Herman Charles Bosman wrote that we are all playing sane in an insane world.

What does it mean to sit and listen to the ways in which a loved one was tortured and murdered in detention? What does it mean to sit through and listen to your own torture and relive that in a courtroom? And, on a separate note, why are our courtrooms cold, officious spaces that retraumatise victims of state violence?

Shirley Gunn, at the Imam Haron inquest on 24 April 2023, lit a candle, with the permission of the judge, to honour the memory of Stephanie Kemp. This small but significant act brought attention to the fact that these testimonies are of real people and not characters in a horror fiction.

The whole fiasco of the inquest leaves much to be desired in a country with an unfinished history that perpetuates the afterlives of slavery, coloniality and apartheid with the ways in which Black life is made fungible through racial capitalism. Nelson Mandela famously said: “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” Consequently, our freedom in the modernist nation-state called South Africa is incomplete when hunger and violence are part of the malaise of our day.

Is our justice system a perpetuation of these logics that dictate that we need to have inquests to reverse the ways in which death was met during detention? Why do we continue to operate on the logics of coloniality and apartheid when perpetrators of heinous crimes are not brought to justice? Is this impunity the basis for the lack of good governance because of the ways in which we are able to evade justice? Have we compromised our moral integrity by agreeing to the conditions leading to 1994?

According to Hannah Arendt, the banality of evil is extreme, and it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension, laying waste the whole world; only the good can be radical. Is the performance of an inquest a semblance of being radical and an attempt to bring closure for a few families?

In today’s dispensation, how have we transformed the state to reflect care and human rights when we continue to perpetuate the logics of coloniality?

I spoke with the grandson of Imam Haron and he said there is no closure when a loved one is killed in such a way. The gravitas of these spectacles of affect wears heavily on witnesses. One wonders if the actors in the banality of evil have lost their humanity in the drive to maintain white supremacy and its attendant violences associated with the afterlives of slavery. What does this mean for the question of restorative justice in a country mired in ongoing racism and Afrophobia? 

In the late 1990s, the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia heard testimony from Bosnian fathers and sons who were raped in front of each other by colonels and lieutenants. The idea was that since these were Muslim men and homosexuality was censured under Islamic practice, the bonds of love between them were broken because of the shame associated with the crime. This particular case led to sex crimes in the context of wars being defined as war crimes because they were seen as genocidal acts, removing the dignity of a people.

Crimes during detention allude to sexual assault. Yunus Shaik testified that he was sexually molested with objects. In such instances where truth-telling is supposed to break the stigma associated with such crimes, when justice is evaded, trauma is slow to transmute into healing, which leaves us with a nation attempting to recover from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Read more in Daily Maverick: The importance of uhuru, ubuntu and ujamaa in overcoming colonial trauma

But what plagues me most is that South Africa has one of the highest rates of gender-based violence in the world. Even the inquest, with the inference to sexual violence, skirts the issue, implying that we lack the mechanisms to deal with such questions because our laws are written within the coloniality of gender, entrenching heteropatriachy and white supremacy, because let us not forget that it was the security police who were enacting these forms of brutality that silenced many victims.

Today, our gender-based violence is a hangover from these violences and silences.

How then do we address national mental health challenges that prevent us from realising our full potential to be post-racial – or is that even a consideration with our unfinished history? 

In today’s dispensation, how have we transformed the state to reflect care and human rights when we continue to perpetuate the logics of coloniality?

Is post-apartheid South Africa able to move beyond the banality of evil? Or are we victims of our history, immobilised by the hefty price of internalised oppression? 

The ethico-political promises of testimony and healing remain unfulfilled. The project of nation-building seminal to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a failure. South Africa remains an idea, a yearning for a utopia deferred. DM/MC