A human being died that night...



More summer reading -- "A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Woman Confronts the Legacy of Apartheid" by Pumla Godobo-Madikizela.

This is certainly familiar ground for me as I've made it a hobby of mine to read different accounts of SA's Truth & Reconciliation process. The accounts are all wildly different in their framing of the issues. For example, you could say that Krog's "Country of My Skull" took an emotional/poetic view and Tutu's "No Future without Forgiveness" took a theological/empathic view. Similarly, Godobo-Madikizela takes a psychological view of the situation.

It's interesting reading. It's in the same vein of much of the recent literature/theater on the topic in that it takes an emblematic character (like "Prime Evil" Eugene De Kock) as the core of the story and builds the author's observations out from there.

What I liked most about the book was Godobo-Madikizela's explicit references to Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" and drawing very clear parallels between the Nazi regime and the Apartheid regime and using Arendt's conceptualization of "the banality of evil" to look at the justifications used for implementing/permmitting Apartheid.

That said, I wouldn't recommend this book unless you're very much into TRC literature. I still think that "Country of My Skull" is the best book about the South Africa's TRC process, but I'd recommend Tutu's "No Future Without Forgiveness" as the place to start an inquiry into the subject matter.

Posted: Fri - July 7, 2006 at 11:00 PM      


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