Permanently removed from society': the Cradock Four, the TRC, moral judgments, historical truth, and the dilemmas of Contemporary History
- Autores: Derek Charles Catsam
- Localización: Historia Actual Online, ISSN-e 1696-2060, Nº. 7, 2005, págs. 135-142
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
On 27 June, 1985, four men from the South African town of Cradock left the coastal city of Port Elizabeth. Among the four was popular teacher and anti-apartheid activist Matthew Goniwe. The only people who would ever see them again would be their killers, members of the South African Police (SAP). The identities of the killers would remain hidden for well more than a decade, when the killers applied for amnesty through the Truth and Reconciliation (TRC), which the Government of National Unity had established after the apartheid government gave way to a multiracial democracy. This article focuses in particular on a culture of deniability that emerged during the 1980s. In the course of the investigations of the killing of Goniwe and his colleagues, journalists uncovered ¿Die Sein,¿ (Afrikaans for ¿The Signal¿) which called for ¿the permanent removal from society¿ of Goniwe. When pressed, officials of the state and security forces insisted that there were many ways to interpret Die Sein and that the document did not necessarily call for Goniwe's death. This followed a pattern in which South African officials had stretched the limits of credulity in asserting that similar words and phrases did not mean what the security forces nonetheless always took them to mean.
