Tutu lighting candle/Truth Commission | Music
| 1.00.00 |
| Tutu : We have looked the beast in the eye. We will have come to terms with our horrendous past. And it will no longer keep us hostage. We will cast of its shackles and holding hands together, black and white. We will stride together into the future, and looking at our past, we will commit ourselves. Never again.
Music
| 1.00.11 |
Map South Africa |
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File footage police shootings | FX: Gunfire Child crying
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Police standing in front of fire | Wilson: For more than two years South Africa has been on a long and often tortured journey, into the depths of its apartheid past, its lies, assassinations, its murders and its misery. And now the journey is over. | 01.01.14 |
Truth Commission | The presentation of the Truth Commission's final report has laid bare South Africa's dark secrets. It has brought apartheid's victims into the light.
| 01.01.37 |
Volume of report | More than 20,000 of them, with their stories, experiences, and memories.
| 01.01.49 |
File footage, police beatings | And for apartheid's perpetrators, it has opened the door to redemption. But for all the inalienable truths uncovered, South Africa is a far more complicated equation. Truth does not equal forgiveness. Bitterness lasts.
| 01.01.58 |
Cynthia at Truth Commission
Super: CYNTHIA NGEWU | Cynthia: He had many bullet wounds on his body. After the postmortem the doctors told me that he had 25 bullet wounds.
| 01.02.17 |
| Wilson: Cynthia Ngewu went to the Truth Commission to find out who killed her son Christopher Piet. And why he died in a hail of bullets that's become known as that Guguletu Seven massacre. But to this day she doesn't believe the police told the truth about what really happened. | 01.02.26 |
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Wilson at massacre site | Wilson: It was at this exact spot 12 years ago where the apartheid police opened fire on a group of black young men. By the time the shooting stopped, seven lay dead in the streets. |
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Super: BEN WILSON | The Truth Commission was never going to be a magic box of answers for all the questions that have been raised about the apartheid years. But it has been a process of countless journeys that have revealed not on what type of country South Africa was, but what type of country South Africa is today.
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File footage, massacre site | Christopher Piet was shot 12 times in the head in a police ambush as he and his fellow activists embarked on a raid against a police van in March 1986. Even though the authorities discovered their plans, the Guguletu Seven were not arrested, they were slaughtered.
| 01.02.53 |
| The massacre has come to represent apartheid's worst excesses. It's an incident that has carved itself into South African history. In the township, Christopher Piet and his comrades are remembered as freedom fighters. To the apartheid government they were terrorists trying to overthrow the state. | 01.03.16 |
| But for Cynthia Ngewu the only thing that really matters is that her son is dead.
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Cynthia her son's grave | On a Sunday afternoon, with the wind whipping across the Cape Flats townships, Cynthia Ngewu visits her son's simple grave, where he lies alongside the others who died that day. She represents thousands of apartheid's victims for whom the Truth Commission has delivered knowledge, but not comfort. For Cynthia, reconciliation is not yet at hand.
| 01.03.40 |
| Cynthia: I don't think they can be forgiven because they don't have the truth inside them. How can I forgive someone who doesn't tell the truth?
| 01.04.04 |
Cynthia interview | Reconciliation is about confessing what you have done. Only then my soul will have peace and I can forgive.
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Williamson at market | Wilson: Craig Williamson is a man who's come before the Truth Commission desperately seeking a fresh start. He is perhaps one of the most despised men in South Africa, an apartheid spy, a killer who wrought his havoc on opponents of the government. | 01.04.33 |
| He's a man whose bloody past sits uncomfortably with his life in the new South Africa.
| 01.04.50 |
| Today he's reinventing himself, running a successful business selling produce from the Johannesburg markets to Angola. But in 1982 his business was death.
| 01.05.01 |
Williamson in Truth Commission | Williamson: To kill any high ranking member of the South African Communist or ANC was a legitimate target as far as we were concerned. The idea was the psychological destabilising of the organisation as well as the disruption of the practical logistical infrastructure and organisation.
| 01.05.13 |
| Wilson: Ruth First and her husband Joe Slovo were fervent opponents of apartheid. Craig Williamson was called in to help silence their opposition.
| 01.05.36 |
Williamson on game reserve | Craig Williamson is now seeking an amnesty for his involvement in her murder.
| 01.05.50 |
| He's a man of wealth and privilege, who enjoys the best that South Africa has to offer. He's planning to build a holiday retreat on this picturesque game reserve just outside Johannesburg.
| 01.05.59 |
| Wilson: Is this the South Africa that you saw in the 1980s?
| 01.06.13 |
| Williamson: Yes, but it was - we didn't share it then. I mean this is Africa which we've got to build for our children. We've got to leave for our children.
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| Wilson: But the Truth Commission won't let Craig Williamson walk into the future without first facing his past.
| 01.06.33 |
Williamson interview
Super: CRAIG WILLIAMSON | Williamson: We believed we were doing good. We believed that we were doing right. We believed that we were justified. That the moral high ground was ours. And in 1998, sitting calmly and talking about it, it really is difficult to believe that what happened, happened so easily. Because if one would believe that - or been told - look, what you're going to do now is actually evil, it's nasty, it's terrible, but go and do it, you would have thought about it. But that never crossed your mind. | 01.06.42 |
| We believed we were right. |
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| Wilson: Do you feel forgiven?
| 01.07.30 |
| Williamson: No. I don't think I'll ever feel forgiven. I don't think that's what it's about. For some people that's what it's been about. I think the only forgiveness I want is for people to say that I still have the right to live in this country, and to be a citizen and to be accepted. I couldn't ask for more.
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Cape Town | Wilson: Cape Town provides a stark example of this country's inherent contradictions. South Africans call it the ‘Mother City.' But you don't have to scratch too far beneath the glitz of the Cape Town waterfront to find South Africa's conscience tapping uncomfortably on the shoulder of white complacency.
| 01.08.04 |
Interior church | Singing
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| Wilson: Cape Town is also home to a man who has suffered as much as anyone - Father Michael Lapsley.
| 01.08.33 |
| Singing
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Father Michael Lapsley in church | Wilson: In South Africa it still takes faith to believe that reconciliation is within grasp. Faith that this country can become a united one. Father Michael Lapsley is a white man who's felt apartheid's pain and yet turned the other cheek.
| 01.08.48 |
| In April 1990 he was a priest and member of the African National Congress, living in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare. A letter bomb, mailed from South Africa ripped off his hands and tore open his head.
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Wilson and Lapsley | Wilson: You've kept files and articles.
| 01.09.24 |
| Lapsley: Well, these are some of my own personal archives. I learnt, some years ago, from a friend, how important it was to record history, as it actually happens. So every interview I give, every newspaper article, and many of the speeches I've given over the years, they're here, preserved. And after I was bombed many people said to me, you must write, you must give an account, this piece of history, your own personal history and how it relates to the history of the people of South Africa, should not be lost.
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Super:
Father MICHAEL LAPSLEY | Lapsley [reading]: There was an almighty explosion. It seemed to go on forever, pushing me back with a terrible force. The pain was indescribable, and greater than I could imagine any person being able to bear. In a way that I found hard to verbalise, I felt that in some extraordinary way God was present with me, going through the bombing with me, sharing in my crucifixion. I found the promise of scripture had been kept: ‘Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.'
| 01.10.10 |
Father Lapsley in church | Wilson: Now, Michael Lapsley is taking his message of forgiveness to the pulpit, and the churches of the Cape Flats. To communities themselves, scarred by apartheid.
| 01.10.48 |
| Lapsley: But I'd like us for a moment to think of the Truth Commission as a giant mirror that has been put in front of this country. A mirror into which we have looked, to discover what has it been that we South Africans have done to one another.
| 01.10.57 |
Poor area of Cape Flats | Wilson: This is what South Africans have done to each other. The legacy of poverty is apartheid's longest shadow. True reconciliation can only come when there is economic justice, when the beneficiaries of apartheid start giving back to its victims.
| 01.11.22 |
Brass band in Bloekombos | Band Music |
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| Wilson: Bloekombos squatter camp is a vivid illustration of just how far South Africa still has to travel.
| 01.11.48 |
| A brass band at church on Sunday is the highlight of the week.
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Cynthia in church | When Cynthia Ngewu comes to worship, she comes here to a darkened shack, where the brightest light is the incandescent faith of the congregation.
| 01.12.11 |
| The new South Africa, the rainbow nation, hasn't yet delivered her from the legacy of the past, from poverty.
| 01.12.25 |
| Cynthia: We as the black people see the Truth Commission helping us because it is revealing the mysteries and horrors of apartheid. But in the white community - the very people who benefited from apartheid - there are those who are not willing to admit or accept that horrible past and humble themselves before the nation and bring about a healing.
| 01.12.34 |
Williamson in country | Wilson: Men like Craig Williamson have a different peace to make, not only with themselves, but with a country that views them with inherent suspicion.
Williamson: There was this airy, fairy belief that you know, we just sprinkle some stardust, | 01.13.06 |
Williamson interview | Mandela stardust, over everything, and everybody will love each other and everything will be super. I think we've got to be much more realistic. I think we've got to accept that there will be people in this society who hate what I did. I hope - I accept if they want to hate me, and as an individual they're free to hate me as an individual. But what's important is that they don't point a gun at me and shoot at me. Because if they point a gun at me, I'm going to point a gun back.
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Lapsley at Truth Commission hearing | Lapsley: In my mind there was somebody obviously who typed my name on an envelope, a woman or a man, who typed that. Also somebody who made it, who created it. And I've often asked the question about the person who made it, the person who typed my name, what did they tell their children that night that they did that day. How did they describe...
| 01.13.59 |
| Wilson: Father Michael Lapsley didn't discover who sent him the bomb that almost destroyed his life. It remains a mystery. No one has owned up. Perhaps he'll never know. That is unfinished business. But it's not holding him back. | 01.14.23 |
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Lapsley interview | Lapsley: I would love to offer forgiveness to that person, and I would sooner they spend the next 50 years as a paramedic, involved in the healing of our country, than locked up in prison. But equally I would say to that person, you know, because I've lost my hands, I will always need someone to assist me. I think you would want to pay for the person to assist me as a form of restorative justice, not of retribution. I think often in the discourse around what happened in the past, and particularly around forgiveness, we speak of the importance of saying sorry, but I think we also need to talk of the importance of restoration as well, and reparation and restitution, as well as the importance of saying sorry.
| 01.14.39 |
Williamson | Williamson: So we know what happened we know who's dead we've got the list of names, we know who's been killed we know who was blown up, we know who was shot, we know who was tortured, we know what building's were blown up, we know what cities were attacked. We know all of that. | 01.15.24 |
Anti-apartheid March | Wilson: But only a handful of those who gave the orders at the highest level of government have come forward. The foot soldiers have been betrayed.
| 01.15.53 |
| Williamson: I think a lot of people feel there hasn't been any open hearted honesty from high political levels.
| 01.16.02 |
| Wilson: Cowardly?
| 01.16.10 |
Williamson
Super:
CRAIG WILLIAMSON | Williamson: Cowards, yeah. Lack of moral fibre, LMF. Total, unbelievable. It's a joke. You know the rest have all just been the three monkeys. You know, they didn't see anything, they didn't hear anything, and they didn't say anything. And that wasn't my experience. And it wasn't anybody else in the system's experience. So this is to me the really sad thing.
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File footage, police beatings | Music
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| Wilson: But the reservoir of charity amongst apartheid's victims has at times seemed inexhaustible. | 01.16.56 |
| Those in South Africa who have the least have given by far the most. | 01.17.05 |
| Cynthia Ngewu will always visit her son's grave. His death is part of her life, her memories of an earlier time. | 01.17.15 |
| But she can talk about it, and now says that apartheid's indelible mark has become a scar, no longer a wound.
| 01.17.26 |