Dr. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela is a professor and influential former member of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was created to address the injustices of apartheid. She was awarded the 2024 Templeton Prize for her insight into trauma and forgiveness in post-apartheid South Africa, and she developed a model for social healing in the aftermath of conflict, something she calls “the reparative quest.”

Her award-winning book A Human Being Died That Night recounts her conversations with Eugene de Kock, the former commander of state-sanctioned death squads, and she builds a case for the possibility of remorse, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Pumla joins the podcast to explain why we can’t just “forgive and forget” and how her encounters with Eugene DeKock led her to develop the concept of “the reparative quest.”

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

Ben: Welcome to the Templeton Ideas Podcast, Pumla.

Pumla: Thank you, Ben.

Ben: I want to get started with some questions about your background. We start this way in all our interviews, and especially in yours, I think it’s important to understand where you’re coming from to make sense of the implications of your work. So just to start, where did you grow up, and what did you love to do as a child?

Pumla: I grew up in one of the townships, in Cape Town called Langa Township. and it’s a segregated township under apartheid, black people only. home was, in an area where there was a very strong community around families, there was a neighborliness around everyone. And so, it was really a place of love and caring and there wasn’t much really to do. except to play with others, the games that children play. We created our own games, I suppose going to school and, you know, and doing schoolwork and enjoying that would be some of the things that I could, I could highlight.

But family time on Sundays was very special. It’s always special because our parents were home. and we would go to church in the morning and have family lunch and our family lunches are always big because My uncles and aunts came to my parents’ home for those kinds of, family meals. And then the holidays are always lovely because we would drive back to the Eastern Cape to my father’s, family home. And that was always a wonderful time together driving. for 12 hours. to the Eastern Cape. So those are some of my memories of my childhood.

Ben: When did you first become aware you were living in in an apartheid system, in a country where You had less freedom, less recreation opportunities than many of your countrymen in other parts of South Africa.

Pumla: The first time I, I encountered apartheid was when my family moved to the Eastern Cape and. My, my mother had gone to the post office to a town next to where we were living. We had moved to in, in the Eastern Cape. And we used to go to a farming town, which was mostly, you know, a population of white farmers. And so, it was kind of like the town where you go to buy serious groceries, a serious grocery store, and I was very excited to be going out with my mom. She was going to the post office and as she completed a post office, chores, I then ran ahead of her to go to the store, to the ice cream store, which was open. And I ran in very excitedly wanting to buy ice cream. Um, and the moment I stepped in excitedly, a young boy of about five years old sitting on the counter with it man behind him, started shooing me out. It, it, like out, which is out in Afrikaans, chasing me out of the store. And so that experience really, really stayed with me and I, I never forgot that the way that it’s dampened my feeling of excitement as a child, it was a moment of discovery of what it means to be black in, in South Africa. And I started asking questions. I didn’t get answers from my mother. Didn’t get clear and clean answers, but I discovered the answers because already now I was almost marked with that experience.

Ben: That was so violent. Was there another moment, a pivotal moment that drove you toward studying psychology and trauma and reconciliation, all the topics that have filled your career as a scholar. Was there a moment, in early life that pushed you in that direction?

Pumla: A clear moment, but I’ll say there’s a, there’s a constellation of moments, one of which was that moment and how I felt about it, how it affected me. And then, you know, observing people around me in my later childhood and early adulthood, especially observing how people negotiated, themselves, the, you know, the way that people moved around in white spaces How my father especially responded at these moments. We would be driving, for example, to the Eastern Cape and he would be stopped by young white boys who were in the army. And the way they treated him, and the way that my father would be quiet in the car, driving after those encounters. To me, there was something that, to me, it seemed contradictory. Here is this person whom I know is so strong and loving and comfortable in himself. But he would be undone by these encounters.

He would not, he would be quiet for long distances. And I would wonder where that goes and what it does to him. And so, my interest in trauma. was sort of mixed up with those experiences in my family, but also with my encounters with reading memoirs of, you know, people who had experienced trauma, particularly, books about slavery, about the Holocaust.

So, all of that, you know, drew me into just this issue of how people live with all these contradictions in there, in, in, in their lives of being human beings with pride, but.

Encountering treatment is dehumanized other and how they return to themselves to hold all of that, all these contradictions of who they are, who others think they are

Ben: And so that kind of sealed my academic interests, in your involvement with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as well, where you were invited to take part because of your expertise, as I understand it. And I want to hear a little bit about that story. But your understanding of trauma and healing and forgiveness Was really, important in that process. Tell us what it was like to be part of that. How did it come about? How did you get involved? And what made that approach of the TRC special?

Pumla: I was already, involved in human rights work at the time as a clinical psychologist. And I think that that is probably what led to the invitation by Archbishop Tutu for me to join the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I was excited about it because it was like coming full circle. I, I really jumped at the opportunity at first. I thought, wow, you know, what an opportunity when I was reading about the truth commission, when it was the truth commission in the making,

I thought, what a, what a wonderful, idea. of healing a nation by inviting people to speak about the experiences that they’ve had. And not only that, inviting perpetrators who had caused the harm to speak also about what they did in a public space. I thought this was so unique.

I’ve never seen it. And I think for me, what really intrigued me is that. At the time of the invitation, I was already reading about Nazi perpetrators because of my Ph. D. research, my doctoral research, having,

And so, none of, you know, none of what I was reading about, had anything to say about reconciliation. In fact, the,

Ben: Mm hmm.

Pumla: The text I was reading, they, they were, what was dominant was that the, this kind of forgiving, you know, is, is just not possible. Reconciliation is not possible. We cannot even imagine what it means to forgive them. And so that, that’s what I was reading. And so, the invitation to the TRC opened a new world for the idea of reconciliation was new.

The word was not new itself, but the way that the TRC was setting, was being set up, was being established. was clearly establishing something new.

and there was criticism at the same time, of course, but overwhelmingly there was this just this sense of deep, deep hope that, um, we were building a new future, and we believed it. And so that is why the TRC was established. It was for that purpose.

And even as people would be asked, as they were asked at the TRC, what would you like the TRC to do for you?

people come with requests that they would like, you know, things that are about reconstituting their story of trauma so that they could begin the journey of mourning.

They’d been grieving all these years without an opportunity to mourn. And so, they, this process of the TRC was allowing people to begin the journey of mourning now that someone is a, has, has, has confessed. And then I can begin the journey of mourning. Because now, now I know. And so it was, it was that kind of justice, if you may, you know, a different kind of justice,

The recommendations of the TRC, such as what people had requested, for example, these little things that people wanted. You know, from the TRC to have surgery, to have a school built in a loved one’s name or in a, in, in the name of a group of people from a particular area, the improvement of roads and people requested things that are about a better quality of life.

Ben: You talked earlier about mourning as one of the important TRC played and even stepping back a little further from the TRC, you’ve talked about the reparative quest. And I would like to hear you unpack what that means and

what are the steps that you think are, are particularly important, um, in general for, for repair to occur?

Pumla: this idea of, uh, the reparative quest, it goes beyond the language of forgiveness. As you know, my earlier work was. Very much around understanding forgiveness and describing what is necessary for, for people to forgive it and why it is important still is important. Now, forgiveness, tends to suggest this sense of finality, the sense of closure. That the past is kind of finished and we can move on, so to speak. Yet these processes of reckoning with the past, they’re not as easy as all that. You cannot, there isn’t closure.

You can’t sort of say, we finish with clothes. So, when I began speaking about this idea of the reparative of the reparative quest, it was to capture the idea that the reckoning with the past is an opening rather than a closure, because we are dealing with wounds that are very deep. And very often irreparable.

And so, coming to terms with this past is not the closing of a chapter. Instead, the process involves an opening rather than a closing of a chapter. In this sense, then it’s, it’s, it’s like a journey that must unfold in the spirit of moral imagination. One of the important things about this process, the way I see it, that you bring two people or two sides together, whether it is individuals or groups of people together.

What is important that is that the space is created for people to, to, to look at each other, to take each other’s stories from the position of Respect and acceptance, and that requires moral imagination. In other words, the possibility that we can imagine moving forward together into a new future. It’s about creating the conditions of building solidarity across historical divides.

It might reinvoke anger or hatred. But the importance is that this, you hold the space, whoever is facilitating the process holds the space for people to stay the cause so that there isn’t like a rupture that breaks down the communication.

We find here at our center that the arts are a very good place to begin this journey of the reparative quest together, because then the arts, you build something that speak about what you did or what I did.

In other words, it begins from the place of non-judgment. It’s not about judging the other. It’s about moving forward, creating something together that you can look at in a way that We can imagine what it means to hold hands together to look into the future.

And so, one must look at it as a journey. It’s not a once off events where you encounter the other. it’s a journey. As I say, it’s a reparative quest. And so, it requires patience.

It requires a sense of commitment to something that is constantly evolving.

Why is the encounter so important? The encounter between the perpetrator and the victim, and related to that, I would love to hear you tell the story of Eugene DeKalb. You know, until you look the person in the eye, it’s very difficult to know who they are, what they think. And I learned this from many people who would come to the commission and say, I would like to meet the perpetrator, the person who killed my son or my daughter or my, my husband, my wife.

I would like to meet the person who killed my loved one.

And it turns out that the reason they want to meet, one of the reasons they want to meet is that the perpetrator remains the only person who saw the loved, was the last one to see the loved one.

And so that encounter. It’s an empowering moment for the victim because they are connecting the person who was the last to see the last, the loved one. And when in that encounter, the perpetrator re humanizes the loved one, then it becomes the beginning of healing for the victim. Because now the perpetrator is accounting for what they did and, in the accounting, they are bringing the person that they murdered back alive,

Eugene DeKock was the head of the apartheid government’s covert operations. He was ruthless. He was in his role as apartheid’s chief assassin. He was, he was ruthless, but it’s important to understand also that people like Eugene DeKock, they believed in what they were taught. They grew up in, in, in a, in a country that systematically instilled hate among many white people, many white children.

And so, he was serving his country. I am not saying this to, um, to condone not to suggest in any way that there’s something right about him, working for the state in that way.

But one must understand that in a state such as South Africa, you groom some, someone is 16-year-old boy, just after high school, you send them to the army. You are instilling a certain kind of mentality in them. And for people who are, who like Eugene de Kock, who grew up with a father, who was a member of the brooded bond, so that it wasn’t just the state, it was also within his family, that black people, The danger, they were “defar”, the Black danger as they were called in Afrikaans. And so, he grew up believing that. And so, the first time he had an opportunity to reflect was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This is the power of the Tooth Commission because it offered this man an opportunity. To reflect in a space that is not adversarial

And the first day I met that first hour I spent with him when he became emotional at a time moment when I was asking him to relate his encounter with the widows of the men he had killed.

As a moment when he became emotional and he was tearful, I instinctively reached out and touched his hand. Something which I never imagined. I never, I wasn’t even thinking about it. It was literally a human moment. And, what brought me to writing the book. was my struggle and my wrestling with that human moment, trying to understand

what it means to, who question a human moment when you have witnessed the possibility of a human moment, even with someone who was called prime evil. That was very revelatory for me. And, and this is why I, I came to this work because of wanting to share this very deeply revelatory moment about what it means to be human for myself as a person who is, has been on the receiving side of apartheid.

It was, it was a moment of understanding what it means to be human for myself, but also what it means to be human for DeKock had committed so much. evil. In fact, he himself didn’t know how many people he had murdered. And so, to witness that journey he was going through throughout all my three months of interviewing him was a deeply transformative learning for me.

Ben: A question I’ve been curious to ask you since you became the Templeton prize winner earlier this year. I want to know what role your personal faith, um, as a Christian has in why you do this work? Does it add any perspective to your understanding of forgiveness, reconciliation, or your motive for, for why you think it’s important?

Pumla: You know, I, I grew up in a, in a family that was a, has always been a family of faith, my whole lineage, my great grandfather was a missionary, was one of the, all these African missionaries in this, um, village, small village in where my father grew up.

My grandfather was a, a priest. My parents were. Always active in the church and in the end of his later life, my father became what in the Anglican Church is called a non stipendiary, like a voluntary priest. He started ministry, but he wasn’t a paid, he didn’t have a parish or paid priest.

So, my faith in this, in my earlier days was, you know, emulating my parents, you know, gaining that, that ethical morality from my parents. They had a deep understanding of what it means to be human and what relational and responsible human connection means.

I am not exaggerating when I say that part of the nurturing of the humanist values that I, the core of my work, also come from the community of black families in the township where I grew up,

So, for me, it’s, it’s a combination of my upbringing in my family, witnessing the way that my parents treated their relationships with others and a deep sense of faith, their deep sense of observing, their deep sense of faith.

My mother was the kindest person, you know, she would say on your knees, my child.

I and she practiced that, and she was such a person of faith, no matter what my mother, she would tend to her faith all the time and all the time.

Everything always. You know, things came right. I mean, even when they did not go according to how to her wishes, but there was something about how her faith held everything together. And so

I am inspired by what I believe. I’m a scholar, of course, you know, I, but there’s something about that, even that scholarship that to me, has always felt to be a calling. And so, my faith is always at the heart of that work.

Ben: “On your knees, my child”, is a beautiful phrase and a mantra that I’m going to come back to later myself. Just one or two last questions for You today, Puma. One is, What lessons do you think other societies that are looking to repair and to resolve historical tensions, what lessons do you see that could be applied to other places, uh, from your experience as a scholar and as somebody who’s seen the possibilities and the limitations of efforts at reconciliation in South Africa.

Pumla: There are such profound insights of understanding that rose in the shadows of the TRC, you know, how states can redefine morality and able people like Eugene de Kock to believe in the state’s oppressive policies to dehumanize others. At the same time, and this is, this is the important lesson then at the same time, the TRC gave us a glimpse of what’s possible when conditions are created to face violent paths. That is always possibility. And people always think that, you know, things are, you know, the, it’s dismal, you can’t do, you know, the divisions are so deep. There is always a possibility.

Human beings are a constellation of contradictions, you know, as Maya Angelou says they are neither devils nor divine. I like that expression from Maya Angelou. So, there are contradictions, you know, it’s, it’s particularly true when we encounter what we term evil in the context of these kinds of crimes against humanity, crimes that are committed under the auspices of oppressive states and divided societies.

And so, the lesson for other nations is that acknowledgement, bringing people together to some form, even if it’s a stage or an enclosed space, bringing people together is an important starting point.

You know, having these dialogue processes, setting out conditions where people will encounter one another in a space where they are encouraged to face the past, not to rekindle old hatreds, but as a starting point to say, we want to build a new future. And that is so critical in all these nations with histories of violence.

The starting point must be acknowledgement.

Ben: Last question for today, Pumla, is what gives you hope?

Pumla: Stories of people who are trying to make things better. You know, yesterday we were screening here at our center, a film about a story of a young woman who’s still searching for the bones of her past. Her mother, the remains of her mother,

And when I looked around the room, it was a mixed room. We, we, we showed this in our museum, in the university’s museum, the screening, and it was a mixed audience.

So, when I saw in the audience, people who are white breaking down, And, and starting to speak about what this past mean, how they are moved by these stories. There was a German woman in the audience who now lives in South Africa. She’s in her eighties, who started talking about her own past in Germany.

Those are the moments of hope that these kinds of stories, when you bring them into these public spaces that, you know, Ben, there’s a, there’s a, there’s a phrase that I use. Making public spaces intimate when you bring these stories into these public spaces, you evoke these intimate stories. And so, it becomes a, a, a, a public space that is intimate.

That is where people are sharing their intimate past and their intimate stories that sit with them. And so those moments give me hope. Why? Because they mean that. We can be moved by one another’s stories. And when once we are moved by one another’s stories, those are the moments of possibility. It is how we take advantage of those moments of possibility that change will happen

The greatest power is if we take these stories, we go with them to build the sense of reparative quest. It’s that sense of building this movement. Towards a reparative quest that is important and that gives me hope.

Ben: Well, thank you so much for talking with me today, Pumla. This has been a wonderful conversation. And congratulations again on the Templeton Prize this year.