I hope all of us can do that. But you must first read that page; you must understand where we are coming from so that we don’t repeat those mistakes. Because I think essentially the Commission is about the future and we can’t really build a future on lies and deceit. We have to build it on the truth. That’s one thing we cannot escape from, but it’s a truth that should set us free to build a much, much brighter future for all of us. | Full Transcript | | 39:47 | As Deputy Chairperson of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Alex Boraine has a stressful, punishing schedule which leaves him very little time to relax at home with his family. | Full Transcript | | 39:58 | It’s not easy. I think the last couple of years have been the hardest years of my entire life emotionally, physically, mentally. There are just so many balls in the air. I have a very, very understanding and caring wife but she constantly says to me don’t come and load off on me here, you have got to handle this and deal with this yourself and find someone else, I’ve got my own life to live. And that’s right. That’s absolutely fair. What do I do? Well, occasionally I roll on the floor with my granddaughter and all the stuff leaves you, because this precious little two-year old is just so much of the future and so much of hope. So that helps. I find that emotional thing the hardest, because you suppress it, you can’t display it, and it hits you at about three o’clock in the morning when you relive some of the stuff and your mind is so alive and you go over it and you see the faces and you hear the words. And it’s very rough. I don’t know quite what this is doing to ...more | Full Transcript |
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