TO FIX SOUTH AFRICA, WE NEED TO LEND AN EAR TO THE VOICES CRYING OUT TO BE HEARD AND HEALED
Response to Letter from the Editor, 25 March
After reading your letter in Daily Maverick, I want to mention a photographic exhibition, Against the Grain, which is on at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg.
I am a 73-year-old white woman, so I witnessed the atrocities of apartheid. Though I’m deeply disappointed at what’s happening in our country today, seeing the photographs by people like Ernest Cole and David Goldblatt is such an awful reminder of how things were then.
I would encourage anyone – those who were there, those who say they didn’t know what was happening and those who weren’t born yet – to go and see the exhibition and acknowledge the absolute lack of humanity to which people were subjected.
What we’re going through currently is also inhumane, but it comes out of greed and fear, rather than out of a desire to crush and subordinate people as happened pre-1994.
The missing link, as I see it, is that despite the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s attempts, we’ve never truly addressed the needs of people to be acknowledged and respected and to have our dignity restored, so there’s a huge gap in what needs healing.
One person who has tried to address this in our country is Father Michael Lapsley, who runs the Institute for Healing of Memories in Cape Town. He used to, perhaps still does, run a workshop that goes by that name. Unfortunately I was never able to attend one and tried unsuccessfully to put one together in Johannesburg, but I heard many wonderful stories of the work he did.
Politicians will never address those underlying needs and I believe that what we need is to sit with each other, hear one another’s stories and through that find a path to healing.