Human Rights Violation Hearings — Durban — 1996-10-24

KHOZA MGOJO: I am interested to your mother, your grandmother.  Is it your grandmother, Jane, because there is also what is called here the reparation committee, which is interested in doing things like what you call trauma counselling, all such things.   Maybe before I ask that question, how is the family traumatized, because we do ask those questions, and if it is traumatized has it had any psychological assistance, etcetera?

WITNESS:   I think we should we all answer that question, because I think we have each - we have each experienced this very particular ways, and I can't say that we've had the same experience of living with my father's murder.   I would like to say on behalf of my grandmother, Jane, who we visited this week before coming to the hearings and told her what we would be doing here.   She lost her son, her only child, and a son that she adored.   She has never recovered from his death.    She spent years trying to find out who killed her son, and she was frustrated and felt very alone and very abandoned in that search in the end.  She got cancer, from which she has recovered, which is a sign of her extraordinary strength, but I think she feels very bitter and very angry and very alone in her loss.  And in the lack of any attempt to help her get satisfaction by finding a killer.   And I think she is still very depressed and I think it would be wonderful if the truth commission could do something for her.   Knowing my grandmother as I do, she may not take kindly to it at first, but I think she will really appreciate it.

KHOZA MGOJO: Thank you very much.   And any of you?

KIM TURNER: What can we say about not having a father, it has been terribly difficult, I think we have all borne our scars in our own ways.   What quite hurts me is three years ago I had my first child and she has now reached the stage which children ask questions and she said to me once, she said, "Mummies don't have daddies, do they?", because she couldn't understand why I didn't have a daddy.  So I had to explain to her why I didn't have a daddy and where he was.   And that's terribly difficult to live with, how do you explain ... (inaudible) ...
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KIM TURNER: (Inaudible) ... no father, because some man walked up to his house and killed him.  I haven't explained that totally to her yet, I don't think I will for a long time, but I am not looking forward to actually having to do that to her, to have to tell her who her grandfather was and why he died, and when that time comes I would like very much to be able to tell her who killed him.
It has been 18 years, and I have had the opportunity to do something about the terrible thing that happened to my dad and to my sister and I and to all of us, and I think it was a process of being active, of telling my story, of coming here and making a film about it, of meeting my father's friends, of talking to people about him and hearing from them, about the loss not only I experienced but that South Africa experienced, that process for me was enormously helpful and I think it was only then 15 years after his murder that I really began to - that my present was no long overwhelmed and sabotaged by a painful past.   
And I think that this commission and your willingness to sit and listen to our stories, and the fact that we are here speaking out our pain as you often admonish us to do, really helps enormously.   And I think for me that has been, being able to speak out the pain has enabled me to reconcile with a terrible past.   And to be able to be present and without that trauma overshadowing it.  
And so I think that the process that you are engaged in and that we are all engaged in is a very important one in the reconciliation aspect of it is crucial.   It is therapy in a sense for us to be able to sit here.   
So, I think for me the worse pain has gone away because I have been able to talk it out.   I hope that this is the last time really that I will have to go into it in detail.

FOWZIA TURNER: I think from what both Jan and Kim have said, you have some idea of what the impact of this night was on all our lives, and from what we have said in our testimonies.
I want to read to you just very briefly something which he wrote to me, and these are his own words:
"Part of the pain of loss is no longer quite knowing what you have lost."
In losing him, I have lost a past, and I have lost a future.   But I have learnt to live with it through the help of my friends, my family and my current husband and my children.

MRS FOLLETT: As Kim and Jan's mother I would like to say something.   You don't bring children into the world with the expectation that one day you will have to try to explain to them why their father was murdered.   And try to deal with the aftermath of that murder.
Kim has been very marked by it.  To this day she can't sleep in a room on the ground floor.   I think that he is a huge hole in their lives at every family event:  when Jan was married to David;  when Kim was married to Richard;   when Alexandra was born.   Richard is dreadfully missed.   You can never replace what was taken away.  So, you take away the present as well.   Fowzia was right, you take away the past and the future, but you take the present for them.   He is always there.   
I think that for Jan and here I want to pay tribute to Jan, because without Jan we wouldn't have half the facts of this case.   Without Jan a lot of what we do now know, a lot of our need to know would not have been satisfied.   Jan's way of dealing with the pain, as she said herself, was to go and find out.   And on behalf of my generation, it was my generation and the generation before mine, who were involved in this struggle, our children have had to bear the pain.   You can see the pain
  of my children today.   Let us make sure that their children are spared it.