IV. Saturday Night: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Following our discussion of legal education, those who were ready for a late night remained in our meeting hall to watch the magnificent and compelling PBS documentary, “Long Night’s Journey Into Day,” on the work of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Although the film lasted more than an hour and a half, all who viewed it, especially those seeing it for the first time, were stunned by the capacity of a legal process without precedent in human history to assimilate the enormity of human suffering that had occurred under the system of apartheid. As discussions afterwards revealed, the fact that such brutal acts of torture could be recounted, often in the most simple and straightforward manner, by victims and family members of victims who had felt pulled by some inner moral necessity to come forward and speak their truths, was an awesome thing to behold.

Several of us felt that in some way it was the act of bearing witness to the testimony itself that was the legal process—that the capacity of all to share the recognition in public that these acts took place allowed the truth alone to begin to do the work of untwisting the distortion of spiritual interrelatedness that is what apartheid was. For some of us, the most powerful moment manifesting this extraordinary moral power of merely bearing witness occurred when Bishop Tutu, who was presiding over the giving of testimony by both victims and perpetrators, simply fell forward from his seated position face-down onto the table before him, shocked beyond the capacity to even be present at the telling, in the presence of the impassive white policeman/perpetrator, of the cruelty and atrocity that one victim had endured.

Others felt that the absence of words of judgment and consequences robbed the proceedings of a sense of justice—that there was a deep hollowness in hearing men blankly acknowledge committing acts of great cruelty without being subject to communal punishment or a definite action of some kind, restorative or otherwise. We all went to bed contemplating the relationship between what we had seen and our work at the retreat, and perhaps also the immensity of what we had seen relative to the smallness of the efforts of a group of good-hearted people like ourselves gathering together on the edge of our continent so distant from South Africa.