Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa

Race plays an integral part in South Africa’s history before, during, and after apartheid, and by extension, plays an enormous role in Country of My Skull. Virtually every aspect of the text involves race to some degree, from the bare facts of the TRC’s formation and operation, to how people use language, to the ways different people process their emotions. Everything about the TRC rests on different racial points of view.

Race divisions are apparent from the opening chapter of the text, where conflicting political parties—the ANC and the NP—argue over the creation of the TRC. The ANC and NP’s disagreements continue even as the TRC goes about its work. Both parties initially refuse to cooperate with the TRC, then eventually do, but only to a point. The NP claims that the ANC runs the TRC and that the ANC will therefore demonize the NP regardless of what it does. The ANC balks at the notion that anyone might hold it accountable for atrocities committed while fighting a just war against apartheid.

Black and white victims process their grief differently, and Krog chooses to highlight those differences starkly. Where black victims often come across as devastated but honorable, standing tall even as they grieve and feeling satisfied either finally knowing the truth about their loved ones or being able to tell their stories, white victim testimony, as Krog presents it, typically reads as self-righteous, lacking weight, or both. Several white victims laugh off their experiences as not being so bad, or suffer losses but are able to obtain good medical care quickly, while black victims do not have the same luxuries. White victims describe attacks in country clubs or on vacation while black victims describe attacks in their own—often rundown—homes. Whites, even as victims, have privileges that blacks do not due to the system that favors them.

Questions of race become significantly more complicated when applied to white versus black perpetrators. Tying into the depiction of political parties, the tendency is to label white perpetrators as evil, liars, and weapons of a racist system while black perpetrators receive pardons due to acting in the name of justice. Perpetrators seem held to different standards depending on whether they are on the oppressing or oppressed side of history.

Black and white journalists covering the TRC handle information presented during the hearings differently as well. Whereas blacks at the time had been enduring human rights violations on a regular basis for years, whites were less aware of what was taking place, and therefore hearing testimonies about abuses they had neither seen nor heard of takes a significant toll on their emotional and mental well-being. However, despite black journalists insisting they can better handle the revelations of the TRC, Krog later discovers that they simply process their anger and trauma by internalizing it, leading to out-of-character behaviors as their trauma bubbles to the surface.

Racial divides persist outside of the TRC, through the general populace, as well. In particular, Afrikaners struggle to process the new realities of South Africa, as many of them feel victimized by the TRC. They feel as though their entire culture is under attack and, in response, many lash out or make excuses. Some express feelings of concern that they will not be safe in a country ruled by the ANC, and they worry that blacks will take revenge on them for the atrocities of apartheid. While they often turned a blind eye to apartheid—sometimes willfully, sometimes through ignorance—whites seem largely unprepared to deal with the consequences of having benefited from an unjust system.