Reckoning with the trauma of the past: The afterlife of violent histories and the work of repair

Jorisna Bonthuys

Illustration by Doret Ferreira

In April 1996, during the first week of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC’s) public hearings in East London’s City Hall, Nomonde Calata uttered a cry, piercing and haunting.

During her testimony, a wailing sound erupted from her body. It burst out with such a force that it threw her torso backwards and then forwards.“It was a scream that really indicated the pain that came from not just deep within her body, but from deep within the body and history of a community with wounds that go back several generations,” says Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, the director of the Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest (AVReQ) at Stellenbosch University.

Long after Calata broke down during her testimony, the sound of her pain echoed beyond the walls of the packed colonial-era building on Oxford Street.

“That scream still haunts many of us who were present on that day,” Gobodo-Madikizela recalls. “Ms Calata was screaming at a past, calling up deeply buried emotions that reverberated over several generations.” Her cry also signalled an emotional rupture, a “second wounding” that those present bore witness to, she adds.

Gobodo-Madikizela holds the South African National Research Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma and she served on the TRC’s Human Rights Violations Committee. She recently received the coveted 2024 Templeton Prize.

Her scholarly endeavours include making sense of the ‘transgenerational trauma’ phenomenon that occurs over generations, using the South African context as a backdrop. Her insights into the mechanisms of trauma and forgiveness in post-apartheid South Africa have created a globally-recognised model for social healing in the aftermath of conflict, a model she calls “the reparative quest.”

Gobodo-Madikizela’s earlier work focused on the concepts of forgiveness and remorse as they emerged during the TRC process.

In her current work, she wants to understand why the prospect of repair and national reconciliation, which framed the work of the TRC, no longer holds any promise amidst the violence of present-day South Africa.

In this context, in which the ‘born-free’ post-apartheid generation has come of age, she has been developing a new conceptual framework for understanding transgenerational trauma, which manifests when the violence experienced by particular groups is relived by the generations that follow them.

To explore this area of her work, she is revisiting a selection of testimonies and iconic TRC moments, including Calata’s cry, which has been described as “the defining sound of the commission” and “symbolic of the start of the human rights hearings”.

Calata’s emotions boiled over while she was testifying about the death of her husband, Fort Calata, a decade earlier at the hands of the security police under the apartheid regime. At the time of his death, she was 26 years old and 7 months pregnant with their third child.

Fort Calata (28) was assassinated in June 1985, along with fellow anti-apartheid activists Matthew Goniwe, Sicelo Mhlauli and Sparrow Mkhonto. In death, they became known as the ‘Cradock Four’. Both teachers, Goniwe and Calata were close friends. Evidence showed that Calata was stabbed in the heart four times. His killers burnt his and the other men’s remains to conceal the state’s hand in the crime.

In her current work, Gobodo-Madikizela is asking the same question posed by T.S. Eliot in his poem ‘Gerontion’: “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” She is investigating whether the notions of forgiveness and reconciliation carry the same meaning for today’s post-apartheid generation as they did during the transition period after the end of apartheid.

Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela | Photo by Stefan Els

Making sense of forgiveness

Gobodo-Madikizela’s scholarly journey in trauma research started with her PhD. In her dissertation, she focused on case studies of collective violence (specifically, the burning-tyre ‘necklace murders’ in the Eastern Cape) and the violence inflicted by Eugene de Kock, former commander of Vlakplaas, a counterinsurgency unit responsible for numerous clandestine assassinations in apartheid South Africa.

During the TRC hearings, one of the first observed expressions of forgiveness for the atrocities committed during the apartheid era occurred after the testimonies of widows of the police officers murdered in the ‘Motherwell bombing’ in 1989. Two police officers, Warrant Officer Glen Mgoduka and Sergeant Amos Faku, as well as an ‘askari’ (a police informer), Sheperd Shakati, were killed in a car bomb explosion that was orchestrated by former apartheid security police.

De Kock appeared at the amnesty hearing of the security police as an ‘implicated witness’. He linked the bombing to the earlier murder of the Cradock Four. At the end of his amnesty application, De Kock appealed to meet the family members of the men murdered in the bombing. Two of the widows agreed and, in a private meeting with De Kock, offered him their forgiveness.

“At the time, I was really taken aback by this,” Gobodo-Madikizela recalls. “It was so counter-intuitive. I wanted to really understand this notion of their forgiveness of such unforgivable acts and its true meaning.

“For a long time, there was this belief that in the face of radical evil, or ‘the banality of evil’ as the philosopher Hannah Arendt called it, some crimes are unforgivable because they are so far beyond human imagination. It was believed that some crimes are simply beyond the pale – so humanly unacceptable that they are just unforgivable.

“My interest in the phenomenon of forgiveness was very much a personal one. But as a trained psychologist, I was also interested in the meaning of De Kock’s expression of remorse. Was it witness-stand remorse or was it genuine, deeply felt regret for his deeds?”

Over a period of six months, Gobodo-Madikizela interviewed De Kock in jail. These meetings culminated in her critically acclaimed book, A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Story of Forgiveness, about her insights into what causes a moral person to become a killer.

“It was such an important time for me, those encounters with Eugene de Kock,” she recalls. “Until then, in all my reading of studies on perpetrators of the Nazi Holocaust – at the time, the only available comprehensive studies on perpetrators of unspeakable atrocities – I had not encountered a single example of remorse for doing so much evil.”

A novel approach

The repercussions of violent histories – including slavery, and colonial and apartheid-era violence – extend far beyond the victims and survivors who experienced these traumatic events directly. The ‘afterlives’ of these traumas can echo across generations, leaving imprints on individuals and communities. Such transgenerational imprints have been documented across the globe, including in countries like Rwanda, Germany and the United States.

“There is something unfinished about past traumatic experiences,” Gobodo-Madikizela explains. “And when this ‘thing’ is unfinished, what happens in its state of being unfinished is that it becomes fragmented; it becomes dissociated from the original trauma. In other words, what is remembered are fragments of the past.” Instead of integrating these memories into a meaningful narrative context, traumatic experiences are often relived and ‘acted out’ in a range of behavioural repetitions of the events.

Gobodo-Madikizela and others at the AVReQ are exploring the concept of violence and its effects on the lives of victims, survivors and their descendants, on the one hand, and perpetrators on the other. The centre is involved in several interdisciplinary research projects in collaboration with trauma researchers from across the globe.

In her work, Gobodo-Madikizela explores a novel approach to making sense of the transgenerational transmission of historical trauma. She is currently working on a book tentatively titled ‘Triadic Memories: Aesthetics of Trauma and Narratives of Repair’.

In the ‘tri-telescopic perspective’ on intergenerational trauma that she proposes, trauma memories cross and re-cross past, present and future temporalities. “For many people, the lived experience of intergenerational trauma reverberates across space and time into their lived experiences in the here and now.”

Gobodo-Madikizela believes this perspective on the transgenerational dynamics of violent histories “offers a lens through which the repercussions of multigenerational collective trauma can be identified as a lived reality that exists beyond phantoms [of the past].”

“We should not be thinking about transgenerational trauma as something that only happens at one specific point in the past and then has a unidirectional impact on the present,” she explains.

The testimony of Calata, for instance, illustrates this “telescoping of traumatic violence through both oral and wordless testimony. Ms Calata’s cry not only told a story about our violent past but foreshadowed how intergenerational trauma and violence would affect our society today,” Gobodo-Madikizela says.

“I argue that the return of historic trauma is a more ambiguous space that points backwards – not just to a single traumatic event but to multiple generations past – and forwards in a prophetic foretelling of traumatic violence that is to recur in the future.”

Gobodo-Madikizela argues that the concepts ‘post-colonial’, ‘post-apartheid’ and ‘post-slavery’ should also not be seen as designating an end in the sense of a clear break with the past and a demarcation between an era of human rights abuses and the present.

In contexts with long histories of oppression, inherited inequality and poverty shape the way that the past is remembered, she says.

The lived memory of the past

Understanding intergenerational trauma in South Africa is as relevant today as it was during and immediately after the TRC hearings, Gobodo-Madikizela believes.

In a recent article, she describes South Africa as a country at war with itself, ridden with mass protests, racial tension, vigilante killings, domestic violence, gender-based murder and the mutilation and dismemberment of women’s bodies. “These events point not at closure and healing but rather at a question screamed into the future: ‘When will it end?’

“When you think about that scream [of Nomonde Calata], the pain that was embodied in that scream was foretelling. It was almost a prophetic scream that foretold that all will not be well in this future.”

In South Africa, the problem of the translation of the past into cycles of transgenerational re-emergence of violence is exacerbated by the continued disempowering conditions of racism, inequality and poverty.

The transgenerational suffering of the previous generation(s) is lived by the current generation within their families, communities and society, she says. Also, a disillusioned generation of ‘born-free’ South Africans is today buckling under the burden of economic hardship they inherited from generations before them.

As a result, many young South Africans still live in abject poverty and are exposed to extreme levels of inequality, like their parents before them. They are also part of a generation on the receiving end of the ‘violence of corruption’, caused by state capture and the misappropriation of public resources.

Apartheid’s violence casts a long shadow on the generation born after its demise, Gobodo-Madikizela says. “In our post-apartheid society, there is also a rupturing of hope and a violent disintegration of the vision of a peaceful future imagined by the generation of South Africans who fought to end apartheid. It is as if the present – the future that was imagined – is the past of the violence of colonialism and apartheid braided together and then rewound.

“We are a society with a complex, unresolved trauma history stretching back hundreds of years,” she adds. “The stories we carry with us are also often the stories that define us. We carry these stories with us and pass them on [to future generations].

Changing the discourse of the past

Gobodo-Madikizela says: “I believe that in all countries where oppression, oppressive rule and a violation of rights have happened over generations, the current [South African] generation is [...] entering a state where they expect to be free. But they are confronted with unfreedom at a time when people are looking up in hope under a black government that will lead them into this period of freedom.

“Many people feel a deep sense of betrayal by the post-apartheid government,” Gobodo-Madikizela says. This is evident in, for instance, the stories she and her colleagues collected in Langa, Worcester and Bonteheuwel and then collated in the digital exhibition titled ‘Through the Eyes of Survivors of Apartheid’. The exhibition consists of excerpts from the stories of 29 storytellers who feature in the book, These Are the Things that Sit with Us.

“People are arriving at this moment [in time] where they’re supposed to be free with an inheritance that is empty. It’s almost like the coffers of their future have been emptied of resources, and the current post-apartheid generation feels robbed of the future they were promised. Something is broken.

“The notion of betrayal came out so strongly in our interviews with the younger generation – the idea that they feel a deep sense of betrayal. And many of them, including their parents’ generation, speak about how, for them, [...] this period is worse than apartheid… They say this not because apartheid was ‘better’ but rather because they expected that, under a black government, they would have a better future than their parents had under the white apartheid government, and that they would be held in care and supported by this government.”

The unfinished business of the TRC

“Some people believe that the commission ‘failed spectacularly’. However, I don’t believe this is an accurate assessment of the work of the TRC. The commission did offer hope and a sense of possibility. But the hopeful aspects of the TRC soon dissipated for a number of reasons.

“Clearly, there were certain things that should have been done during the TRC hearings; there were certain missed moments. We were blinded by the vision of reconciliation. We didn’t think long enough about how deep these wounds go and what it would require to address them. As a country, we sat back and thought it was enough to promote reconciliation.”

Today, more than 25 years later, the country is seeing a resurgence of racism, racial conflict and intolerance, Gobodo-Madikizela points out.

“A big problem now is the violence of corruption. In South Africa, it has reached phenomenal levels; it is unbelievable. It is just beyond human understanding how the same people who fought for freedom can work so hard to destroy the futures of so many South Africans who suffered under apartheid, and that of their descendants. Corruption is a gross human rights violation.

“Also, the wealth created during apartheid was skewed in favour of white people and so, as we move into the next generation, the inheritors of that wealth are still today mostly white people. Black people have inherited poverty, they’ve inherited disability, and this inequality is a continuity of the apartheid past. But it’s also a consequence of the failure, the drastic failure, of our government.”

Repair and the quest for solidarity

Gobodo-Madikizela says it is essential to follow through with the recommendations for repair outlined in the TRC’s final report.

“The project of reconciliation begins with the articulation and acknowledgement of what it is that is being reckoned with, with reflecting on how different groups are positioned in relation to the past. This is why I think our work at AVReQ on the ‘reparative quest’ is so important.

“Restoring the human bonds that were broken between the wounded, the victimisers and their descendants require the engagement of what I call ‘reparative humanism’ as an alternative to the notions of ‘healing’ and ‘closure’.”