Narrating Our Healing:Perspectives on Working Through Trauma

Many thousands of words from every imaginable perspective and in every genre have been written about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) since it began its work thirteen years ago. Among the most interesting and moving of those works was A Human Being Died That Night: A Story of Forgiveness by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a psychologist who worked for the TRC. Gobodo-Madikizela\u27s account of her meetings with convicted death squad commander Eugene de Kock (aka ‘Prime Evil’), and her struggles to reconcile knowledge of his horrifying deeds with the humanity she found in the man, personalized her calls for forgiveness and reconciliation, giving them a poignancy beyond the easy platitudes occasionally offered up by some other TRC proponents