Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela Research Articles

Musings and Meditations on the Edginess and Hatred of Forgiveness

Heeding Frantz Fanon's thoughts on colonialism and forgiveness alongside his call for us to “turn over a new leaf . . . work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man,” this text-mediated meditation on the hatred of forgiveness contends with the question/quest of forgiveness and its relevance to our idea of Africa today. To attend to these ethical questions, the author assembles a textual montage by juxtaposing Wole Soyinka's The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness lecture series (1997), with some reflections on for/giving from Nathalie Etoke's Melancholia Africana (2019), Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of forgiveness, and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela's (2004) attempt to imagine and inhabit a postapartheid South Africa where forgiveness acts as an infinite responsibility to the other. As such, this text-mediated meditation engages the newness, closure, eruption or interruption of violence, and forgiveness characteristic of the African present alongside discourses on African memories of grievances and speculations about the Africa that is yet-to-come.

Uncanny Times: The Case of Eugene de Kock

ABSTRACT This article focuses specifically on post-apartheid representations of Eugene de Kock, who is seen as one of the bookends to the first, more optimistic, phase of South Africa’s post-apartheid moment. The other bookend, also discussed briefly here, is Nelson Mandela, the country’s first democratically elected president. De Kock was a notorious apartheid-era assassin and commanding officer of Vlakplaas, infamously associated with the extra-judicial torture and execution of anti-apartheid freedom fighters in the 1980s. I isolate this time-frame, from Mandela to de Kock, to comment specifically on what can be seen as a distortion of temporality in South African public life – a kind of disjuncture between time and history, to use David Scott’s formulation (2). I argue that this distortion is characteristic of the post-revolutionary present, not only in South Africa, but in many other parts of the world where a struggle for freedom terminates in a neoliberal order. The figure of the prison is central to this discussion: indeed, the prison is understood as one of the privileged sites where meaning is made and contested in the imagination of a national identity. Also central to this discussion is Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s remarkably prescient 2003 book about her encounters with de Kock in the ‘C-Max’ section of Pretoria Central prison, A Human Being Died That Night.

Inside out: Gender, individualism, and representations of the contemporary South African prison

This article examines A Human Being Died that Night: A Story of Forgiveness by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and Red Ink by Angela Makholwa, which are, respectively, auto/biographical and fictional narrative representations of the contemporary South African prison. Both narratives foreground gender because their female authors consciously posit their own femininity, in the case of Gobodo-Madikizela, and of her protagonist, in the case of Makholwa, as significant to the prison they portray. Although the way non-fiction and fiction operate cannot be conflated, Makholwa’s novel seems to mirror the structure of Gobodo-Madikizela’s auto/biography in obvious ways; an observation that helps justify why I analytically compare these narratives in this article. Most apartheid prison narratives, by authors of all genders, largely adopted an unambiguously political frame in articulating the subject positions of characters. The personal was deliberately subsumed in what appeared to be an urgent political need to dismantle the oppressive apartheid system. By contrast, there is a clear shift to the individualization of the prisoner at the expense of politicized collectivity in the selected narratives. However, my reading seeks to demonstrate that the ostensibly apolitical stance adopted by Makholwa and the personal and psychological approach taken by Gobodo-Madikizela are in fact deeply political and community-engaged processes.

Acknowledging the Other’s Suffering

Acknowledging the Other’s Suffering

Conversation between Ruth Safier and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela on “Remembering the past: Nostalgia, traumatic memory, and the legacy of apartheid”.

Conversation between Ruth Safier and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela on “Remembering the past: Nostalgia, traumatic memory, and the legacy of apartheid”.

Managing vulnerability: South Africa's struggle for a democratic rhetoric

A detailed account of the struggle to cultivate connectedness out of the divisiveness of apartheid In Managing Vulnerability, Richard C. Marback analyses the tension surrounding the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa through a rhetorical lens. Marback studies the heart of South Africa's desire for reconciliation and contends that this goal could be achieved only through the creation of a language of vulnerability in which former enemies become open to the influence of each other, to the constraints of their respective circumstances, and to the prospects of a shared future. Through a series of informative case studies, Marback illustrates how the cultivation of openness and the management of vulnerability take shape through the circulation of artefacts, symbols, and texts that give empowering expression to virtues of connectedness over the temptations of individual autonomy. Marback discusses the construction and impact of the narrative tours of Robben Island, the silencing of Robert Sobukwe, the debates over a proposed Freedom Monument, a brief gesture of ubuntu from Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela to Eugene de Kock, and the transformation of the title character in the film adaptation of the 1980 novel Tsotsi. Ultimately, Marback contends, finding a means to manage vulnerability is both the immediate success of and the ongoing challenge to South African democracy and is indicative of the nature of rhetoric in democracies in general and in contemporary civic life.

Threshold of Human Touch

Editor's Note In the fall of 1997, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela was a clinical psychologist serving on the Human Rights Violations Committee of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In her book A Human Being Died that Night: A South African Woman Confronts the Legacy of Apartheid, she recounts her interviews, conducted in the maximum-security Pretoria Central Prison, with Eugene de Kock, the commanding officer of the state sanctioned death squads. Nicknamed Prime Evil, de Kock acknowledged his crimes to the com mission and was ultimately granted amnesty for all but two; for these he was given a two hundred twelve-year sentence for crimes against human ity. At one point early in the series of interviews, de Kock breaks down as he recounts meeting the widows of two black policemen he murdered. As he weeps with remorse, Gobodo-Madikizela instinctively reaches across the table between them and touches his hand to comfort him. Later, this act of compassion launches Gobodo-Madikizela into a profound meditation about her emotions and motives: she wonders whether she has crossed the

History, memory and reconciliation: Njabulo Ndebele’s <i>The cry of Winnie Mandela</i> and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s <i>A human being died that night</i>

This article deals with two texts written during the process of transition in South Africa, using them to explore the cultural and ethical complexity of that process. Both Njabulo Ndebele’s “The cry of Winnie Mandela” and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s “A human being died that night” deal with controversial public figures, Winnie Mandela and Eugene de Kock respectively, whose role in South African history has made them part of the national iconography. Ndebele and Gobodo-Madikizela employ narrative techniques that expose and exploit faultlines in the popular representations of these figures. The two texts offer radical ways of understanding the communal and individual suffering caused by apartheid, challenging readers to respond to the past in ways that will promote healing rather than perpetuate a spirit of revenge. The part played by official histories is implicitly questioned and the role of individual stories is shown to be crucial. Forgiveness and reconciliation are seen as dependent on an awareness of the complex circumstances and the humanity of those who are labelled as offenders. This requirement applies especially to the case of “A human being died that night”, a text that insists that the overt acknowledgement of the humanity of people like Eugene de Kock is an important way of healing South African society.

Editor's Notes

Editor’s Notes Since its inception six years ago, River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative has been dedicated to the simple proposition that truth matters. Although factual narrative remains difficult to define with absolute precision, we have adopted the Tim O'Brien credo that if one hears or reads a great story that claims to be true, one will inevitably ask the question: "Did that really happen?" And, as O'Brien reminds us: "If the answer matters, you've got your answer." This year, courtesy of a Fulbright research/lectureship to South Africa, I have had the chance to experience first hand the social, political, and artistic power of complex and intertwining narratives that claim to be true. Now celebrating the first ten years of its post-Apartheid democracy, the Republic of South Africa is perhaps the only nation in the world to have staked its political and social future on the complementary concepts of truth and reconciliation. Instead of burying its racist past or merely extracting revenge on those who perpetrated it, the nation of South Africa seems to believe that confronting the traumatic story of its history might ensure a more just and equitable future. We all could learn from them. Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu convened South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission as an extraordinary invitation to both the victims and the perpetrators of the old South Africa. All were asked to bring to the public arena their truthful accounts of life under apartheid—the torture, the disappearances, the beatings, and the shootings—in an effort to confront the meaning of these stories rather than to pretend they never happened. Though the commission's work and record is far too complex to summarize here, the concepts behind its work are relevant to anyone [End Page vii] who has ever tried to construct a truthful narrative or to read it with full critical awareness. South Africa's story seems to offer compelling examples of the problems and implications of the nonfictional claim and its attempt to recover or complicate truth. Obviously, narrative versions of "truth" here in South Africa have changed radically in the transition from the old regime to the new regime; therefore the careful study of these narratives both destabilizes a naïve notion of "truth" as well as demonstrates the deep stakes (or implications) that writers and readers have in the interplay of constructed texts, truth claims, and actual lives (or deaths). Though truth is a socially negotiated concept, its narrative power to affect actual lives is as meaningful as it is contested. A white South African colleague of good conscience recently recalled her secondary school history text, From Van Riebeeck to Verwoerd, which presented the "truth" of South African history to a generation of young scholars. In this account, the nation's history became the story of Afrikaner whiteness, traced from its founding European settler to the architect of an apartheid philosophy devised to protect that "whiteness" with the full force of ideological and political power. (Lest we retreat to smugness on hearing this account, the Americans among us might do well to recall how we told our own stories about the taming of the American frontier.) The transformation of the Van Riebeeck to Verwoerd "truth" to a story more consonant with what it actually means to be South African has absorbed this nation for the past ten years, spurring a South African Constitution widely acknowledged to be the most progressive in the world—even in the midst of intractable economic inequality. Along the way, the nation has listened to the traumatic stories of its past—listened and largely offered forgiveness and reconciliation when the stories revealed a genuine commitment to own up to the responsibility and implications of that past. Would that more nations were up to this challenge. The process has not been easy—and along the way has spawned literary nonfiction startling in its implicating power. One thinks of Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull, an account of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission written by a former radio reporter for the South African Broadcasting Corporation; Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela's A Human Being Died That Night, the story of...