Do not forget the sacrifice

THIS week has seen more harrowing testimony from former apartheid activists at the inquest of Dr Neil Aggett, the trade unionist who was said to have hanged himself in his cell after being tortured at the notorious John Vorster Square police station almost 40 years ago.

Nobody was held accountable then, just as nobody was held accountable – until last year – for the murder of Ahmed Timol, who was flung to his death from the 10th floor of the same police station.

Both of these inquests are critical if we are ever to staunch the weeping wounds that still cannot heal, which if we do not address them, will become something even worse, ultimately ripping the fabric of our society irreparably.

We need to properly remember the abuses that were perpetrated. We need to show, even if only symbolically and much later, that no one gets away with wrongdoing so that we can move forward and break the cycle of the oppressed becoming the oppressors – as has been the case throughout time, from the Boer freedom fighters who became the progenitors of apartheid to the Jewish survivors of the Nazi death camps whose successors today in Israel make bantustans of Gaza, the Golan and the West Bank.

We need to remember, too, that the Struggle against apartheid involved white, coloured and

Indian South Africans, many of whom paid the ultimate price – in direct contradistinction to the new narrative peddled by born-free identity politicians that only black South Africans should benefit.

We also need to remember that it is a great possible dishonour to the millions of black, coloured and Indian South Africans who suffered horribly under apartheid for white South Africans to simply dismiss their pain and blithely ignore the festering legacy that remains.

We dare not forget. Not a single one of us.