Not quite Free at Last

We all think we know the broad outlines of the story. South Africa endured 46 years under brutal apartheid rule and, in the turbulence of the struggle that eventually overthrew it, an estimated 21,000 people lost their lives to political violence. About 14,000 of those people died in the period between Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 and his inauguration as the first black, democratically elected president of the new “rainbow nation” in 1994.

From 1996 to 2002 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) conducted public hearings across the country in which victims could finally tell their stories and look the perpetrators of gross humans rights violations in the eyes. This much-celebrated reconciliatory project forced us to confront our dark past to enable us to move on, into a bright, democratic and peaceful future. When the TRC handed the final volumes of its report to then-president Thabo Mbeki in 2003, Mbeki commended the commission for playing an important role as a vital stepping stone in the democratic South African nation-building project. He assured the nation that those perpetrators who'd been denied amnesty or failed to apply for amnesty before the TRC would face prosecution for their crimes.

What the TRC became over the course of the next two decades was, in truth, not a significant contributor to national policy through the implementation of its wide-sweeping and ambitious recommendations but rather, a useful symbolic tool that could be used as a means of deflecting any future difficult national conversations about the past. We'd had the TRC, cried, listened to each other, forgiven, committed to reconciliation and moved on — no need to rehash the horrific details or resort to crying victim any more.

But many of those who'd lost their loved ones to political violence and participated in good faith in the TRC process, with the understanding that those who rejected its amnesty offers or lied to its committees would be held to account, are still waiting for justice. Earlier this year 25 families filed a case against the government for R167-million in constitutional damages, arguing that the democratic state’s failure to prosecute TRC-related cases is a violation of their constitutional rights and dignity. They are demanding that President Cyril Ramaphosa establish an independent commission of inquiry to investigate allegations of political interference by the executive in the prosecution of these cases.

These allegations, first made public in 2015, allege widespread interference by members of the Mbeki government in the work of the supposedly independent National Prosecuting Authority in regard to the investigation and prosecution of matters arising from the TRC.

It’s against this background of truth and lies, promises and betrayals and the still unreconciled, ever-deepening scars of the past that Free at Last, a new three-part docuseries offers an emotionally engaging, hard-hitting portrait of the ways in which the failed promises of the TRC have continued to wreak pain, deepen trauma and sow despair on many South Africans and post-apartheid, not-so-rainbow-anymore South Africa.

Through interviews with the families of apartheid victims, former apartheid policemen and assassins, government officials and truth commissioners, the series makes a convincing argument for its attempt, “To unpack the collective trauma of a nation that has overcome extraordinary challenges but in order to move on, must now truly confront its troubled past.”

That troubled past is visible in the skeletal frame and dead eyes of former Vlakplaas assassin Chappie Klopper as he stands looking through the fence of the farm where he and his fellow killers once murdered without fear of consequence. It’s present in the tired, sad eyes of Tshidiso Motasi, who was an infant sleeping in the Hammanskraal house of his parents Richard and Irene Motasi on the terrible night in 1987 when they were murdered by members of the Vlakplaas Unit. Tshidiso and his grandmother Gloria Hlanangane are still waiting for the NPA to prosecute the killers.

The ghosts of the past hang over the exhausted bodies of the family members of the Cosas Four, who, 42 years after the four were blown up by members of the apartheid security forces, have endured almost 30 delays in the ongoing court case brought against the only two perpetrators still alive. 

Justice delayed is indeed justice denied, and while Mbeki denied any knowledge of or involvement in alleged political interference into TRC-related prosecutions, it's clear from the evidence presented here that someone has a serious case to answer for. It's a stark fact that, almost 31 years into democracy, virtually no prosecutions in these cases have been brought and, in most instances, the delays have seen key witnesses die and perpetrators not accounting for their crimes.   

Free At Last, a co-production between South Africa, the Netherlands and Germany, directed by Xoliswa Sithole, Thomas Blom and Misha Wessel, doesn't have the answers as to what really happened in the past or what can be done about properly addressing it. It does, however, do the important job of keeping difficult questions in the public spotlight, allowing those from all sides of the past to keep the conversation alive, while those seeking justice and answers continue to wait for the promises made to them to be finally kept or forever, unforgivably, broken.

• The third and final episode of Free At Last airs on SABC 1 tomorrow at 9pm.