No place like home

This has been a strange week. For reasons both personal and, well, hugely public, I've been thoroughly discombobulated. Part of my mind has been back in Cape Town, back in the 1990s*, back in all kinds of personal and political strangeness. Part has been trying to make sense of London, now, in new kinds of strangeness.

And tonight I found myself watching Red Dust on BBC2 - a "political thriller" about the Truth & Reconcilation Commission. Starring Hilary Swank. How come I've never heard of this before?**

More to the point, though, it reminded me forcibly of the two things I love and hate most about my country. South Africans live with indelible scars - scars of every kind, scars that I suspect are most obvious to expats like myself, who know the country intimately yet have some distance from it. Returning home is at best a bittersweet pleasure***; on my last trip (December 2003) I was struck by how powerfully the past still overshadows daily life. It seemed that every conversation included some reference to race, although the people we were talking to didn't seem aware of this. There is so much damage: to the national psyche, to social structures, to the economy... And as SA hypes its attractions as a tourist destination (with good reason, it's fabulous, I hasten to add), adding township tours and Robben Island to the list of attractions, even that damage becomes just another commodity. So at worst, it's a country where violence collides with a peculiarly desperate brand of capitalism.

But. Despite all that, it's an ongoing miracle. At the time I took the TRC so much for granted - just another part of the craziness of SA life - I didn't bother to follow it, I didn't even think about it much. Now, with a little distance, I confront the absolutely amazing, glorious insanity of it: a literal and judicious interpretation of "the Truth shall set you free". Imagine! Setting oppressors and oppressed, terrorists and victims opposite each other at a table; telling them to say sorry and make friends. It's childish, it's sublime and it's impossible.

And it worked.

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* Quotable quote: "Most days it's hard to believe I was ever as stupid as I was at 18" - thank you, Sheri Tepper.
** Just as curious, whatever happened to the Antjie Krog movie? How is it that films with A list stars like Swank, Juliette Binoche and Samuel L Jackson just sink without trace?
*** But obviously, I CANNOT WAIT for my next visit this December.