Truth & Lies | Truth and Reconciliation

Robben Island Museum
Off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa

"From the 17th to the 20th centuries, Robben Island served as a place of banishment, isolation and imprisonment. Today it is a World Heritage Site and museum, a poignant reminder to the newly democratic South Africa of the price paid for freedom."

Jillian Edelstein
Truth & Lies Exhibition

Based on her documentation of hearings that revealed gross human rights violations during proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) from 1996 to 2000.

The photographs are a reminder of an apartheid ‘hell-hole’ that was prevalent in South Africa prior to 1994; a South Africa that the young of today might only have heard about. The Edelstein photographs also represent seemingly innocent scenes of murder, torture, secrets, lies and the uncovering of truths.

A visit to the exhibition goes hand in hand with a deeper understanding of Nelson Mandela’s words of wisdom at the dawn of our democracy: “Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.”

On view through March.

[Text from Museum website. Graphic from Good & Evil: Stories and photographs from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Accompanying text below by Jill Edelstein.

DIRK COETZEE
Pretoria, 26 February 1997

"I follow Dirk Coetzee’s detailed instructions down Jacaranda-lined Isipingo Street. For a few short weeks every year, this dull brown town is turned purple by a mass of exquisite blossom. My first impression is of how heavily Coetzee has incarcerated himself. His rottweilers are snarling, and the barbed wire around the metal gates glistens in the sunshine. Tea is served in china cups on a floral tray. So civilized, I think, holding my cup and saucer. I notice that wherever Coetzee goes, the leather purse which hangs off his wrist like a little handbag goes with him. ‘It contains my gun,’ he informs me. ‘I take it everywhere, even when I go to the toilet.’"

– From Jillian Edelstein’s diary.

Dirk Coetzee was the first commander of the special ‘counter-insurgency’ unit at Vlakplaas. He had ordered the deaths of many ANC activists, including Griffiths Mxenge, a human rights lawyer, who was stabbed 40 times at Umlazi Stadium in Durban, and Sizwe Kondile, a young law graduate from the Eastern Cape, who was interrogated and beaten then handed over to Coetzee who had him shot and his body burned. Coetzee’s career at Vlakplaas was short-lived. He was demoted first to the narcotics division and then to the flying squad and in 1986 was discharged from the police force. In 1989, prompted by the last-minute confession about the unit at Vlakplaas by one of Coetzee’s colleagues, Almond Nofomela,who was attempting to avoid execution on death row for a non-political murder, Coetzee exposed the undercover operations of the SAP in an interview with the journalist Jacques Pauw. For the next three years, Coetzee lived in exile. He returned to South Africa in 1993, and in May 1997 was tried and found guilty for his role in the murder of Griffiths Mxenge. But he had applied to the Truth Commission for amnesty and in August 1997 he was granted amnesty for Mxenge’s murder. At the TRC hearing in Durban, Coetzee was asked what he felt about what he had done to the Mxenge family. He said he felt:

“... humiliation, embarrassment and the hopelessness of a pathetic, ‘I am sorry for what I have done’ ... What else can I offer them? A pathetic nothing, so in all honesty I don’t expect the Mxenge family to forgive me, because I don’t know how I
ever in my life would be able to forgive a man like like Dirk Coetzee if he’d done to me what I’ve done to them.”

[Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]