Making peace with enemy, the past

Published Jun 26, 2016

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Shanil Haricharan

“IF YOU want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.”

Nelson Mandela’s provocative words aptly permeate a session of the Mandela Dialogues on Memory Work 2 at the Human Rights Media Centre (HRMC) in Kenilworth. A wet and cold wintry afternoon shrouds the warm conviviality in the small meeting room. It is the eve of the 40th anniversary of the June 16 Soweto uprising.

The dialogue participants from post-conflict countries – Nepal, Argentina, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Bosnia Herzegovina and South Africa, including the US – are acutely aware of the formidable barriers and the long walk in achieving Mandela’s noble provocation. Many are memory workers.

The concept of "memory work" recognises the need for social justice beyond the immediate imperative for redress in response to particular events. Memory work reaches beyond the confines of formal transitional justice interventions and, therefore, takes a broader and 
longer-term imperative to do the complex and painful work of memory in contexts of past human rights violations, injustices, violent conflict or war.

The aim is to release societies from a cycle of violence, prejudice and hatred, so we create a vibrant and conscious society. To achieve such a society, memory work supports the building of a just and sustainable peace, and securing social justice.

The Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Global Leadership Academy (GIZ), based in Frankfurt, convene the Mandela Dialogues.

A key intention of the Mandela Dialogues 2 is to create safe spaces for former enemies to listen to each other’s stories. The engagement and learning from these immersion sessions also empower participants to further their work and that of their home organisations.

At the HRMC session, the dialogue participants observe four former South African enemies reflecting on their personal journey.

The former enemies’ choices in the formative years of their youth, during the late 1970s and the 1980s, will define the heroic narrative they will fight for: the oppressive apartheid system or the liberation struggle; as conscripts of the South African Defence Force (SADF) or as freedom fighters of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK).

Their opposing heroic narratives will define their lives' journeys: their dreams and nightmares, their shame and honour, their pain and joy, their empathy and compassion, their personal agency – their humanity. I am one of the former MK combatants; the other is Shirley Gunn. We were former members of the Ashley Kriel Detachment (AKD). The former SADF conscripts are Verne Harris and Paul Morris.

Paul and Verne sombrely recall the nature of choices of 17-year-old white boys in the 1970s and 1980s, growing up against the backdrop of apartheid. The choice was either compulsory two-year national service as a conscript, or a conscientious objector (facing a six-year jail term), or delaying it by pursuing tertiary studies, or leaving the country. They chose to serve in the SADF.

As Paul reflects: “Without any real political education and a comfortable middle-class life, I was not going to be a conscientious objector. I grew up with ideas of war mythology and Second World War heroics. I was not sure of what other paths I could take. I went in reluctantly.”

He adds that the military system was a continuation of the school system, which was highly regimented with strict uniform codes and very harsh corporal punishment, including regulated gender roles and cadets.

Verne remembers that the militarisation of young white males started earlier than his conscription call-up in 1975: “My introduction to the SADF was cadets at school. I just wanted to get over with the two-years conscription. I wanted to stay alive and learned skills to remain invisible in the South African Air Force. I have not done much reflection and revisiting that part of my life. I wrote a journal, but have been unable to revisit what I wrote then up until today.”

Both relate their painful experiences as conscripts during military training and operations on the border with Angola or inside Angola. “It was a nightmare,” shares Verne.

Paul agrees: “I experienced the system as very brutal. A very unfamiliar environment from the happy family home I grew up in. The war affected me for the rest of my life.”

On the opposing battle line, Shirley Gunn shared her background growing up in a Catholic, middle-class and professional family in Cape Town. Shirley felt absolutely ashamed of being a white South African after the events of 1976. She was 21 years old.

In the next few years as a University of Cape Town (UCT) social work student, she was exposed to the harsh realities of apartheid and the inadequate social services in disadvantaged communities.

Shirley actively worked with trade unions and civic organisations, later joining the political and then the military underground structures of the African National Congress (ANC). She received military training in Cuba and Angola. Shirley painfully recalls her detention in solitary confinement in 1985, and again in 1990 with her one-year old son Haroon.

I share the influence of the 1976 Soweto uprisings and the killing of Steve Biko on my political awareness. I was a high school student on the north coast of Durban. As a student at Wits University during the early 1980s, I became more politically aware. I relate how in 1985 the action of the police sjambokking (whipping) me on campus, and the general repression across the country, compelled me to join the armed struggle in the Transkei.

I remember the decision to join the armed struggle as a traumatic turning point in my life. I was a pacifist and had a strong Hindu upbringing in non-violence. I was resolute in my decision to fight. A year later, I joined Shirley and the AKD.

We realise through our conversations that in the absence of memory work processes to acknowledge and heal our traumas, the diverse and painful narratives of our youth during apartheid remain largely buried in our psyche.

For former conscripts like Paul and Verne, it has been a long journey from the horrors of war to recent times. Paul moved to London and studied Gestalt psychotherapy. He spent many hours receiving psychotherapy himself for his night terrors, realising that he falsely thought he had dealt with the trauma of war.

He tells us of his unresolved grief, the killing and the dying that he was close to. To exorcise the demons of war, he journeyed 1 500km on a bicycle across southern Angola and Namibia. His book, Back to Angola, is a testament of his healing.

I shudder at the thought of the many other Pauls among the 660 000 SADF former conscripts. I ask whether they are immune to the toxicity of war.

Verne’s journey to understand what he had been through was to study South African history, which led him to become politically aware, resulting in his activism in anti-apartheid structures.

He sadly shares: “As I got involved in activism, I realised I needed to hide the fact that I had been in the military. It was a shameful part of my history which I eventually erased for myself. It was actually through the Mandela Dialogues 1, in talking to a former Serbian conscript and conscientious objector, that I started to go back to this.”

Verne is currently the director of Archive and Dialogue at the Nelson Mandela Foundation. He was Mandela’s archivist from 2004 to 2013.

Shirley talks passionately, as director of the Human Rights Media Centre, of her work on oral histories through training, community memorialisation and intergenerational dialogues.

The centre has published over 130 life stories including: refugees from war-torn African countries, survivors of apartheid, women, youth, intergenerational stories, blind and partially sighted men and women.

She laments: “People don’t know how things were for us in the liberation army. To fill this gap, I am managing the AKD Life Story Documentation Project with 19 MK members for book publication in 2017."

The international participants’ responses to the conversation highlighted the universality of the heroic narratives and the enduring fault lines between the victorious and the vanquished. In post-conflict societies, Mandela’s vision of former enemies, challenging their historical narratives and working together is a noble and a necessary imperative.

However, such an imperative requires a commitment to certain core values and some experience in working together to realise these values. Such contexts offer the basis for us to listen to one another.

It was such contexts that made it possible for four former enemies to reflect on their divisive and agonising past, with empathy and without judgement.

In our long walk to building a democratic society, how do we create such safe spaces for memory work so we can heal the wounds of the past and prevent the recurrence of injustice.

Indeed, memory is an instrument of liberation.

l Visit www.nelsonmandela.
org/content/page/nelson-
mandela-international-dialogues1

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