When South Africans started talking about a negotiated settlement for a democratic future, we had to figure out what do we do with the past. And there were three options. One is Nuremberg type trials like in Germany, which had the disadvantage of not being good for reconciliation at that heated moment, that it might not have been accepted by the National Party establishment, and that it wouldn’t work properly, that people would just destroy documentation, and that there wouldn’t be the capacity to actually prosecute people. Or blanket amnesty—do nothing, and I think the National Party was quite keen on that, to say, “Well, let’s just give everybody amnesty.”
In fact they asked for that, and it was a bureaucratic bungling that happened that they didn’t get it. But that’s what they aimed at. And the third was a kind of a way of handling the past without damaging the political process, a way of not forgetting everything, but not putting people in jail for the rest of their lives. And that was the Truth Commission and it served its role perfectly well, I think.
[The Nuremberg trials were a series of military tribunals set up by Allied forces after World War II to prosecute Nazi war criminals. They took place from 1945 – 1946. The National Party, founded in 1914, ruled South Africa from 1948 to 1994. Its following included mostly Dutch-descended Afrikaners and English-speaking whites. The National Party was long dedicated to policies of apartheid and white supremacy. By the early 1990s, the party had moved toward sharing power with South Africa’s black majority.]
People—the popular perception now is that the Truth Commission was a flop. You ask people around and they say, “Well, you know, where is the reconciliation? I mean, look at us.” Well, I want to remind them of what we looked like in 1989, and then they will see the reconciliation, the way we South Africans treat each other on the factory floor, in the offices, in the suburbs, in sports stadiums. It’s with respect. The relationships between groups and ethnic groups and races in this country are among the healthiest of any diverse society on this planet. And maybe it’s a compliment to us that we think it’s still bad because our standards are high, but it is really—we’re really doing well on that front. I think if we didn’t have the Truth Commission we wouldn’t be where we are now. I’m fairly convinced of that.
It did give the satisfaction to black South Africans that their history would be acknowledged, that their stories would be listened to. Before that people who were tortured or had a husband or a child killed, the official version was, “Well, you’re a communist, you’re a terrorist, or you’re lying.” And now, especially with the cameras of the national broadcast and the microphones of national radio there, people could get on a stage and share their stories and share their pain with the nation and be honored for it, be recognized for it. That was massive, and I saw that firsthand hundreds and hundreds of times over three years, where I had met people beforehand because I had to coach them. “Don’t fear the TV cameras. It’s your camera. I’m not gonna zoom in when you start crying; I’m gonna zoom out. But you want to talk to the rest of—you want to talk to your village, your people, the rest of the nation? That’s what these cameras are for.”
So I had this kind of relationship with many of the victims and people who were giving testimony. And the relief among the vast majority of them just to get this out, and then waiting on Sunday night—“I’m actually gonna see, and I get my family together and my congregation together, and we sit there and we watch my story being told, because my story is the story of thousands of others also who didn’t make it to the Truth Commission public hearings”—that was massive.
It did I think pull the sting of—in terms of the black community it pulled the sting of most of the anger of that violent—physical violence of apartheid. However, it was a flawed process. Because it was part of a deal, of a political deal, it dealt only with gross violations of human rights, very properly explained what they were, between 1960 and 1994. And I think that was important, the person to person violence—torture, kidnapping, assault, murder—but it’s not the story of apartheid.
The damage of apartheid was not in terms of how many people died, because people outside of the country are surprised to find out that actually few people were killed by apartheid. It was not a “Final Solution” kind of process. People were not put up against walls and shot in their hundreds, not at all—not at all.
It was much worse. It was the enslaving of people’s minds. It was telling them over generations that, “You are inferior. You are stupid. Black is half-human. White is superior. European is the standard and you will never make it. This is not your country. Go and live in your homeland. Here’s a pass that you have to carry. And a child of 16—if you’re a grandfather of 80, a white child of 16 can sign your pass and give you permission to walk around in your own homeland.” [The apartheid era government in South Africa created 10 Homelands or Bantustans as territories designated for the black population. Black South Africans were stripped of their citizenship and granted citizenship in one of the homelands. Four of the homelands were declared to be independent nations by the government. After the fall of the apartheid system, the homelands were abolished.]
The forced removals of living for generations and generations in one place, and then a white official comes and he says, “Get the hell out of here and go into some godforsaken place.” That was the damage of apartheid. On the white side it was a very unpopular process, but it in hindsight is the main reason why we don’t have apartheid denialism in this society. We have Holocaust denialism. We have all kinds—after any such big event, any genocide or big event like this in the world’s history over the last 100 years, there’s a tendency afterwards to go into denial by the perpetrating group.
That did not happen and is not happening in South Africa, because white South Africans were forced morning, noon, and night to watch on television and listen on radio and see in newspapers men who looked like me and carried my name standing there and saying, “I please want to have amnesty because I tortured these guys, and those were the circumstances, and then I said this, and I killed those people.” And then those people he tortured would come to the Truth Commission and my cameras would be on them and they would say, “This is what this man did to me.” And it was reality television that was never seen before and will never be seen again. It was extremely powerful because it was genuine human drama. And unspeakable stuff that was done was shown to the nation.
So whites South Africans couldn’t afterwards say, “Well, no, it didn’t happen,” because they knew the whole world saw it, and they saw it, and black South Africans—we saw it together. So that was an extremely important event, to realize once and for all if you didn’t before how evil apartheid really was and the pain that it caused and the resentment that it caused, because you needed white South Africans to carry that with them, because when the Truth Commission was over in ’99, it wasn’t gonna just be a Sunday school picnic. They needed to carry that knowledge, that the resentments this is what the resentment was about, and it will manifest itself. And I think it’s worked very well in that way.
Max du Preez is a South African journalist, author and documentary filmmaker. He was an anti-apartheid journalist who worked to expose government repression.
Born in 1951, Max du Preez grew up in Kroonstad, South Africa. Unlike many Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch colonial settlers who largely supported the apartheid government, his parents were open-minded toward integration of whites and non-whites.
After attending Stellenbosch University, an Afrikaner institution, du Preez began a career in journalism writing for Afrikaans and English language newspapers supportive of the apartheid government. Du Preez quickly became disenchanted by the South African media’s blatant political bias and abandoned his work in the mainstream media.
Du Preez became involved with anti-apartheid movements like the United Democratic Front. In 1988, he founded Vrye Weekblad, the first Afrikaans-language, anti-apartheid newspaper that offered alternative policy perspectives from mainstream media and was critical of the government. The government attempted to stifle the paper financially and legally by levying exorbitant registration fees and charging it with various infractions. In 1990, a member of the Civil Cooperation Bureau, a pro-apartheid group, bombed Vrye Weekblad’s headquarters. Vrye Weekblad survived, however, until 1994 when the government’s financial pressure finally forced its closure. Ironically, apartheid collapsed and South Africa transitioned to democracy later that same year.
During the transition, du Preez covered the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission on television, publicizing the body’s efforts to ease tension and promote a unified, post-apartheid South Africa.
Today, Du Preez remains a prominent South African columnist and media personality. He has received several awards including the Nat Nakasa Award for Courageous Journalism and been named the Yale Globalist International Journalist.
South Africa is a nation of almost 53 million on the southern tip of Africa. The nation has a unique multicultural character and is approximately 80 percent African and 10 percent European, with the remaining 10 percent being of mixed race or Asian heritage. These broad racial categories include a multitude of ethnic and linguistic groups.
Although it has the largest economy on the continent, much of the nation remains in poverty and there is great economic disparity. Historically, the mining industry has played a key role in South Africa’s economy and it continues to remain an important industry today, alongside manufacturing, tourism, and financial services.
South Africa was first settled by non-natives in 1652, when the Dutch established an outpost in what would later become Cape Town. Soon after, British, French, and German settlers came to the area. The descendants of the original Dutch settlers became known as Afrikaners. Conflicts over land and power arose between the settling groups as well as between the settlers and the native people of the region. In 1910, Britain formally created the Union of South Africa as a self-governing dominion within the British Empire.
Throughout South Africa’s history, non-whites were subjected to widespread discrimination. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the government passed a series of laws institutionalizing discrimination and segregation. In the 1948 elections, the National Party, which served as a platform for Afrikaner nationalism, gained power. The National Party program was centered on the system of racial segregation known as apartheid. Supporters of apartheid argued that South Africa was made up of four distinct racial groups: white, black, “Coloured” or mixed-race, and Indian.
The white minority oppressed the African majority and other non-white groups. Black Africans were particularly disadvantaged in terms of education, housing, income, and health. Blacks were denied citizenship and not permitted to use the services and facilities accessible by the white minority. Many blacks were forced to relocate when their neighborhoods were declared “white.” A series of laws enacted in the 1950s further codified and expanded racial segregation. In part, the National Party justified its policies by branding its opponents as communists.
The African National Congress (ANC) was founded in 1912 to advocate for the rights of black South Africans. As apartheid expanded, the ANC and other groups used both nonviolent and violent actions to combat the government. The ANC and other groups were oppressed by the government, and many of their senior leaders were banned or imprisoned. Nelson Mandela, a prominent ANC leader, was imprisoned from 1962 to 1990.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the anti-apartheid movement gained strength. Foreign governments and the international community isolated South Africa. International sanctions damaged the economy and helped erode domestic support for apartheid. Meanwhile, the end of the Cold War weakened the government’s claim that yielding power would lead to a communist takeover.
In 1990, the government of South Africa took its first steps toward ending apartheid when it ended a ban on certain political organizations including the ANC. Nelson Mandela and other opposition leaders were released from prison and apartheid legislation was repealed. F.W. de Klerk, President from 1989-1994, helped to broker this transition of South Africa from the apartheid-era to a multi-racial democracy. In 1993, de Klerk and Mandela received the Nobel Peace Prize for their work.
In 1994, South Africa held its first election that allowed all adults to vote, regardless of race. The ANC gained power and Nelson Mandela was elected president. South Africa enacted a liberal, democratic constitution, backed by a strong and independent judiciary. While the ANC has remained the strongest party, elections are vigorously contested and democratic safeguards are respected. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigated abuses and crimes committed during the apartheid era.
Freedom House’s 2013 Freedom in the World report categorized South Africa as “free” with an overall freedom rating of two, with one being the most free and seven being the least. The country also received ratings of two in political rights and civil liberties. However, in the 2013 Freedom of the Press report, the nation was categorized as “party free” due to government restrictions on the press and the prevalence of civil cases brought against journalists for libel.
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