Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa

Having addressed hearings for victims and police-related amnesty-seekers, Krog moves onto amnesty hearings for politicians, which prove to be an attractive spectacle drawing many more foreign journalists. Krog believes that South Africa’s TRC’s unique position of having politicians testify is a result of them having to submit individually rather than as a group. Krog observes that this is “a shift from individual tales to the collective, from victims to the masterminds, from the powerless to those in power” (134).

Krog then outlines the basic positions of each of the major political parties—IFP, AWB, National Party, ANC, Democratic Party, and Freedom Front—each of whom have strong, disparate positions on their roles in apartheid. The IFP and AWB in particular object to the TRC, the IFP because of conflict with the ANC and the AWB because of far-right politics.

Krog primarily focuses on the submissions from the National Party, who were most recently in power before Mandela’s election, and the ANC, who fought against apartheid and took over from the National Party. The NP’s primary stance involves admitting to being wrong in perpetuating apartheid, but denying knowledge of or involvement in “the authorization of assassination, murder, torture, rape, assault” (136). By contrast, the ANC’s “whole submission centers on the notion of a just war.