Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela - A Human Being Died That Night

Forgiving Apartheids
Chief Killer

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

This is an extraordinary human story about a self-confessed, ruthless and highly skilled murderer. It is based on a series of lengthy interviews that Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela has conducted with a man widely known as Prime Evil in an attempt to understand what motivated him to commit the deeds he engaged in. This is a book that does not simply condemn. It explores the multiple dimensions of an ideology that made a man. The subtext is that if we fail to understand the nature and power of the forces that make for evil forces that often lie just beneath the surface of most societies they are likely to reoccur in one form or another at some time in the future.

One of the tasks of South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was to uncover the causes, motives and perspectives of oppression and the mind of perpetrators of gross violations of human rights. Professor Gobodo-Madikizela takes this mandate a step further. Drawing on her considerable skill as a psychologist, she also reaches deep into her own humanity to confront herself and her readers with a range of pertinent moral and spiritual questions about the capacity of human beings to commit evil. This is the story of an encounter between two very different human beings. One white, the other black. One male, the other a woman. One an apartheid torturer, the other one who lived on the wrong side of apartheid laws. The one a pursuer of evil in a clandestine manner, the other a member of the TRC, eager to lay bare the evils of the past.

The book takes a dramatic turn with de Kocks extraordinary awakening of remorse. De Kock focuses the spotlight on a system within which he worked and on those who rewarded him for his evil deeds. This raises questions concerning the moral and legal responsibility of government, civil servants, officers in the police and armed forces as well as citizens. Many who designed and nurtured the apartheid state, gave orders to kill or simply turned a blind eye to what was happening have never been required to face the questions that de Kock and Professor Gobodo-Madikizela require the reader to face.

This is not a book of easy answers. It poses deep questions about social and political responsibility. It at the same time discerns the presence of humanity in the midst of the worst kind of evil. This is a book about the possibility of healing and restoration. In this sense it is a profoundly South African book about the South African transition in which people on both sides of the political divide reached out to one another in an attempt to understand what went wrong as a basis for limiting the chances of the kind of evil that brought this country to its knees ever happening again. It is a book that anyone interested in learning how after massive traumatic events it is possible to transcend feelings of revenge and break the cycles of political violence. Its relevance stretches far beyond South Africa.

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizelas erudition as a scholar, her warmth as a human being and her insight into the South African story come together in a book that makes an important contribution to existing literature on the psychology of evil and on the South African transition. I am extremely grateful to her.

April 2006

Brother, brother, what are you saying? I mean, you have blood on your hands! Dunya cried in despair.

The blood thats on everyones hands that flows and has always flowed through the world like a waterfall, that is poured like champagne and for the sake of which men are crowned in the Capitol and then called the benefactors of mankind. Well, just take a closer look and see whats really what!

F YODOR D OSTOYEVSKY ,
Crime and Punishment

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