A Human Being Died That Night (thoughts)

Apparently, this is going to be a week for me to gush about nonfiction! A Human Being Died that Night by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela is a slim book, but no less powerful for it. Gobodo-Madikizela is South African, with a background in psychology, and after the end of apartheid, she participated in the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) set up to try to help society come to terms with its past. While this book includes stories of victims that she heard, as well as in her own past, it’s centered around her interviews with Eugene de Kock, an Afrikaaner counter-insurgency commander during apartheid who came to represent all of the violence of the regime. de Kock has been sentenced to over two hundred years in prison, and so in lieu of a pardon from the government (that he expects but that has yet to arrive), he will spend the rest of life locked up.

Gobodo-Madikizela visited prison to conduct extensive talks with de Kock, and from the book it’s apparent that she went with the intention of trying to understand what makes people do evil deeds. She found a man who had real regret for his past, and this touched her. Gobodo-Madikizela’s writing is incredible; she brings the reader right where she is, fills him with her emotions, and then proceeds to intellectual analyses. Here is the moment when Gobodo-Madikizela, and thus the reader, meets de Kock for the first time:

As he smiled shyly, perhaps politely, rising to greet me, I saw a flicker of boyishness, of uncertainty. At the same time, my mind registered “Prime Evil,” the name that marked him as the surest evidence of all that had happened under apartheid. De Kock had not just given apartheid’s murderous evil a name. He had become that evil. The embodiment of evil stood there politely smiling at me. 

I think what makes this book so powerful, other than the sheer perfection of Gobodo-Madikizela’s writing, is that she humanises de Kock, and looks at the societal context, without ever dismissing his crimes. The following passage struck me deeply:

De Kock’s given role, for example, as apartheid’s crusader indicates right away that he had a future of violence carved out for him by national leaders. Should he have resisted such forces as apartheid’s legalization of violence and the silent support by a society that benefited from the violence? Of course he should have. But could he have? Did he have the conviction to oppose the system he served? Did he have any of the unique resources that only the morally courageous-the few who have the courage to follow their conscience-possess in totalitarian societies? That one is not confronted with the choices de Kock could have or could not have made, that one was not a member of the privileged class in apartheid South Africa are matters of sheer grace. There is wisdom and insight in what Pulitzer Prize-winner Tina Rosenberg says, that we “who interview and write and judge, we are clear-eyed about the system’s evil. …We know how we would have behaved. It is [our] extreme good fortune that we will never face this test.”

The thing is, while this is a book about an evil regime, and the evil things people did in its name, and the evil things people suffered in its name, it is never hopeless. And I think that’s due to Gobodo-Madikizela’s focus on people, who survive, who repent, who have the potential for change. It’s difficult for me to explain what this book did for me; every time I try, it never quite comes out right. I find myself just wanting to share another long quote from Gobodo-Madikizela herself, since she put it all so well. But before I do so, I will try. This is a book that I think everyone should read: it’s as much about what it means to be human as it is about South Africa’s tragedy. I would often hold my breath while reading, I was so caught up with Gobodo-Madikizela and the experiences that she was conveying. I would also often reread a story three or four times, making sure I really felt it, following the example of empathy she creates. And so much of her writing had a powerful effect on me, I ended up typing out two full pages so that I could reread one story as much as I desire. I very rarely resent returning books to the library, but A Human Being Died that Night is one of those books: I wanted to be able to put it on my own shelves, to reread whenever I wish.  I hope that I’ve convinced you to pick this up. Here is a final passage, in which Gobodo-Madikizela explains her motivations for seeking de Kock out, as well as the common reactions of others who found out about her project.

Casting my professional interest in de Kock in terms of romantic motive (“in love with him”) or as something mysterious (“She’s so fascinated by him!”) makes it too easy for my listeners to distance themselves from the reality of interacting with the man. It allows them to dismiss my work as something unnatural, something kinky. It allows them to set it aside-to set me aside-as an exception, something allowable within the space of a soap opera irrationality, something on someone else’s screen. There is a charming madness to it. It closes off the possibility of any serious dialogue on the real subject of my visits to the C section of Pretoria Central Prison: to understand the inner mind of evil, to follow its thought processes, and to expose myself to its human face, stripped of media stereotypes and the easy distance of hatred. Connecting on a human level with a monster therefore comes to be a profoundly frightening prospect, for ultimately, it forces us to confront the potential for evil within ourselves. Compassion toward and hence forgiveness of people who have left a gruesome trail in their wake in effect brings “innocent” victims and wicked men together to share at a single common table of humanity, and that prospect is unpalatable.