This selection from Tutu's book presents a clear example of an argument based on a Hegelian synthesis (see Chapter 13, p. 668). Tutu considers two antithetical solutions to the problem of dealing with South Africa's past. By placing these propositions in opposition to each other, he succeeds in rejecting them both and constructing a third alternative to take their place.
The debilitating legacy of apartheid is going to be with us for many a long day yet. No one possesses a magic wand which the architects of the new dispensation could wave and, "Hey presto!" things will be transformed overnight into a promised land flowing with milk and honey. Apartheid, firmly entrenched for a long half century and carried out with a ruthless efficiency, was too strong for that. It is going to take a long time for the pernicious effects of apartheid's egregiousness to be eradicated.
Apart from the systematic and devastating violation of all sorts of human rights by the nature of apartheid itself—described by five senior judges in a deposition to the commission as "in itself and in the way it was implemented . . . a gross abuse of human rights"—many South Africans remembered that awful deeds had been perpetrated in the past. They remembered the Sharpeville massacre when, on March 21, 1960, a peaceful crowd demonstrated against the pass laws and sixty-nine people were mown down when the police panicked and opened fire on the demonstrators, most of whom were shot in the back while fleeing.
People recalled the Soweto uprising of June 16, 1976, when unarmed schoolchildren were shot and killed as they demonstrated against the use of the Afrikaans language as a medium of instruction. Afrikaans was regarded as the language of the enforcers of the apartheid policy that an overwhelmingly Afrikaans-speaking political party, the Nationalist Party, had inflicted on the nation from 1948.
South Africa remembered that several people had died mysteriously while they were in police detention. It was alleged by the authorities who might perhaps have been believed by most of the white community—they were certainly not believed by most of the black community—that they had committed suicide by hanging themselves with their belts, or they had slipped on soap while showering, or they tended to have a penchant for jumping out of the windows of the buildings where they were being detained and questioned. Others died, so we were told, from self-inflicted injuries. One such was Steve Biko, the young student founder of the Black Consciousness Movement. It was said he had banged his head against the wall in an inexplicable and quite unreasonable altercation with his interrogators in September 1977. People recalled that when the then Minister of Police was told of Steve's death he had callously and memorably declared that his death "leaves me cold." People recalled that Steve had been driven naked on the back of a police truck over 1500 kilometers to Pretoria, where it was reported he would have received medical treatment, except that he died soon after he arrived there. No one ever explained why he could not
have got the emergency treatment in Port Elizabeth where he had been detained, nor why if he had had to be taken to Pretoria he had had to be humiliated, comatose as he was, by being transported without any clothes on.
People remembered the bombing in Amanzimtoti, KwaZulu/Natal, in 1985 when 5 a limpet mine placed in a refuse bin outside a shopping center exploded among holidaymakers doing last-minute Christmas shopping, killing five persons and injuring over sixty.
South Africa recalled the Magoo's Bar bombing of June 1986, when three people were killed and about sixty-nine injured by a car bomb planted by Robert McBride and his two accomplices, allegedly on the orders of a commander of the ANC's armed wing, Umkhonto weSizwe,[224] based in neighboring Botswana.
People had been filled with revulsion when they saw how people were killed so gruesomely through the so-called "necklace," a tire placed around the victim's neck and filled with petrol and then set alight. This horrible way of execution was used by township ANC-supporting "comrades" especially against "sellouts," those who were suspected of being collaborators with the state. It was also used in the internecine strife between warring liberation movements, such as the United Democratic Front (UDF), which largely comprised ANC sympathizers while that party was banned, and the Azanian People's Organization (Azapo), the party espousing the principles of black consciousness developed by Steve Biko and his colleagues. You were appalled that human beings, children even, could actually dance around the body of someone dying in such an excruciating fashion. Apartheid had succeeded only too well in dehumanizing its victims and those who implemented it. People remembered that all this was very much a part of our past, a part of our history.
People were appalled at the carnage in Church Street, Pretoria, in May 1983 when a massive bomb exploded outside the administrative headquarters of the South African Air Force. Twenty-one people died and over two hundred were injured. The ANC claimed responsibility for this outrage.
More recently people recalled the St. James' Church massacre in Cape Town in July 1993. In that attack, two members of the armed wing of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC)—the liberation movement which had broken away from the ANC in 1959—burst into a Sunday church service and fired machine guns, killing eleven worshipers and injuring fifty-six. Nothing, it seemed, was sacrosanct anymore in this urban guerrilla warfare.
These and similar atrocities pockmarked our history and on all sides it was agreed 10 that we had to take this past seriously into account. We could not pretend that it had not happened. Much of it was too fresh in the memories of many communities.
There was in fact hardly any controversy about whether we should deal effectively with our past if we were going to be making the transition to a new dispensation. No, the debate was not on whether but on how we might deal with this only too real past.
There were those who wanted to follow the Nuremberg[225] trial paradigm, by bringing to trial all perpetrators of gross violations of human rights and letting them run the gauntlet of the normal judicial process. This, it turned out, was really not a viable option at all, perhaps mercifully for us in South Africa. In World War II the Allies defeated the Nazis and their allies comprehensively and were thus able to impose what has been described as "victor's justice." The accused had no say whatsoever in the matter, and because some of those who sat in judgment on the accused, such as the Russians, were themselves guilty of similar gross violations in the excesses perpetrated under Stalin, the whole process left a simmering resentment in many Germans as I found out when I participated in a BBC-TV panel discussion in the very room in Nuremberg where the trial had taken place fifty years previously. The Germans had accepted it because they were down and out and the victors, as it were, could kick the vanquished even as they lay on the ground. Thus the Nuremberg option was rejected by those who were negotiating the delicate process of transition to democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human rights. Neither side could impose victor's justice because neither side won the decisive victory that would have enabled it to do so, since we had a military stalemate.