Forgiving is possible if matched by offender’s remorse
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela has hope that the hatred born of apartheid barbarities need not be passed on to future generations
SOUTH Africans who were politically informed during the apartheid years may have known Siphiwo Mthimkhulu’s story. He was an anti-apartheid activist who was repeatedly detained without trial under apartheid laws, tortured, and poisoned under the government’s policy of “covert operations”.
His mother Joyce Mthimkhulu’s story might never have been known if it were not for the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In fact, her story might have remained in the black hole of invisibility had Gideon Nieuwoudt, one of Siphiwo’s killers, succeeded in interdicting the TRC to prevent Siphiwo’s mother from telling her story in public.
In a painfully memorable moment during her testimony, Joyce held up a lock of her son’s hair. Mysteriously, after he was released from detention, Siphiwo’s hair started falling out and he developed other severe symptoms that his mother said reduced him to “crawling like a cat”.
Doctors at Groote Schuur Hospital found that his symptoms were caused by thallium poisoning. He sued the minister of police for torture and poisoning, but disappeared soon after he instituted the suit. His killers testified at the TRC that they abducted and shot him. They then doused his body with petrol and burnt it over several hours to destroy evidence. Joyce’s plea to the TRC: “If they can show me where the bones of my child are, I will be grateful.”
Award-winning documentary filmmaker Mark Kaplan powerfully captures Joyce’s quest for truth about the whereabouts of her son’s remains in his film, Between Joyce and Remembrance. The film also tells the story of Nieuwoudt when he visits the Mthimkhulu family to ask for forgiveness, and their absolute refusal to grant him the forgiveness he wants.
In a dramatic moment in the film, Siphiwo’s 15-year-old son, Sikhumbuzo (meaning “memorial”), who was only three months old when his father was murdered, throws a heavy vase at Nieuwoudt, fracturing his skull. With his hand covering the bleeding wound, and the Mthimkhulu family rushing to help him, visibly shocked by Sikhumbuzo’s actions, Nieuwoudt tries to convince the family that he has told them the truth.
In Black Christmas, a film that tells the story of a perpetrator’s journey of transformation and remorse for the racially motivated 1996 Christmas Eve bombing in Worcester, Kaplan shifts the lens from his usual focus on the harrowing stories of victims of apartheid crimes and directs it on the story of a perpetrator who has been forgiven by victims of his crimes.
Screened in public for the first time on Thursday at the Labia cinema in Cape Town, the film centres on Stefaans Coetzee, the youngest bomber and member of the rightwing Wit Wolwe, aligned with the Israel Vision religious cult. The decision to target the Worcester Shoprite store on Christmas Eve — a major pre-Christmas shopping day for many black families — was calculated to achieve mass murder: “We wanted to kill as many black people as possible,” Coetzee says in the film.
Olga Macingwane, one of the survivors of the Worcester bombing and a member of the Khulumani Support Group, an organisation that was started by survivors who testified at the TRC, was the first person from the survivors to meet Coetzee. In the film she recalls asking him at that first meeting: “If I forgive you, Stefaans, what are you prepared to give back?”
Coetzee, who was abandoned by his parents, grew up in an orphanage and ended up with a foster father who taught him to become a terrorist in his teens, had nothing to offer. Yet Macingwane forgave him. “Come here, my boy,” she told him after hearing his story. “I see my sister’s son in you . . . I forgive you.”
Kaplan’s Black Christmas is a compelling statement on why forgiving Coetzee makes sense. His journey of transformation is made explicit in the film: from a drugsmuggling, racist and violent prisoner nicknamed “Hitler” by his fellow inmates, to a man who, with the help of a restorative justice programme, begins to face his shameful past and its unsettling truths.
At the same time, the film shows why forgiveness cannot be prescribed. When, as part of his parole application, a meeting is organised with the support of the Department of Correctional Services for Coetzee’s first encounter with a large group of survivors and family members of victims, one survivor refuses to forgive: “I will go to my grave not forgiving him.”
After watching the film, one can’t help but think of Clive Derby-Lewis and Janusz Walus, whose “sorrys”, in the eyes of the Hani family and some observers, have failed to rise to the level of believable remorse.
Remorse transcends words of apology and requires an internal dialogue that forces perpetrators truly to face their dehumanising, murderous actions, and genuinely to confront their guilt. Some perpetrators are incapable of feeling remorse — they lack the capacity for the kind of empathic resonance with their victims’ pain and suffering that may lead to remorse.
Alternatively, they understand the moral implications of their actions, but in order to protect themselves from an inner shattering of the self, they continue to hide from their shame. Instead of facing the truth about their actions, they pervert the truth, claiming righteousness of their actions. Derby-Lewis, for instance, told the TRC that the killing of Hani could be justified because of his Christian faith: “We as Christians are told that it is our duty to fight the antichrist in whichever way we can.”
Similarly, in December 2014, his wife, Gaye Derby-Lewis, defiantly told reporters that given another chance, her husband would repeat his destructive, hateful actions.
Remorse is not just a word, and forgiveness not a right that perpetrators should demand when they want to be released from prison. South Africa chose the path of national reconciliation not simply to give perpetrators a vocabulary for escaping accountability.
The TRC opened up the space for South Africans to turn away from violence towards new, post-colonial and post-apartheid ethics that could help build, in the words of Frantz Fanon, a more humane “world of the You”. The vision was for a world in which the continuing legacies of black pain — its intergenerational cycles of repetition — might be interrupted so that the children of victims do not carry the burden of their parents’ pain, and pass it on to their children.
Sikhumbuzo Mthimkhulu’s crashing of the vase on “the enemy’s” head may be the only language available in the face of an absence of authentic recognition of the depth of one’s pain. Black Christmas shows that another way is possible.
Gobodo-Madikizela is a professor and Chair of Research in Social Change and Transformation at Stellenbosch University. She also holds a research fellowship at the University of the Free State, and was awarded the SARCHI Chair for Historical Trauma and Memory
Some perpetrators are incapable of remorse — they lack the capacity for resonance with victims’ pain The decision to target the Worcester store on Christmas Eve . . . was calculated to achieve mass murder