![]() ![]() The process was meant to stand in stark contrast to the Nuremberg trials: where Nuremberg was an exercise in retributive justice, the TRC was an exercise in restorative justice, in which offenders were urged to take responsibility for their crimes, and victims were urged to speak about their trauma. When Nelson Mandela was swept to power in 1994, Fullard became a researcher for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), South Africa’s reckoning with apartheid. “But this was a world where death – from sickness, from stabbing – was so common, where mothers had not a single child left.” Fullard was joined by Claudia Bisso, part of the team who helped identify Che Guevara's bones in Bolivia in 1997 ![]() “In my white, middle-class world, death is a tragedy of epic proportions,” she says. She recalls travelling to the impoverished black townships, where she experienced a “sense of horror”: death swept the communities with such grim consistency that the bereaved themselves had become desensitised. She became a student activist for the United Democratic Front, a party with strong links to the then-banned ANC. As a young feminist, she was involved in women’s movements (she considers marriage a “cop-out”, and has “never ever, ever, ever wanted kids”). If she ever retires, she says, as she manoeuvres her hatchback towards Soweto, where she is due to take a DNA sample, she’d like to start a museum commemorating the missing.įullard’s journey to becoming a gravedigger, as she calls herself, began in the 1980s, when she was a history and English student at the University of Cape Town. In her spare time, she pages through old files and books, and when she comes across the name of somebody killed during apartheid, she jots it down and places it in a box. But this exterior belies a steely, uncompromising core, committed to finding the dead and the forgotten. Fullard, 49, is an unlikely crusader: permanently frazzled, often late, and quick to cry when confronted with a sad story. M adeleine Fullard, the blonde in the floppy hat, is the head of South Africa’s Missing Persons Task Team, a small group of investigators and forensic anthropologists who sweep the country, looking for the bones of apartheid’s disappeared. “Twenty-five years later and I have to go point him.” “I told him, ‘Nobody will pick us up’, and it proved to be right,” he told me in April, recalling how he had reassured De Kock that night. The grey-haired man, Marthinus Ras, who had grown up in these parts, had picked the location. De Kock and his accomplices dug a hole in this isolated spot, and covered Ntehelang’s corpse before daylight. They had purposefully beaten and suffocated him, but they had accidentally murdered him. In July 1989, drunk and furious, he had led a team of his own to this spot, after they had killed Ntehelang at a farm 160 miles away. These were the remains of Phemelo Moses Ntehelang.įrom a distance, De Kock observed the team’s celebration. So had the elastic from his underwear, a single trouser pocket bearing the brand name “Cash McCall”, and a rusted zip. The skeleton had been beautifully preserved by the light clay soil and the synthetic blanket. Inside was a gift: the bones of a man, dropped head over heels into the ground, so that as his body disintegrated, his toe bones landed by his skull, which had cracked along its natural sutures. They opened the musty blanket, crumpled like origami paper, dyed dark by the soil. They took turns lowering themselves into the hole, digging and dusting. These were the remains of Phemelo Moses Ntehelang “We’ve got him!” The skeleton had been beautifully preserved by the light clay soil. On the second day, one of the investigators knelt down and pointed at the corner of an ancient green blanket. This was Eugene de Kock, apartheid’s most infamous killer. One of his favourite books was Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report On The Banality Of Evil. He was led to his cell, where he spent most of his days reading. The man known as Spectacles returned to Kgosi Mampuru II prison, his home of 20 years, where he was stripped of his civilian clothes and dressed in an orange jumpsuit. The grey-haired man returned to his modest suburban house, where he was trying to go straight and quit drinking. On the third day, a rainstorm turned the piles of dirt to mud, and the team, defeated, headed back to their headquarters in Pretoria.
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