Sliding puzzles, truth games, split screens.
Profile of artist Sue Williamson. Financial Times, 20 February, 2021.
Image above from It’s a pleasure to meet you (2016).
In one screen of this two-channel video installation is a young woman, Candice Mama. She tells the story of encountering Eugene de Kock: commander of apartheid’s most notorious death squads and the man who killed her father. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you’ is what De Kock says to her and each family member when they meet him in prison, while a pastor presides. She speaks of being convinced by his sincerity and remorse. A photograph flashes up of the family smiling broadly as if posing with a celebrity. But the celebrity is apartheid’s chief killer, in maximum-security jumpsuit, thick glasses and sinister side fringe. ‘Do you forgive yourself?’, Mama asks De Kock. He replies that nobody who has done the things he has done can forgive themselves.
In the other screen is a young man, Siyah Ndawela Mgoduka, listening. He also lost his father, but his only contact with the killers is a memory of being given the middle finger across a TRC hearing by a security policeman. Mgoduka cannot quite bring himself to believe in the story being related so sincerely right next to him (even as he might want to). It is a story which has the sound of having been told many times before, of having become (as many TRC cases did) an exemplary tale, a parable.
Why the ‘dress up’, asks Mgoduka, and why was there a pastor there? Why the rush to forgive, when it might all happen too quickly, and leave you with unprocessed anger? He speaks of the TRC as a gift that was offered, an opportunity for white South Africans at large, but one which was not taken. Or else taken for granted, with (like so much else in the country) someone else doing the heavy lifting: ‘You can’t be the one who’s arrogant when I’m forgiving you.’