Apologies and regrets

Jacob Zuma expresses regret to the nation for his behaviour which has supposedly pained us. I have difficulties with this concept. We all know about Zuma's weaknesses. We knew them before he was elected into office. His current behaviour is not surprising and fits in with what we have previously seen of him. History does tend to predict the future. I am therefore, in no way pained by Zuma's behaviour. This does not make his behaviour less embarrassing. He has lost more respect, partially by his stupidity and his apparent belief that his behaviour does not matter. For me, the problem is that we have a president who has extremely poor impulse control. This has been clear before, but is again emphasised. Power and poor impulse control is a recipe for major troubles.

After some irritation at being in yet another conversation which morphed into how "they" are doing everything wrong, how "they" are corrupt and so on, I started thinking about the processes involved. I, after some irritation, said I objected to the racist undertones and that people, all people did these things. Of course, everyone agreed!

But what is happening in these exchanges? By describing and decrying "their" corruption, we are defining ourselves as against corruption and moral. We recognise how wrong things are. We, and our friends sitting around the braai with us, are the good guys. We are also the victims. We can commiserate with one another and agree that we are moral, good and victimised. We are not part of the culture of corruption, we are not part of the community that does these things. So we get some sense of community from the interaction and have defined ourselves. However, in my experience, when people engage in this sort of behaviour, they often feel more despondent and disempowered. So why do it?

I think it happens because the alternatives are just too difficult.

I don't know everyone who was their last night, but I suspect that when the roles were reversed, and apartheid was in place, that none or very few of us, insisted that apartheid be dismantled and people be given equal status. I don't think anyone of us at the gathering risked our lives or our comfort levels so that right would be done.

All whites in South Africa have benefitted through our whiteness. But this is never acknowledged in these gatherings. Guilt for apartheid is never acknowledged. We never say that we are selfish and as long as we and children have security that the other man does not really matter.

If I had to talk to people at the gathering individually, the chances are that we would touch on what has been described as the fundamental attribution error. In other words, other people do what they do because on their personality; they are just bad. I do what I do because my circumstances are really difficult.

The problem with this sort of labelling of the other, is that it forms the basis of wars, genocide and discrimination against others. I am justified in vilifying these people; they are really bad - look at what they do.

The alternative to labelling groups of people is to know people. It is not to necessarily do good; charity is wonderful, but they are still the other. In order to counter this tendency, we need to spend time with someone and to actually know something about them, who they are, their stories, their aspirations. We also need to know this tendency in ourselves to label others and to resist it, to not take what appears to be the easy way out. We need to be honest with ourselves and we need to know how we have benefitted through apartheid, that we deserve the guilt we have, and that we complain because we are inconvenienced, not because we are moral, upstanding citizens.

Where does guilt and forgiveness lie?

I have been trying to think why I was so disturbed when I heard that Professor Jonathan Jansen pardoned the Reitz students. They had supposedly urinated on food and videoed the cleaning staff eat it in a mock initiation rite.



He explained that the university shared their guilt as it had long been an institution which had allowed racism. It is a university which traditionally served the conservative white Afrikaans student. Even post-1994 the residences have been segregated. Without doubt it has not confronted racism which is rife on the campus. Prof. Jansen also explained that part of his pardon was to encourage reconciliation.



However, I think that Prof. Jansen faulted on a number of levels. I agree that the university has responsibility in what has happened. It is a shared responsibility which extends to all South Africans, and to a large extent more to white South Africans - we all bear responsibility for the world we have created. But this does not take away the responsibility of the individual. The students are also partially responsible for creating a world in which cruelty and racism exists. I struggled with this concept when working with men who had tortured. They understood it better than I did, and when I indicated that I thought we as a society were guilty of atrocities, they would say that it may be true on one level, but we had not attached electrodes to a suspects genitals. Prof. Jansen can apologise for the institution and to some extent for society, but he cannot take on their individual guilt. We can only apologise for being part-creators of such a world. The students are still, individually responsible for their role in the creation of a world in which people are degraded and treated cruelly. On this level, the call for them to show remorse makes sense - we need to see them accepting responsibility for their actions, acknowledging the harm they have done and demonstrating remorse.



We regard to forgiveness: Prof. Jansen does not have the right to forgive them their actions; this right belongs to the victims of these young men. He only has the right to acknowledge their remorse if it is there, but he has to direct them to the people they have harmed. He can, if he chooses, acknowledge the lack of protection offered the victims by the institution he represents and ask their forgiveness for not ensuring that they were treated with dignity. He can also, if he chooses, apologise to the students for an institution which did not insist that they acknowledge the humanity of all people.

Inviting the students to continue studying risks implying that their behaviour did not matter. It also implies that the dignity of those they injured is of no importance. The only way this could have been ameliorated would have been with a public recognition by the students of the wrongness of their behaviour, clear remorse and a commitment to restitution.

Traumatised or not traumatised?

Everything goes through periods of being fashionable. Or to sound smarter about it, we construct our worlds through language. And one of my current pet hates is that everyone is traumatised by everything. Stoicism and fortitude have disappeared, these are no longer fashionable words. When last have you heard them? If someone dares say that they are not traumatised by an armed robbery or by whatever, they are clearly mistaken. Everyone knows they should be traumatised which means that they are in denial or suppressing their true feelings. Our society has decided that when we have bad experiences that we have to receive trauma counselling.

An entire industry has arisen around this belief; numerous institutions provide training in trauma counselling. Numerous NGOs owe their continued existence to their providing trauma counselling. When some disaster happens somewhere in the world, the mental health professionals are there, providing trauma counselling. The psychologist who suggests someone is fine and would be better off without any intervention from the mental health industry is regarded as either incompetent or blunted by his or her experiences.

In reality the entire concept is bizarre. When you have had a bad experience, the last thing you need is a stranger asking about your emotional reaction! You need to know that you are safe, you need food, water, warmth, whatever you have lost and you need comfort, preferably from your own family or community. You definitely do not need do-gooding strangers who do not know you, who are not part of your community and who will disappear from your life as soon as they have either done their little bit or been attracted to some other disaster.

There are a number of studies now that indicate that early interventions by mental health professionals can cause the problems they were designed to prevent. They, in general, do more harm than good. These studies confirm that people who have had bad experiences need their families and friends during stressful times. Most people will be fine following dreadful events; around ninety per cent of people will experience no long-term symptoms.

It is not only that everyone is supposed to be traumatised when experiencing something bad, we as a society appear to have strange ways of dealing with really terrible events. Every time there is some truly horrific incident on the news and the sound bit ends with: "They are receiving trauma counselling" I have to wonder what this says about our society. We do not have to worry further about the type of society we have created - they are receiving trauma counselling. They will be fine, no matter how horrendous the event - they are receiving trauma counselling. We no longer have to think about shattered lives - they are receiving trauma counselling. We have no further responsibility, we have created the structure to deal with horror - they are receiving trauma counselling.

A special graduation

I graduated on the 5th October at Unisa (a distance learning university in South Africa). I generally do not go to graduation ceremonies, but this time decided I had better, largely because I have demanded so much time from my family the last five years.

It was so special. I did not expect to enjoy it, but I did. It was a graduation ceremony situated in Africa with colour and ululating and shouts of appreciation. Unisa attracts people who would not otherwise be able to study, so there were people in their forties and fifties and sixties getting first degrees. It was apparent that every person had a story and the audience appreciated it. Every graduand was applauded for their achievement which had clearly come with struggle and many difficulties. This was not a routine awarding of degrees to young, privileged people who had spent the last few years attending classes and studying; these were degrees awarded to people who had struggled to pay the fees, who held down jobs, who had families and had to study in snatches of time, often spreading the degree over many years. I felt immensely privileged to share the acknowledgement of their success.

Working with torturers

I am trying (operative word is trying) to ready an article for submission and hopefully publication. I routinely ask myself, everyday I think, why did I embark on this research? I have been asked this on numerous occasions. Why do research with torturers? The closest is probably that it fell on my lap and I could not allow men who were so distraught by their own behaviour face the journey of exploration alone. I have also always been aware of my own guilt with regard to apartheid and how I have benefitted by that evil system. I have never tortured, but I knew I had I had done nothing to prevent what was wrong and had benefitted from it.

As I write the article, I revisit my thoughts on my experiences working with men who have tortured. I am unaware of any work on the impact on the researcher or therapist who works with perpetrators of torture and other atrocities.

Initially I felt as though the participants were inviting me into an abyss. Wilson and Thomas (2004, p. 19) refer to the abyss experience as archetypal and define it as: "individual encounters with extremely foreboding psychological experience, which typically involve the confrontation with evil and death; the experience of soul death and the spectre of nonbeing; the sense of abandonment by humanity; the sense of ultimate aloneness in the universe and despairing; and the cosmic challenge of meaning." They are referring to work with trauma victims. I worked with men who caused this in others and in themselves and invited me to join them in their journey of attempting to understand why they tortured and killed. They needed to reconstitute themselves and re-establish meaning in their lives.

Looking back, I ask whether this has had any long-term effects on me? I developed empathy with the participants in my study. It was the only way to avoid pseudospeciation. If I decided they were not like me, "of a different species" the following step was dehumanisation and that is a building block for committing atrocities. In order to have empathy , I had to be aware of my capacity for evil. I had to know that although I have never tortured, it was a mere accident of birth that I had not.

I found that once I became aware of my ability for evil, I could work with perpetrators. I became aware of an interlinked universe and could allow both victims and perpetrators in the room. I shared humanity with all of them. I was victim and perpetrator.

Police, firepower and human rights

We have the history we have in South Africa of police brutality during apartheid. We have a constitution based on human rights and the rights of police to shoot have been defined in the police act. And now the police minister wants to increase the police's firepower. Numerous comments have been made on this matter. But:

• Most of us have no idea of what it is like to do the job the police do. Imagination is insufficient. We know that even if someone has been trained for months and they have not been exposed sufficiently to the sensory experiences of being shot at that they can freeze or not respond correctly. How much less can people judge who have not been there at all?
• Human rights is a beautiful philosophy. In practice it leads to numerous dilemmas which are extremely difficult to resolve. Professional philosophers struggle with these dilemmas. The police officer on the ground has no chance of resolving these dilemmas.
• It is, I think, a matter of interpretation. If criminals are carrying heavy caliber or automatic weapons it should be interpreted that the police officers as well as the public’s lives are endangered. Waiting for them to demonstrate further aggression is stupid. Dead police cannot shoot back. Hopefully the new amendments will sort this out.
• There are confusing demands on the police officer on the street. If they arrest a gang of hijackers, the commanding officers will ask them why they are still alive. They understand the message. The community demands strong action; I suspect that if we surveyed people, most are going to demand that criminals are shot dead. Everyone is gatvol. The police know this. They act in compliance with society’s demands. They know the law, but they also know society does not always agree with the law.
• It comes down often more to whether we want to know what is happening or not. We can keep the law as is and reports will be manipulated so that it appears that the police are sticking to the law. We’ve had this before in South Africa. I do not doubt for a moment that it continues. All current reports indicate the police were shot at and then opened fire. Maybe I am unduly cynical, but I do not believe this. It does prevent controversy, suspensions and internal investigations when it is presented in this way. And the police are congratulated on their quick action. We, as a society can recognize all the issues involved and take responsibility for decisions made, but I doubt that we have the courage. A policeman (who has committed various atrocities) explained to me that he is a sacrifice for the community. He does what we expect him to do and carries the guilt and emotional effects as a result. We just want results and do not know what he does in order to get the arrest and conviction. I think he is right.