The consequences of truth: Post-traumatic stress in new South Africa (continued) Part 6 of 7
By Lynn Burke
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Speaking Out

Ntombi Mosikare vividly remembers the sight of her teenage brother's bloodied body the night of June 26, 1985. He was one of the executive members of COSAS, the Congress of South African Students. Eight of his co-members were to suffer the same fate at midnight that night in different townships throughout the country.

Mosikare says Solomon left their home in the black township of Duduza at 8:40 p.m. that night. A little over three hours later, he was blown apart by a hand grenade.

"He never came back, and we found his body lying in the street," she says softly. She was 28 years old. He was only 19. She crouched in the shadows, afraid to claim Solomon's corpse. His body was surrounded by police officers. She was scared to move any closer. "It was very scary," she said. "They were switching their lights on and off."

As soon as the sun began to burn through the sky the next morning she walked back down the dusty red road to get her brother. "His arm was in tatters," she says quietly, audibly sucking in her breath. She reaches for her face. "One eye, you know, came out," she says.

Mosikare felt responsible, wondered what she might have done to prevent his death, wondered what he might have done. She said some of her neighbors kept their distance from her family, and branded them terrorists. Her brother's death, they said, was his own fault. For years she had nightmares, couldn't get the vision of Solomon's body out of her mind. "I had problems but I knew nothing about counseling at the time," she whispers. As time passed, she managed to block out the images, sleep through the night, begin to forget.

It wasn't until two of her brother's killers applied to the TRC for amnesty that the full trauma of his death really came back to haunt her. "It brought everything back," she says. "It was difficult, I couldn't take it." Solomon Mosikare's killers were among the approximately 7,000 people who have applied for amnesty. (Of the 5111 processed, 216 have been granted.) She started obsessing about the fact that she had advised him to repeat a year of school in order to bring up his grades. He wanted to be a doctor, so Mosikare encouraged him to stay in Duduza and keep studying. "If he didn't stay maybe he wouldn't have been killed," she remembers thinking.

Like many victims who submitted testimony to the TRC, Mosikare feels let down by the process. "I think that the first thing they should have done was take care of our mental needs, and they've done nothing." Khulumani, she says, is what saved her. Today she is the director of Khulumani, the support group that serves nearly 12,000 people throughout different townships.

The group has little money. It is not funded by the government, and the few full-time staff members who work at Khulumani find precious little time to do the kind of fund-raising necessary to keep the group running.

As a result, Dineo Nageng, at 27 years old, is the only professional counselor for Khulumani. "It's an almost impossible task," she admits. Khulumani does receive help from volunteer psychologists, but has problem staffing the areas of South Africa most in need of help, the "no-go terribly volatile areas where white psychologists won't go."

So Khulumani has created a network of survivor-counselors who spread out and hold workshops with the people who live in areas where there are no trauma clinics. Group therapy sessions, traditionally supposed to compose of ten people at most, burst with 50 or more victims. "We've actually had to go against what we've learned in school," Nageng says.

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