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Reconciling the Past:
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela,
South Africa
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TRC chair Desmond Tutu and committee member Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela at the TRC hearings.
Photo: IRIS FILMS
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"The Long Road Traveled"
by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela
South Africa's past is marked by violent political conflict and decades
of resistance against the cruel and repressive laws of apartheid. Opposition
was for many years non-violent. But, after almost 50 years of peaceful
protest by Nelson Mandela's African National Congress (ANC), the police
opened fire on March 21, 1960, on several thousand black people gathered
to protest the notorious pass laws that required blacks to carry internal
passports that completely regulated their lives. Sixty-seven protesters
were killed and 186 were wounded, including 40 women and eight children.
This killing by the apartheid regime spelled the end of peaceful protest.
Mandela announced the establishment of an armed wing of the ANC to carry
out acts of sabotage. As a result the police arrested him, and he was
sentenced to life in prison. Over the next decades repression spun out
of control: since 1960, numerous massacres of black people by the police
were recorded; hundreds of thousands of apartheid opponents were detained
without trial; and thousands were severely tortured and often died in
detention. During the 1980s, South Africa saw an increase in widespread
torture by security police, mysterious deaths and disappearances of political
activists, mass killings, and police cover-up operations. Meanwhile,
the police were given immense powers and immunity from prosecution for
the human rights abuses they committed.
Freedom and Forgiveness
By the beginning of the 1990s, President P.W. Botha and his colleagues
were driven to the realization that the spiral of violence was leading
the country to ruin and international isolation. He released Nelson Mandela
from prison and established CODESA (Convention for a Democratic Election
in South Africa), which resulted in the transfer of power to the majority
through the election of Mandela and the ANC in 1994.
One of the concerns in making the transfer of power was how to reconcile
the past. The result was the National Unity and Reconciliation Act of
1995 and the establishment of The Truth and Reconciliation Commission
(TRC). Facing the past was critical in a country that had a history of
crimes against humanity, as apartheid was described in a UN declaration.
But perhaps the significance of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
(TRC) was that it not only addressed apartheid's crimes, but also reviewed
the gross human rights violations committed in the resistance against
apartheid. For this reason the commission emphasized even-handedness
in the way it dealt with the more than 22,000 victims who came to tell
their stories of trauma, loss, and suffering. |
Pumla was involved in several social issues in South Africa, and was a founding
member of a children's rights organization in the Eastern Cape region in 1991,
a position that led to her appointment as chair of the first UNICEF project
on the situation analysis on the state of children in South Africa. In the
1980s, she was an expert witness to the Supreme Court of South Africa, working
with human rights lawyers who were defending young black anti-apartheid activists.
In 1996, she joined the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a committee
member on the commission's Human Rights Violations Committee. She was based
in Cape Town, where she initiated and developed the Commission's first outreach
program. During her term on the TRC, she coordinated and chaired victims' public
hearings of the TRC in the Western Cape region.
While serving on the TRC, Pumla interviewed perpetrators of atrocities from
both sides of the past political conflict, a project that was the subject of
her doctoral thesis. She has been the recipient of many awards that have taken
her to the University of California, University of Michigan, UCLA, and Harvard
University. In the fall of 1998, she was awarded a Peace Fellowship by the
Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies
at Harvard University. She has been a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights
Policy and the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School of Government,
and spent her fellowship year examining forgiveness in the context of the TRC.
In 2000/2001 she was a fellow at the Center for the Study of Values in Public
Life at the Harvard Divinity School, and spent the year working on her first
book, which is based on her interviews with Eugene de Kock, the former apartheid
government's chief assassin. Recently Pumla received the Dr. Jean Mayer Global
Citizenship Award at Tufts University for the insights she has brought to discussions
on transitional justice. She was recently featured in the award-winning documentary Long
Night's Journey into Day.
The most profound experience of Pumla's career with the TRC was witnessing
the incredible phenomenon of forgiveness between victims and perpetrators.
The desire by the many victims to meet their perpetrators was something she
had never imagined would happen. But when she witnessed victims reaching out
to perpetrators who had shattered their worlds, and offering them forgiveness,
she was filled with hope. It became clear that the TRC process had far-reaching
consequences, not only for individual victims and perpetrators encountering
each other, often for the first time, but also as a model for uniting groups
of people struggling with a history of conflict.
Pumla is a graduate of Fort Hare University, where she obtained her social
work degree and honors degree in psychology; Rhodes University, where she received
her masters degree and University of Cape Town, which awarded her a doctoral
degree in psychology. She worked as a community social worker and a clinical
psychologist, and then taught for several years in the psychology department
of the University of Transkei in South Africa.
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