Special Hearings — Children's Hearings — 1997-05-22

MR SNYMAN: Good morning to all of you.  Thank you.  On Tuesday I received an invitation to, for the choir to perform here at the TRC and I have been thinking about it and the songs that I want to do.  Now it is very difficult for a choir master to do a specific song for a specific reason or specific event and I had two sleepless nights.  Four o' clock yesterday in the morning I have decided, I have made up my mind and I am just going to do two traditional songs.  First to give them confidence and to show you the full potential of the choir and then I am going to do a peace song for South Africa and a spiritual song from the musical "The Witness" and I would appreciate if you would listen to the words, because God uses ordinary people to do his command and if we obey God then the second chance that God gave South Africa, I think we will have a much better and a much friendlier and a happy country.  Thank you to all of you.
CHOIR PERFORMANCE

DESMOND MPILO TUTU: I think there are some of you who are a little jealous.  Let us give them another hand.  Thank you very much.  Thank you Mr Snyman and we are enormously grateful to you and to the choir of Alexandra Sinton School.  I would like to bid you all a hearty welcome here today.  This is a special sitting of this Commission.  We are going to listen to the youth who will come and relate some of their experiences here today.  We want to welcome all of you very, very warmly to this special session of our Commission when we will listening to accounts by young adults who were children, a few years ago, describing some of their experiences under apartheid.  We are enormously grateful to you for being willing to come.
 We did get a bit of flack, there are some young ones, younger than 18 who feel that we have discriminated against them and we want to apologise, because we had to take an important decision, because of our concern about, actually, the rights of children that we should not expose them to the possibility of being exploited even by the Commission, but we know that there are people who are feeling very, very strongly that they too would have wanted to be able to come and tell their story.  We say thank you very much to those who are going to be doing so in a way, in a representative capacity.  We have given a very large part of the work of the Commission, the time of the Commission to adults and yet when we look at what took place in the struggle against apartheid, we have to acknowledge that young people were very much in the forefront of that struggle.  We want to acknowledge that.  
 Often and often we adults spoke, perhaps, against apartheid, but there came a time when young people said we have done everything, enough is enough and young people were ready to put their lives where their mouths are and in a way it is consistent with most of history.  It is interesting to note just how God has used young people at critical points in the histories of different people.  When the people of Israel were suffering under the oppression of the Philistines, it was a young boy, David, whom God raised who fought against Goliath.  Mohammed was young when the inspiration came from God for him to do something about changing religion and he was used as someone who would speak especially to a group of people who probably felt somewhat marginalised.  Jesus Christ was not an old man like Archbishop Tutu, he was young and so we can go on and we come to hear what the experiences of young people have been in the period that we are asked to look at as a Commission and why are we doing this.  
 In part, of course, we want to  know the impact of injustice, of oppression, of conflict on young people and, perhaps, in their telling of the story, traumatic as it may be to relive some of those incidents, in the telling of the story a catharsis may happen for them and for society.  That in the telling of the story a healing will take place, but that is not the only reason, although that is a very important reason.  It is not the only reason.  A quite crucial one is to say we want to dedicate ourselves, young and old alike, to ensure that the sorts of things that we will be hearing about do not ever happen again in our country.   We want to dedicate ourselves, to commit ourselves to building the kind of society which will be child friendly, a society that will say children matter, not just because the future of any nation depends on them, the present depends on them.  That we will have the kind of society that says we need children and young people, because they dream dreams, they see visions, they have ideals, they dream of a society and a world where war will be no more, where peace will reign and young people have been part of the peace movement round the world.  Young people dream dreams of a society where there is sharing and equality and so young people have been in the forefront of movements to end poverty.  Young people are part of the movement that says this is the only world we have and we must cherish it and so they are very, very much in the forefront of the ecological movement.  Young people say we want a society which says people matter because they are people and race and ethnicity are a total irrelevance and so you have found them in very many parts of the world in the forefront of the struggle against racism and so we come today as those who want to be humble as we listen to young people tell of their trauma, but also tell of their dreams.  
 I welcome you all very, very warmly, but especially may I welcome these schools that are here represented, Mannenberg Senior Secondary, Rustenberg Girls High, St Cyprians School, of course Alexandra Sinton High, Kafkin Senior Secondary, Mannenberg Primary, Kensington High School, Habibia School.  Now, if you have been left out do not walk out, just let us know, let somebody know so that we can welcome you too.  You are special, you are very special especially today and maybe let us clap, all of you.  Come on, let us clap.  
 May I introduce the panel here.  Mary Burton is a Commissioner and a member of our Human Rights Violations Committee and a former President of Black Sash.  Glenda Wildschut is a Commissioner, a member of our Rehabilitation and Reparations Committee and she is a health care giver, she teaches at UWC in, Hugh, what do you call it, public health.  She did not tell me, I am telling you, she is in public health.  Wendy Orr is a Commissioner, she is also Deputy-Chairperson of our Reparations and Rehabilitation Committee.  She is a medical doctor and was, well, known, she is very well known for having been the one who pulled the plug torture and so on in prisons and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela is a phycologist, she is a, I am speaking now,   I mean.

MS GOBODO-MADIKIZELA: It is like yesterday.

DESMOND MPILO TUTU: Yes, alright.  Please do not confuse me.  She is a committee member, a member of the Human Rights Violations Committee and is a doctoral student at UCT and I also just want to say thank you, in advance, to our interpreters who do do a superb job of work, just give them a small clap and we also have people who we call briefers who try to provide support and counselling and they are staff persons of the TRC, but some, we have also had community briefers and we, Wendy is also the convenor of our Western Province office and in that capacity she is my boss and she is in charge of us here and there are all of our staff who have done wonderfully to prepare for these hearings.  We want to say thank you to them and to the police.  It is a good thing that now we are able to praise the police, because that was not true previously.  So, can we give all of those people a nice clap.
 I am disappearing, not because you are not important, it is just that I have to get to something else and have not yet produced enough produced enough clones, thank you.