How to Humanize Wrongdoers without Losing Accountability
A Human Being Died That Night shows how to see through perpetrators' evasions of their crimes and how to humanize them without letting them off the hook.
Most people who’ve felt anger at someone who did something wrong have been told some variation of “don’t be like them.” They’re warned not to dehumanize the wrongdoer and to remember the humanity of the perpetrator.
That’s easy to say when forgiving small slights. However, violent crimes test our abilities to humanize offenders. We’re not inclined to see the humanity of child killers or unrepentant rapists.
In A Human Being Died That Night, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela shows how to navigate those difficult impulses. During South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) investigations, Gobodo-Madikizela was in charge of interviewing Eugene de Kock.
De Kock was apartheid’s most infamous death squad commander. He led operations to kidnap, torture, or assassinate anti-apartheid activists - sometimes even outside of South Africa.
His testimony earned him the moniker “Prime Evil” across South Africa. The detail of his testimony revealed:
How the shadowy apartheid state worked
Who was culpable for its most heinous crimes against Black South Africans
Why he and his compatriots were willing to commit kidnappings and assassinations in the name of the country’s white nationalist government
Gobodo-Madikizela’s study of this man, his victims, and her own evolving thoughts about how to treat him is a stress-tested case of how to maintain one’s humanity in the presence of another’s inhumanity.
What de Kock Wanted from His Interviewer
The image readers probably have of de Kock is a monster evading responsibility for his crimes. He used some techniques to distance himself from his crimes.
One technique was invoking an old argument his father used. De Kock’s father would defend Afrikaner nationalism by saying that if he’d been born Black, then he would have joined the African National Congress, the anti-apartheid party.
Gobodo-Madikizela found the comparison “laughable.” De Kock’s imagined solidarity was a common belief that perpetrators adopt: that “what they have done is no worse than the other group’s actions.” The Afrikaner nationalists wanted a South Africa based on white supremacy. The ANC wanted to build a South Africa where people of all races co-existed in a country based on universal respect for human rights.
Those types of distancing techniques didn’t stop de Kock from implicating multiple South African prime ministers in approving operations. Gobodo-Madikizela notes that during his first TRC hearing, “he had inspired the black audience filling the great hall to spontaneous applause during his testimony that day when he named his superiors and lashed out at them for not having ‘the backbone to stand up and take responsibility.’”
De Kock received two life sentences for murders that fell outside of the amnesty conditions set by the TRC. Few members of the former State Security Forces disclosed the details that he did and shared his fate. Some were even living in luxury from the final payouts they received as apartheid ended.
He felt like a scapegoat, and he wasn’t the only one who felt angry at the full weight of the apartheid government’s crimes falling on his shoulders.
Reconciling Empathy with Accountability
Throughout her interviews with de Kock, Gobodo-Madikizela wrestles with stronger feelings of empathy than she was prepared for. She was a Black South African woman who grew up under apartheid. Her knowledge of the apartheid government’s terrors was firsthand.
Despite some of de Kock’s evasions, he was visibly struggling with the enormity of his crimes. In one session in which he discussed his relationship with Black operatives, he began a sentence by saying “If I met you ten years ago,” then stopped.
At the time of that interview, ten years ago was the height of South African death squad activity. Gobodo-Madikizela writes that during that time de Kock was “executing or supervising murderous actions against blacks like me.”
Once the silence fell, she saw de Kock struggling with these memories. “It gave me a sense of hope that he was in some emotional pain about the things he had done,” she wrote.
She identifies her turning point in her conflicted feelings about her empathy at a meeting of international psychoanalysts assisting with the TRC investigations and hearings. Gobodo-Madikizela was presenting her findings from her interviews with de Kock. One speaker asked her whether he was manipulating her into thinking he was remorseful. Then Albie Sachs, a South African judge, raised his hand to speak. Gobodo-Madikizela writes:
“Sachs spoke about how important it was ‘to see these men’s humanity,’ and how much our hope as South Africans depended on reaching out to such glimpses of humanity in a spirit of compassion instead of revenge. Albie Sach’s words were all the more compelling because, as he spoke, he was gesturing with his cut-off arm.”
Compassion as a Politics
South Africa is unique in its attempt to build a politics around reconciliation rather than imposing a victor’s justice on the previous government. It couldn’t have happened without Nelson Mandela’s leadership, and the democracy’s compassionate ethos permeated the TRC.
As she interviewed de Kock, Gobodo-Madikizela found herself “angry that the same society that had created de Kock, that had accepted his murderous protection of their privilege, had ostracized him and was now standing in judgment of him.”
That anger on behalf of a maligned war criminal may seem surprising, but it’s consistent with the ANC’s goal of living peacefully side by side with former oppressors after decades of bloody repression.
That effort began with an attempt to show the country what really happened during apartheid. It showed how the government, church, and countless individuals made widespread Black repression possible. It gave Black South Africans a forum to tell the country and the world what they had experienced in secret for decades.
One of the results was a body of writing that led to books like Gobodo-Madikizela’s. Writings like hers grapple with conflicting goals of mercy and accountability and conflicting emotions of empathy and rage.
These writings stand out because they’re not naive self-help books or dismissive of victims’ pain. A Human Being Died That Night is a great introduction to a large and profound body of work.