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

After switching to a more narrative style in Part 3, Krog returns in this chapter to the fragmented style she uses in Part 2. Most of Chapter 13 is further stories and testimonies from victims of all kinds—black victims of white and black violence and white victims of black violence. One victim, Michael Lapsley, who is a pacifist Anglican priest who loses his hands and an eye in a targeted bombing by the ANC—blames de Klerk for his misfortune, saying: “I lay sole responsibility for that with F.W. de Klerk. De Klerk knew of the hit squads […] but [he] chose to do nothing about it” (177).

Several of the victims in this chapter either experienced necklacing—restrained with a tire, covered in petrol, and set on fire—or watched loved ones experience it. Krog observes that Queenstown, where the TRC is at this point in the narrative, is the “necklace capital” of South Africa. Another victim details a confession of being a foreigner of a different name via torture, and then wrongfully jailed. Finally, a white victim speaks of his family dying in a land mine, and his going back to the site of the attack to bring pieces of his wife and son home to bury.