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News Story: The consequences
of truth: Post-traumatic stress in new South Africa |
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JOHANNESBURG -- For years her sleep was plagued with visions of that night, and when she woke up in a cold sweat, she could still see the four white men, running toward her, grabbing for her, spreading her legs across the cold floor, reaching out, strangling her. Thandi Shezi was 26 years old when a group of policemen barged into her home in the middle of the night, beat her and dragged her off to a jail cell over the screams of her six-year-old daughter and four-year-old son. Once at the cell, four white policemen covered her head with a thick, wet sack, attached electrodes to her body to shock her, chained her feet to a table and took turns raping her. Ten years later in her Johannesburg office where she works as a counselor for a victims-rights group, Shezi stretches her arms out in front of her and examines the physical reminders of her torture, small black scars that have faded but not disappeared. "You can see these marks, they are all over, my chest and my thighs," she says, peering out from behind large glasses. Shezi says she was targeted by the police because she worked in the underground movement against apartheid as a secretary for the Soweto Youth Congress. Her task was to transport ammunition and help target government buildings for destruction. "Somebody gave them the information that I'm a trained terrorist," she says, each syllable heavy with memory. She says they held her without trial for a year, and when she was released, she says she was a different person. She was angry, withdrawn, jumpy. Her heart raced and her skin crawled when she stood too close to a man. "I was a very angry person inside, and I was violent. I couldn't stand to see somebody standing next to me." Her voice breaks. "I was living somebody's life, it was not my own." She told no one about her rape. She was too ashamed. And she says when the anger inside of her became too much to endure, she turned on the person closest to her, her little girl. "My daughter is the victim of my trauma," she says. "I used to bang her (into) the walls." Shezi beat her daughter over a period of eight years. Shezi suffers from post traumatic stress disorder. She is not alone. Many people in this country have suffered great emotional and psychological harm because of apartheid. Many have developed post traumatic stress reactions, and they need counseling. But South Africa is a country with limited resources, and therapy is a luxury here. The African National Congress, South Africa's ruling party which came to power after the first democratic elections were held in 1994, has done very little to directly address the problem of post traumatic stress. But it has not shut the door on the past. Instead, it embarked on one of the world's most extraordinary experiments in truth-telling. In 1996, the ANC and the old National Party passed the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, and created an official space to listen to the screams of a nation -- the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The TRC, as it has come to be called, was established to "promote national unity and reconciliation in a spirit of understanding which transcends the conflicts and divisions of the past." President Nelson Mandela selected 16 commissioners to serve on the TRC from a list drawn up by nongovernmental organizations, and appointed Archbishop Desmond Tutu as chairman. Victims of past acts of political violence and torture were encouraged to come forward to document the human rights abuses they suffered between March 1, 1960, and May 10, 1994, within or outside South Africa, and perpetrators were invited to apply for amnesty, which would be only granted for full disclosure of crimes proven politically motivated. Though the commission did appoint “briefers” (referred to also as “Cry People”) to assist survivors when they gave testimony at public hearings, and referred some deponents elsewhere for additional support, there were no direct psychological services for the victims. And the emotional responses of individuals who testified at the many hearings held in churches and halls throughout the country have been mixed. Many reported a tremendous sense of relief. Tim Ledgerwood, a former conscript in the defense force who attempted to escape and join the ANC, told the commission about his torture at the hands of the apartheid security police and said the TRC had changed his life. “Having gone to the (Commission) with my story, it is almost as if it is all right to talk about it now,” he said at a Cape Town hearing. “Slowly things are changing. As if I've been freed from a prison in which I have been for 18 years.” However, a worrying number of individuals found that in the weeks following their deposition, the symptoms associated with the original violations resurfaced and intensified from the retelling of their stories. Their experiences sharply contrast with the much-reported accounts of relief like Ledgerwood's. Their experiences are complicated, they ruin the easy narrative provided by the TRC. They reveal the degree of ambiguity inherent in reconciliation and the trauma involved in seeking the truth. |
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