I'm not one for sad or painful books. I'll happily go to a movie that I know will pull the emotional heart-strings, but I'm definitely not one for investing time and effort in traversing through hundreds of pages of something that will induce sensations of pain, guilt, remorse or some of those other wonderfully melancholic emotions.

Thanks to some fairly unrelated events I have found myself remembering one such book that I read a few years back. I seem to have relegated it to the deepest, darkest parts of my memory reserves in trying to forget that I ever read it. The aforementioned culprit is Antjie Krog's acclaimed work, Country of My Skull. The book is an in-depth, personal narrative "with the goal of capturing the overwhelming moral, emotional, and historical complexity of the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa."

I almost didn't have a choice in reading the book … it was prescribed reading for my last degree and heavily endorsed by my supervisor, Dr Elmarie Kotze, who was a passionate follower of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). I'll admit that reading Country of My SKull was pretty much my first voluntary engagement with the TRC process. I had seen some snippets of the broad casted hearings on TV, but like with most pieces of information that you don't understand the context or relevance, I switched channels. The TRC flew under the radar in my life as I traversed my early 20's. Little did I know that I was living life in oblivious ignorance of a process that cut right to the bone in the narrative pulse of our nation. Krog's book moved that seemingly irrelevant process from the outskirts of attention to a space where I had to confront my identity as a white South African and how I had been largely ignorant of the impact apartheid had on our nation.

I wish I could say reading Country of My Skull was an experience akin to coming up out of water for a breath of air. Nope. Instead, it was a process that left me feeling choked by the emotion of witnessing stories of immense pain and confronting how I had personally benefited from the restrictive regime.

One of the significant processes in the TRC was that of the granting of amnesty to perpetrators who came forward and gave full disclosure of their dealings in human rights violations. It was an audacious process and one that, in the words of the TRC's Chairperson Rev Desmond Tutu,

"… is fortunate that the kind of details exposed by the Commission did not come out in a series of criminal trials, which – because of the difficulty of proving cases beyond reasonable doubt in the absence of witnesses other than co-conspirators – most likely would have ended in acquittals"

The TRC came up for a lot of stick because of the amnesty process. There was a stream of anger within the pulse of the nation that called for justice in the form of criminal trials. Instead, the TRC opened a path of justice that (hopefully) elicited more truth and justice that could have been achieved by more punitive measures.

It has been interesting to see how, much like my process of forgetting the pain of reading Country of My Skull, the TRC has almost been forgotten by the nation. The process has been repressed within our nation's narrative pulse in quite astonishing ways. I guess it is also not surprising that a collective amnesia would set in when one considers the wounds that the TRC exposed and the immense pain our nation was confronted with.

And so, there have been some events that have resulted in the writing of this post. The first is the recent conviction of apartheid era Minster of Justice Adriaan Vlok for the attempted murder of Frank Chikane (I've written about Vlok before here). Vlok is significant because he was granted amnesty for his involvement in some atrocities by the TRC and has now been convicted of a case for which he did not apply for amnesty. There has been a significant shift in the nation's pulse as represented by Vlok's conviction. It's almost as if the pain and turmoil represented by the TRC has now been brought out into the open again.

The second event is that of recent conversations with a colleague, Keith, who has just read Country of My Skull and will be presenting on it as a programme he's running at the University of Hawaii. The conversations have revolved around the painful reading of the book and the application of its lessons to life.

These events seem to have conspired against my desire to let the sleeping dog lie. On personal scale, the TRC is back on the radar. On a national scale, the same is also true. Perhaps the personal and national reactions are the same? In purveying the national response to Vlok's conviction, I hear a deep fear being expressed at having all this exposed again. Wasn't the TRC enough? Do we need to go through it again? Some voices are demanding that if the court route is one being followed that both sides be brought to book. Other voices are just wishing we could forget about our past.

Personally, I wonder which way this will all go? The TRC offered and granted amnesty in many cases and we had full disclosure from perpetrators. I wonder if the new spate of criminal charges and court cases will revoke some of the hard and good work that the TRC did?

I now have Country of My Skull next to me on my desk beckoning for a second read-through. I'm trying to resist, but I know that resistance is futile in this regard. I have an inevitable feeling that I'm about to, once more, delve into the past of my country. It's a past that I was protected from to a large degree because of my age and position in society. A signifier of this journey is that I have also just downloaded the full TRC report (available here).

I may have changed the channel when the TRC hearing were being aired and I may have tried to forget the pain of reading Krog's personal narrative of the TRC process, but I now embark on my own journey of discovery into the TRC. It is a journey I' think I'll write more about in posts to come, and it might be a journey I give up on.