A Human Being Died That Night

"This is a complicated and moving book about the nature of good and evil. Pumla is a South African psychologist who spent a lot of time in prison interviewing people like Eugene de Kock, the commanding officer of state-sanctioned apartheid death squads. He is currently serving 212 years in jail for crimes against humanity. He directed ‘the blood, the bodies and the killing’ against apartheid’s enemies. She walks us through her recognition, “that good and evil exist in our lives and that evil, like good, is always a possibility”. Anybody can say this but because she exposes us to what happens to her as she is interviewing de Kock, we come to a more visceral understanding of this capacity for evil. She explains how she ends up really empathising with him, and possibly even sympathising with him. De Kock oversaw the killing of innocent people and it is incredible that this black South African psychologist was able to sit down with him and physically touch him. She recognised a side of him, a capacity for good, that unfortunately never evolved. He was responsible for truly horrific crimes. And yet she came to empathise with him. It’s extremely uncomfortable for her, and for the reader, to recognise the capacity for good in persons whose actions we condemn as evil. Yes. There were a few terrorists I talked to who seemed to have become truly evil. They seemed to have lost their capacity for empathy. You get this feeling that the hairs are standing up on the back of your neck. But that wasn’t the case for the majority of terrorists I spoke with. In many cases I felt that they were caught in a web of lies, that they were vulnerable boys who had been manipulated by leaders to do terrible and terrifying things."

"The author, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, is a black South African clinical psychologist and she was a co-ordinator for the victims’ public hearings in the Western Cape for the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Yes the book is about post-apartheid South Africa, but Gobodo-Madikizela herself grew up under apartheid. In the book she interviews a white Afrikaner, Eugene de Kock, a staunch advocate of the National Party that had maintained apartheid, a member of the security forces who had been dubbed ‘Prime Evil’ for the role that he played in the kidnapping, torture, and killing and of predominately anti-apartheid activists. She went to interview him in prison, intrigued by him because, during his appearance before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he expressed an interest in apologizing to the widows of policemen killed in the Motherwell bombing, one of his operations. That sparked the question: what would lead Prime Evil to apologize or engage with these widows? Gobodo-Madikizela gives invaluable insight into the psychology of perpetrators, the psychological impacts on victims of horrific atrocities, and how we think about possibilities for moving forward as a community post-atrocity. That’s always a worry about whether remorse or apologies will be faked. That’s actually one of the reasons that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa did not require an apology or make an expression of remorse a condition for getting amnesty. I think the sincerity of de Kock’s remorse is demonstrated by what has done since he was released from prison, which has been to go around and systematically try to make amends to members of the black South African community that he harmed during his career as a security agent. One of the things that I find most interesting about her portrayal of him is that it challenges a common conception of a moral monster as a psychopath. As Gobodo-Madikizela herself writes at one point: most people who engage in human rights atrocities aren’t psychopaths. It’s not that they’re unable to feel guilt. It’s that there’s complicated narratives and ways of being in denial about what you’re doing, by for example seeing it as justified for the greater good. Certain background institutional and social contexts also make it possible for ordinary people to do absolutely heinous and horrific things. This makes the question of preventing widespread wrongdoing much more complicated than often thought. “It challenges a common conception of a moral monster as a psychopath” De Kock illustrates these points. If anyone was guilty of evil during apartheid, de Kock was. The references to what he did in defence of apartheid come out in various ways throughout the book. But it’s also clear that we’re dealing with an ordinary human being. He recognized that he did things that most human beings couldn’t understand. It was done in the shadows of the community. But he had a justification for what he did. De Kock believed that the security and future of white South Africans was in peril. So de Kock viewed what he was doing as defence of a community that he cared about, and who in order to survive ultimately relied on people like him doing what he was doing. At the same time, he articulates how he rationalized and justified horrific wrongdoing, de Kock articulates his moral limits during these periods, almost as a way of demonstrating his humanity and morality. At one point, de Kock says to Gobodo-Madikizela, ‘I did horrible things but I never touched kids. There was a limit to what I would do.’ Because so many children died during security force operations, she thought that was too incredible to believe, but then she talked to people who confirmed that he viewed and treated children differently. He paused a major gun battle one time because there was a little kid in the hallway, and he wanted to make sure the kid went to safety. Gobodo-Madikizela talks at certain points about how maybe there’s a slightly higher propensity among people who’ve suffered violence as a child, which de Kock had as well. There’s inculturation, growing up in a community that dehumanised black South Africans, a community that saw South Africa as a state for white people and white people only, who were the real citizens, and so they became immured to the suffering of other people and had a lack of empathy for black South Africans who were part of the community. The other part of Gobodo-Madikizela’s book I find especially compelling concerns her discussion of what that violence meant for victims, and for black South Africans like herself who weren’t direct victims of torture or killing or abduction, but suffered the consequences of living as a second class citizen and always under the threat of violence during apartheid. For direct victims, you learn of the trauma that violence leaves, the psychological scars and the physical scars, the shattering of assumptions about the nature of the world and the human beings in it. A Human Being Died that Night is an incredibly powerful narrative of who is responsible for horrific wrongdoing and the human cost that that wrongdoing has, on perpetrators and on victims, more importantly."