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

The TRC’s first hearings begin. A large portion of this chapter comprises snippets of direct testimony from many different victims, some attributed and some not, presented as though taken verbatim from the actual proceedings. Krog provides many pages of victims’ stories describing violence and trauma that they have endured through losing children, spouses, or their own torture. While the vast majority of the victims in this chapter are black, Krog does include one Afrikaner victim towards the end of the chapter.

Krog gives particular attention to the testimony of Nomonde Calata, and the assessment and interpretation of Nomonde’s testimony by Krog’s Xhosa friend, Professor Kondlo. Nomonde is the wife of one of the Cradock Four—four noteworthy, black South Africans who vanished and were later found dead. Kondlo describes the funeral of the Cradock Four as “the real beginning of the end of the apartheid” (58).

Woven throughout and around victims’ testimonies, Krog includes snippets of poetry that reflect her background as a poet rather than a journalist, and some brief historical context for why the Commission is starting in the Eastern Cape. She describes the process her news team goes through for how it will report on the TRC in the coming years.