All in the Mind 10th Anniversary Special 6: The Power of Forgiveness
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What is the significance of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa?
Natasha Mitchell, joining you for All In The Mind. We've been celebrating 10 years of the show on air this summer, and today a chance to catch again an interview I did in 2007 with a psychologist whose understanding of forgiveness is profound. She's seen victims forgive perpetrators for the most heinous crimes. Her book, A Human Being Died That Night, Forgiving Apartheid's Chief Killer. was written after serving on South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
We will have looked the beast in the eye. We will have come to terms with our horrendous past and it will no longer keep us hostage.
My name is Pumla Kobodo Madigizela. I come from South Africa in Cape Town. I'm affiliated with the Department of Psychology and hold a position there as Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Cape Town.
We will cast off its shackles and holding hands together, black and white, we will stride together into the future. And looking at our past, we will commit ourselves.
Never again. Maybe I could mention also that I'm a former member of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the committee that was called the Human Rights Violations Committee, which was responsible for organizing public testimonies and collecting testimonies from victims of gross human rights violations.
As the new South Africa grapples with legislation to deal with crimes of its apartheid past, there's disagreement on how to forgive those who violated human rights during that era. The confrontation with the past of white South Africans learning many for the first time of the crimes committed in their name. The death squads, the cross-border raids, the letter bombs mailed to anti-apartheid activists. When the deadline for amnesty applications was about to close in 1996.
Welcome to Australia, Pumla. Thanks for joining us on ABC Radio National. Thank you, Natasha. Before we come to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and your involvement in that, to what extent was the apartheid era in South Africa as much an apartheid of the mind? You talk about an apartheid of the mind, but also about a psychological splitting that happened in the community.
Just to bring in another discipline that contributed to the engineering of a process such as apartheid, and that is the religion. In South Africa, the dominant religion is Christianity, particularly among Afrikaners. And what the apartheid government did was was to use religion and psychology, to integrate religion and psychology as a way of getting to the minds of their supporters. Any group or individuals who were opposed to the state were perceived as the Antichrist. These were the apartheid leaders placed by God, so to speak. And at a deeper psychological or even perhaps one might say unconscious level, I mean that word sometimes is overused, but at a much deeper level is a level at which people then split off their ability to understand right from wrong and abuse from treating people as fellow human beings.
This whole idea of splitting away within the self so that if you are not for me, then you are other. And if you are other, then I can treat you any way that I want. So you make the other person invisible. You don't see them as human beings. And that happens at a very deeply psychological level to the extent that people may not even be consciously aware of what they are doing, just their mind splits off. I don't exist in your eyes or you don't exist in my eyes as a human being.
How did apartheid become an ‘apartheid of the mind’ according to Pumla?
Your book,
Pumla, A Human Being Died That Night, is the most extraordinary dialogue between you and one of the apartheid regime's chief killers. Tell me about Eugene de Kock, whose peers dubbed him primeval. He's in prison now for two lifetimes. Who is he and what did he do?
Eugene de Kock was the head of COVID operations unit in the security forces of South Africa. And his role was to train black and white collaborators with the state as death squads. Black and white anti-apartheid activists were targeted by the security forces or the state. And word would be out that they needed to be eliminated.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the significance of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa?
0:00–4:27
2
How did apartheid become an ‘apartheid of the mind’ according to Pumla?
4:27–8:17
3
Who was Eugene de Kock and what role did he play in the apartheid death squads?
8:17–12:37
4
Why did Pumla choose to meet the ‘chief killer’ in prison and what did she hope to learn?
12:37–17:50
5
What was the impact of touching de Kock’s shaking hand during their first interview?
17:50–22:41
6
How does the ‘necklace game’ illustrate the inter‑generational transmission of trauma?
22:41–28:24
7
What is ‘radical forgiveness’ and how does it differ from ordinary forgiveness?
28:24–29:27