Good evening everyone. The process of pulling ideas out of the ether -or facts out of the swamp of life-and rendering them into the cool, handsome typeface of a book is an extraordinarily difficult one. And so we come to a book launch to congratulate the author who has managed to do so, and to celebrate with her.
And I do want to congratulate Dr Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela on this very fine work; her account of her engagement with Eugene De Kock while she was working for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I also do want to invite you all to celebrate with us at this moment of its South African launch. That's what the drinks are about.
But I also want to do something simpler, more personal: I want to thank you, Pumla, for the gift of this book. You write, in the book, about how impossible it is to represent trauma through language, and how difficult it is to use language to perform the transaction of forgiveness that is so central to reconcilaition.
But you have found the words, you have found the language, to assist us all in the project of healing -individually and collectively. And that is your gift to us. You give it to us without any kind of sentimentality, or hubris. You don't say to us, "Look how brave I was to look Prime Evil in the eye", or "I've seen the light that is eluding all of you".
Rather, you give us some kind of roadmap -some kind of guide-for how to deal with the confused, and jangling and often very painful feelings we all continue to have, as South Africans, ten years the other side of the Rainbow.
And for that I thank you. I thank you as a South African, but I also thank you, very particularly, as a white South African. Because you make it very clear that even if de Kock committed acts of great evil, all of us who were the beneficiaries of these acts are to share responsibility for them. I thank you not because I feel you've exonerated me in any way, but because your book has given me, personally, some kind of language for how I am to resolve my own guilt as a white South African, for the things that were done in my name.
I first came into contact with Pumla when, as a journalist, I was trying to make sense of the TRC as theatre, of how the Commission was orchestrating its hearings so as to present a drama with which we could all identify. I became particularly interested in the hearings that had taken place at Paarl, on the Boland, where a woman named Anne-Marie McGregor had come to the hearings to talk about her son, Wallace, a conscript who had died up on the border in 1987, and whose body she was not even allowed to identify.
What was extraordinary about this testimony was the way it shifted the victim/perpetrator paradigm into an entirely different register. Wallace McGregor might have been an apartheid soldier, but he was also the victim of a system he had been manipulated into defending. And now, in front of the Commission was a woman weeping, a woman who had lost her son to war, like so many other women.
Now, for the first time, white South Africans were forced to understand themselves not just as victims of terrorists or as perpetrators of evil, but as victims of the very system supposedly protecting them.
How did it happen, I wanted to know, that the story of Wallace McGregor came to be heard at Paarl? That's when I first heard of Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela. She was one South Africa's first black clinical psychologists, and she had been appointed onto the TRC's Human Rights Violations Committee. Pumla had become very disturbed by the way white South Africans appeared to be splitting themselves off from the TRC process, and so she was determined to find a way of bringing them in.
I came to hear about how Pumla went to the Paarl library, poring over community newspapers and records until she found the McGregor story. How she called Bishop Tutu on her way back from Paarl and said, 'We've got to do this'. How this led on not only to the McGregor testimony but to the TRC's special hearing about Conscription. I came to see how a black woman, a victim of apartheid herself, had the courage to break open one of white society's greatest taboos: the trauma that conscription visited not not only upon our black compatriots, but upon ourselves as white South Africans, and thus upon our society as a whole.
Later, I also heard about how controversial this project was within the TRC; how some of her colleagues were offended by the very notion that white conscripts and their families could even be seen as victims. And I came to discover one of Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela's most enviable qualities: her fearlessness. Her very cool and very dignified fearlessness. Her willingness to stick to principle even if politically unpopular.
Over the years I've watched this quality with growing respect. After having experienced the ravages of HIV within her own family, she wrote publicly about what she believed to be the wrongheadedness of the government's approach to the AIDS epidemic, and particularly what she believed was a state of denial, at the highest level, about the level of promiscuity among South African men.
She is not an opstoker. As anyone who worked in the TRC will tell you, she is a natural conciliator. But she cannot abide denial and darkness. She is a truth-teller - not least about herself.
As you'll see when you read this extraordinary book.