Was justice served by South Africa's peace accord?

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Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. And welcome to the fourth episode in our series, Inventing Peace. These five panels took place in the summer of 2025. They consider historic peace agreements of the 1990s, their history, their political and social legacy, and their lessons. There's one recurring question. Is achieving negative peace, simply halting the violence, ever enough in the long run? Episode four considers South Africa.

and its national peace accord. Good evening for 27 years, six months and six days he had been a prisoner. During that time, he became a legend, a symbol of black resistance to apartheid, and to many he became a martyr. Tonight, he is a free man. Nelson Mandela emerged from his long nightmare as a simple man walking his way to freedom accompanied by his wife, Winnie. There is general agreement that his freedom begins a new era in South Africa.

Just 18 months after that historic development, the National Peace Accord was signed in South Africa. by 27 different parties, including Nelson Mandela himself, as head of the African National Congress. The date was September 14, 1991. The agreement was aimed at ending political violence and creating a framework for multi-party democracy. It came after more than 40 years of apartheid.

and ultimately paved the way to an interim constitution and elections. In 1994, Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa. Today, two people who lived through this period of history in their youth with insights into how peace meets justice. Prakash Diyar is a human rights lawyer from South Africa. He came to Canada in 1989 after his life was threatened by the apartheid regime.

He is former legal counsel at the Canadian Human Rights Commission and did work on reconciliation with Indigenous peoples at the Department of Justice. is an award-winning fiction writer and playwright, an indigenous South African of the San people. Her forthcoming novel is called We Inherit the Fire. It looks at the dying days of apartheid from the perspective of a former political prisoner and her teenage daughter.

Both guests are based in Ottawa, and join me for our Inventing Peace panel at the 2025 Stratford Festival.

I began by asking Kajiso Molope to describe an experience that shaped the way she thinks about peace. You know, I think when I hear this question, I want to... talk about big moments like the moment I watched Nelson Mandela walk out of prison or something like that. But for me, it was a very small but very significant event. It'll sound very silly when I start telling you about it, but I was maybe about five, six years old, maybe seven, and I woke up.

in the middle of the night, and on my floor, the floor of my bedroom, was a white woman sleeping. Now, you have to understand that I grew up under apartheid. I mean, this is a place where just holding hands with a person of a different color would get you in trouble. I was stunned, you know, in this place where everybody around me was the same color as me. Here was this woman.

And my mother later told me that this was a German woman who was moving through the country. My father was part of... an organized system of people fighting against apartheid, part of the system where there were moving activists, people who were banned, there were moving information and people across the country. Lately, when I've been speaking out against injustice and human rights violations, this woman who was on the floor of my room comes to mind all the time. And I think...

People had been asking me, aren't you afraid? Aren't you afraid to speak up? And I remember that there was this stranger in my house who was a foreigner, who was risking her life. in order that I can live in peace. Because at this point, I was living, there was bullets flying, and it was scary to go to school.

And I think for me, it was a moment of understanding, and I understand it more now as an adult, that in order for us to have peace, we as individuals, as a collective, are going to have to take some risks. And here was this person who was risking a lot of things, could have been arrested, could have been tortured, but... She was envisioning a world in which I would live safely, that I would live in peace. And so that was my moment. Thank you very much for that. Prakash.

A 23-year-old client of mine, one of the Sharpeville Six, was facing execution within hours. And I was speaking to him under very difficult circumstances, as you can imagine. He asked me, will my mother be okay? Peace was not in his heart at this time. He was not thinking about the law. He was not thinking about the application, last-minute application for a stay of execution. But he was asking whether his mother would be okay.

And that struck me because although peace was absent from his heart in that moment, it struck me that peace was more than just the absence of violence. For me, it meant it was about dignity. The dignity of a person, the dignity of his life, of his mother. And so that... really struck me that peace without dignity and peace without justice is not really peace. If I may just add something else, if I may.

For me personally as well, that was my professional experience. But for me personally, I was at court one day. And quite unexpectedly, I was arrested at court. taken away under the state of emergency, which gave the police extraordinary powers. For me, in that moment, I was more concerned about my family. my 18-month-old daughter and my three-year-old son and my wife. And for me, again, it came to the question of peace. Is that the absence of violence in the street?

Is it about the dignity of a person or the justice or the injustice in this particular case?

And so actually that is kind of where I would like to begin this conversation, is a little bit of a snapshot of what life was like for both of you in those turbulent days. So Cariso, back to you. Just in that decade before... In the 1980s, you were a teenager. Can you describe your family's circumstances then and the political reality that you were growing up in? As I was saying before, I was...

Dodging bullets. When I was in preschool, the teachers would have to put us all in a room to protect us from protests. fire gunfire um and then i knew i learned things like in order to survive i have to figure out how to keep myself safe so i learned in grade one that hiding under a car was the best way to get away from flying bullets. I learned when I was maybe eight or nine that I had to protect myself from tear gas.

taking a wet cloth and putting it on my face, things like that. So this was my life. It was a life of violence. It was violence from the state. My father was an activist. He regularly was arrested and... detained and tortured. And there were times when we didn't know where he was for days. And I remember once my mother had to go look for him with the community because he'd been tortured and left for dead.

So this was the life. And so you grow up thinking that this has to end. There has to be a place. There has to be a time where it ends. You said it's like a war zone. It was. I think that's something that people don't understand about apartheid. It seems like, oh, it was, you know.

Just a system of racial division. But it actually was a war zone. I did grow up in a war zone. You know, there would be war tanks moving through the streets when we were playing. So we would have like to disperse and allow these war. tanks to move through. It was definitely a very difficult time and I think this was...

Towards the end of apartheid, the violence escalated, but there was a lot of hope. And I think one thing that my father taught me, my mother taught me, my father used to say, the future of South Africa lies in the hands of black women. which was really powerful for us because he had four girls, right? No wonder. He had to say something like that. Did you believe it when he told you that? I did. I did. I think my family, you know, my...

Understanding that my mother was a teacher, you know, she took a lot of risks protecting students and things like that. I think that what I was taught was that it's ending. The end will come. We are not going to live the rest of our lives like this. But for the end to come...

we have to work hard and together. So, yeah, I really felt hopeful in those years. Prakash, you were a lawyer in that period. You were a young lawyer, and you were representing specifically political prisoners and activists. Building on what Kahiso said, how far did peace seem to you in those years? Did you have that kind of hope that it was instilled in Kahiso by her father? You know, thank you for the question.

I was a human rights lawyer, but I was also an activist trying to fight against the injustice of the apartheid system. My family came from a fairly poor background. I was very fortunate to be the very first person in my entire family, on both sides of the family, to be afforded an opportunity to go to university. And I know you probably know about apartheid, but if I may just say...

Apartheid meant separateness in every aspect of its word. Our residential areas were separated by the Group Areas Act. It was a criminal offence to live in an area that was not demarcated for your group. distinct racial groups schools were segregated and completely unequal so coming back to your question i had many many clients

And so I became a target myself. I was arrested. I was detained. I was kept in solitary confinement. I was tortured. They tried to frame me with false charges of harboring illegal arms and ammo. in my flat. We used to call it a flat. It's an apartment. Which was obviously false, but they tortured a client, a 16-year-old client of mine who was also in detention. You would have children who were in detention under the state of emergency, 9-year-old, 10-years-old.

15-year-olds, 16-year-olds. And they forced him to falsely sign the statement after torture that I was having illegal arms and ammo because that was a serious offense. It was treasonable because it was meant to mean that you wanted to throw the government by means of violence. So you were an activist and a lawyer. In protecting people like, and I hope to say this correctly, like Caiaphas Nioka. Yeah. The Sharpeville Six, who you've written a book about. Yeah.

that implied that you had some kind of hope of being able to deliver some kind of justice. In that period of time, how much was that hope in you? You know, it's the hope that kept us going. We couldn't see... the end of apartheid in our lifetime, so to say. And we got a lot of inspiration from the international community in this respect. The hope was that we were in this struggle not for ourselves. Like Jesus said, we have this internal struggle within South Africa. But...

There was this whole international community out there that was supporting our struggle for freedom and for justice. And that gave us so much hope that we knew... that our struggle was just. We knew we were on the right side of history. And if I may just add this, Canada played a crucial part in exerting all the political and diplomatic...

pressure, including sanctions and divestments, so much so that Prime Minister Brian Mulroney at the time was recognized for his efforts in the release of Nelson Mandela as well as the end of apartheid. Yes.

Yeah, indeed. That moment that you're talking about, Prakash, of course, was a landmark moment when Nelson Mandela is released in 1990. He was the head of the African National Congress, which was banned until then. He was freed. and the banning of liberation movements, including the ANC, was lifted entirely. Can you describe that moment, Kahiso, what you remember of that moment and what it meant for you? Oh, it was...

One of the moments that shaped me, I think, as a person. So there had been all this violence and all this torture and people being detained. My family was one of the few families in the neighborhood who had a TV. And when the moment came that afternoon, people started coming in.

through our door, into our living room. People, not everybody I knew, I didn't know everyone who came in. They came in and they were all sitting down and there was this historical moment. And as soon as he walked out, my father cried. That was the only time I ever saw my father cry. I didn't even see him cry when his mother died. And he just, you know, he burst into tears. And it was really... me understanding that this was a, you know...

He had been part of fighting for this, that people who were sitting on the floor in our living room, you know, there were young men and women and friends of mine who had been part of running away from the police, that everybody was sitting. in that moment going wow you know we we we earned this we earned this moment yeah Prakash you were at the time because of the danger you had faced because you had been tortured and imprisoned you had

made a home in Canada. Describe how you felt watching from afar and whether you trusted what you were seeing on the television screens. Was it real to you? It was surreal, you know, because we never expected... our struggle to culminate, at least for a lot of us, so quickly. But the struggle had started many, many years ago, right? And so...

When Mandela was released, because of my own personal safety, I had to leave the country soon after a very good friend of mine was assassinated. David Webster was assassinated. And the kind Canadians helped me and my family. leave the country overnight. And this was just like a few months before the release of Mr. Mandela. So we could never foresee what was going to be unfolding. But we were obviously jubilant.

It's seeing that our hero was now being released. And he was just a symbol, of course. But the release of all political prisoners was important. true transformative changes needed to happen before we could realize that, no, this is for real. Now, we've said that the National Peace Accord was signed in 1991 at a National Peace Convention in Johannesburg. Just in that period leading up to...

The last minute, like until it was signed, there was a great amount of tension. And maybe at moments it felt like it was never going to happen. Can you describe that period, almost this liminal space between horror and peace? Yeah, I mean, there were lots of threats from the right wing.

threatening to start a war and that the peace accords were not going to happen and this moment was not going to come. I remember this as being, I was very afraid, but I do remember this as being one of the great... that Mandela really displayed his leadership. And it was him, it was when he came on the radio or the TV and he said, this will happen. whether you like it or not. We will move into peace, whether you like it or not. And I was, what?

14 at the time, I needed to hear that. I needed to know that there was somebody out there who was going to make sure that this was going to happen. Yeah. And you said you've talked previously about how you felt the gaze of the world watching. Yeah. How did that help, knowing that the world was watching? I... I think that that was difficult and it remains difficult for me. I think that we as South Africans, as especially black South Africans, we were being depicted in the media as being violent.

There were always pictures of us or footage of us throwing stones at the police and at soldiers. And so we were depicted as this really violent people. And my feeling at that time when the change was happening was that there was this expectation of us to move into democracy without having a war. And I think then the world was saying, you know, this is likely to be one of the most peaceful transitions, one of the most peaceful transitions. But there had been violence. There had been a war.

Right. It was a war, as I said before. And I felt there was pressure for us not to fight at that moment. There was pressure for us to be peaceful, which was sort of an extension of us feeling that so much was expected of us and not much. was expected of the perpetrator. So it was on us to make it a peaceful transition. The state, despite its outward talk about the new South Africa and change...

they were actually fomenting the violence. They were arming factions that were opposed to the ANC as well as the United Democratic Front, of which I was a member. They were found subsequently and proven to have actually armed in Qatar, which was a party. So there was this deliberate attempt. To talk about peace on the one hand, change, but also creating this violence and giving the perception that this was black-on-black violence, for example. But I think...

I think the drive for peace was so strong, especially from the leadership like Kakiso has mentioned. There was no turning back. But I should emphasize one important thing. And that the reason we got to this stage, in my respectful view, was that the apartheid government was brought to its knees by the internal resistance on the one hand.

but by the pressure of the international community on the other hand. Apartheid was proving to be too expensive to continue as business as usual. The sanctions were biting. The disinvestments from the banks and big corporations was biting. And the pressure from some of its allies was also... intensified and so it wasn't like there was a change of heart that no we got to change our ways they were brought to the brink and they had no option so they decided we might as well discuss

reconciliation, peace, to try and salvage as much as we can in these circumstances. Important to note. So then the signing happens. And there is again another strange, otherworldly period after this is signed. Can you describe that, what it was like, Carisseau, just in the immediate aftermath of the accord, what life felt like? I'm sure you remember, Prakash, that everybody was talking about the new dawn. And there was this expectation that we were just...

free of apartheid. It was like that. It was gone. Not only the new dawn, but also the rainbow nation. The rainbow nation. There you go. It was ideal. Yes, it was this ideal, beautiful utopia that we were setting up. And of course that wasn't true. There had not been justice and there was peace, but it was peace sort of on the surface.

And the excitement was there hadn't been a war. But that wasn't entirely true. There had been a war. And the transition wasn't entirely peaceful, as Prakash pointed out about the government arming different factions. But there was a sense that we had gotten our country back.

That was a feeling that was there that we were getting our country back. We had a lot of people who had benefited from apartheid saying, we're leaving the country. But I think there was this... euphoria you know i remember mandela would just appear in different places the leaders would just appear at different places and i remember this one day where All transportation, all public transportation was free for that day because Mandela was going to be somewhere in Cape Town. It was just...

It was such a beautiful time. We understood that it wasn't perfect. We understood that we had lost a lot by, you know, moving into democracy the way that we did, that a lot of people hadn't gotten what they deserved. There was no justice, but it was. such an exciting time. I mean, it was just, the air was just electric. It was beautiful. There was also a lot of fear from the minority white community about changes. Because, and this was fermented again by the government. They call it

In Afrikaans, the swat ghafar, it means the black fear, that the black's going to be ruling. They're going to do to us what we've been doing to them. Yeah. That was the fear. And, of course, that was never on the cards. We just wanted justice, and Mandela was a great proponent of that. Going way back to 1955, the Freedom Charter, and even in his...

In his address to the court before he didn't know whether he was going to be sentenced to death or not, he said in the Freedom Charter way back in 1955, South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white. It wasn't going to be the domination of one over the other. Talking of change was not about revenge, right? It was about unity, bringing the country together, right? And forgiveness.

I am curious what you were thinking, watching again, when the election happened in 1994, where Nelson Mandela became president. How much faith you had in those developments in that early piece? I'm a trained skeptic, okay? You just don't change your spots overnight. And what gave me more credence to what I was skeptical about is because...

I was based in Ottawa, but I was still fighting for the release of my clients, the Sharpeville Six, who were political prisoners. And one of the preconditions of Nelson Mandela's release was, I will only accept my... if all political prisoners are released. And yeah, the government is telling me... That my clients are not political prisoners. They are ordinary common criminals. They remained in prison. We had won a last minute stay of execution, but they were in death row.

Right. They win death row. So I had the struggle from here. And so I saw the games they were playing. Right. You know, you don't undo. centuries of colonization and decades of apartheid just like that. It's going to be a process. Similarly here in Canada as well. It's a process. It's not going to happen overnight. you South African-Canadian lawyer and author Prakash Diyar, he and novelist Kajiso Lesego Molope are my guests on a public panel exploring South Africa and its 1991...

National Peace Accord. Our conversation was recorded in July at the 2025 Stratford Festival. It's the fourth discussion in our five-part series called Inventing Peace. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. It was the spring of 1988, northwestern Alabama. A preacher commits a sin, a deeply personal transgression. And from there, everything spirals out of control. The amount of damage this man did is incalculable. It's still damaging all of us. It still hurts us to think about. From Revisionist History...

This is The Alabama Murders. Listen to Revisionist History, The Alabama Murders, any way you get podcasts. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established out of the National Peace Accord.

Its hearings began in 1996. Some were broadcast to the nation, and by extension, television audiences around the world. Witness after witness described personal horrors. political violence carried out against family, friends and community members. I found the car that had been completely burned. Fortunately, there were some remains of the page. What showed to me that it was pros car. When we got closer inside.

i found the body lying in the back seat of the car it was lying upside down The hearings were a searing public event, and yet for many, they provoked even more questions around justice. Lawyer Prakash Diyar defended political prisoners such as the Sharpeville Six, wrongfully convicted of the murder of an official during a protest.

Threats on Diar's own life led him to take his family and to come to Canada. I asked for his impression of the TRC hearings as he watched from his new home base of Ottawa. I think it was an important process for people to give them a voice, firstly, for those who were victims and survivors, to give them an opportunity of speaking their truth. Because when you talk about truth and reconciliation, you will notice truth comes before reconciliation. And unless you address that truthfully...

you're not going to get anywhere close to peace and reconciliation. But for me as a lawyer as well, I was very happy to see that the person like Archbishop Desmond Tutu was appointed. to lead this commission. I thought he was just the right person. A man of cloth, of course. Basically, he wasn't a political leader and he was the first person to tell you that.

But there was a vacuum when Mandela was jailed. Others were jailed. Others were exiled. Others were assassinated. He believed in adhering to the laws of God than the laws of man. So there were some shortcomings. I had some skepticism about some of it, but I knew that it was a necessary process. The biggest thing that you've mentioned is this was live televised.

And the biggest thing for me, it was an educational process. It was sharing. And especially the white minority community were kept in the dark of what its government was doing to the other population groups. It's exactly that very fact that would have made it all so incredibly difficult for the people who went through the torture, who went through the shootings, who went through the apartheid to watch face-to-face people who killed their sons and daughters.

on the streets. In your community, Kakiso, how did watching that play out among people? So I went to some of the hearings. I went to see what was happening. I agree with Prakash in some ways, but not in all. I agree that it was an necessary process and that it was important for people to speak their truth.

But I remember at the time a lot of elders thinking and asking, what is this? What are we doing here? People feeling like it was a bit of a spectacle, that it was sort of... being watched not with a lot of um empathy that just that people wanted to hear the stories oh my god this happened you know like a tv show more But a lot of elders were saying, what is this? And what that meant was, it was still a very sort of Western process.

There are Indigenous justice systems, and that was not reflected in the process of the TRC. And I think a lot of people who were saying, a lot of elders who were saying, what is this? They were saying, this is not how we do things. This is not... how we confront injustice. This is not how we speak to each other about who has done wrong and who has been wronged. How would they have imagined it differently?

If you look at something like Likota, which is an Astuana word, and it's a court system, it's a community justice system where the community comes together and discusses together what has happened. And there's support from everybody. There's a very beautiful play by Yael Faber called Molora. which means ash. And in it, she reimagines the TRC processes. And she has, you know...

And when I say support from the community, an example is she has elders at the outer end of the process, right? And the people... who are on trial in the middle. And there is song and there is dance and there is holding, right? And I think something that was missing from the TRC process.

was the holding. People would go out and they would speak their truth and then, you know, the perpetrator would come in and the perpetrator was supposed to be pardoned or there was supposed to be, you know, some kind of forgiveness. And I think... I agree with forgiveness from Bishop Tutu, but one of the biggest things that I think he missed in this was at what cost does forgiveness come? And it's a question that I don't think a lot of people were willing to ask because I think...

People were just wanting it to be done. And of course, in every peace process, there is this difficult tension between peace and justice. Which should prevail? What at the cost of what? And I'm curious from both of you how you think this whole process, the TRC and the peace process, how did that deal? with the tension? What did it reveal about that tension between justice and peace? Prakash and then Kakishu. Yeah. I'll start off by saying that peace has to be anchored in justice.

I don't think it's either or or there's a balance. If peace is not anchored into justice, then I think we're not moving the needle anywhere close to achieving reconciliation. And so it's not an either or or which comes first. Also, there has to be structural, fundamental changes to the systems that led you to where you are.

And unless there are changes to the system of inequality, then you're not going to be achieving the so-called peace. Yeah, you will have quiet for a while, but for how long will you have that quiet? If you want everlasting peace. And I agree with that. And to be specific, we were displaced as a people under apartheid.

We were displaced, our lands were taken, and we were put out into areas where, you know, the soil wasn't as fertile and things like that. As Indigenous people, the land holds and heals us. If you take that away from us, you're taking away our livelihood. So how can there be peace if there is no redistribution of land, if there is only the acknowledgement that, yes, land was taken?

but nothing is done about it. So we still don't have land. We still, you know, and then food justice questions come into play. Where do we grow our food? And the way that we live, the way that we hold on to, the way that the land holds us. is taken away from us. So how can there be peace if that loss continues? Please. Yeah, and I would completely agree with that. Just to give you some context.

The Land Act of 1913 in South Africa only demarcated about 7% of the land to blacks who could rent or own. Only 7%. 93% of the land was in the hands of a white minority, and a very small minority, I should say. Today, in 2025, About 78% of the land is still in the hands of whites. Okay? So justice and peace, land is one of the most important things. including here in Canada, right? These are issues that the courts have been dealing with for a long time.

And indigenous peoples have been winning major victories under Section 35 of the Constitution Act of Canada. And the indigenous peoples' value of land is almost universal.

Kahiso has described is equally true of the indigenous peoples, how they view land. Kahiso, your four novels, and soon to be fifth. are all pretty much set in South Africa. Yeah. And you've traveled back and forth between Canada and South Africa. Can you talk about what you've learned about the peace process?

all of it, from the transition from apartheid to democracy, how that's affected the different parts of life in South Africa. I mean, what if you compare the South Africa you see today to the one you left initially? What are some of the changes that you've seen that you can directly attribute to the peace process and the...

and the reconciliation process? So we're very much a questioning nation. So what I've seen happen is a continuation of the anti-apartheid movement. There has been, it's been quite... heartening, actually, because younger people keep questioning what the older generation did. What did the peace accord mean? What did the TRC mean? What did it mean for us?

Because we are always thinking, what are we leaving behind for the future generations? So there has been a big land back movement. There's a lot of disappointment. among young people about how the transition to democracy was done. And people feel really robbed. And so the Land Bank movement is huge. And we always...

We always say in South Africa, our heroes are problematic, which is not something that I think is said all over the world. But I think the South Africa that I lived in, it's very different, obviously, because there's no apartheid. There is a continuation of what we were fighting for. It continues. What's the chief complaint of young people about how democracy happened? That they didn't fight for land.

That our leaders did not put that at the core of what they wanted out of moving forward. That is the biggest thing. define negative peace as the absence of violence and positive peace as the integration of human society. And I'm wondering, Prakash, how you would characterize South Africa's peace so far? Negative peace, positive peace? I think a bit of both. It had a lot of shortcomings. It wasn't a perfect process by any means. It was just the beginning.

of the process of reconciliation. It was not the end, right? And a lot of people forget that. Also, the TRC made recommendations, but it could not carry out the recommendations itself, it was up to the state to do that, right? And the state has failed its people, not the TRC necessarily. Although the process was not perfect, it made many recommendations that...

For example, there was supposed to be amnesty for those who came and truthfully testified. There was no prosecutions that were carried on, and so forth and so forth. But to me, I think the biggest... the biggest downfall is not changing the inherent inequalities that existed in apartheid that is still present today. Right?

And unless you have that fundamental or transformational change I was making reference to earlier, you're going to have the status quo. White South Africans make up, at the moment, 7% of the population. Give or take. A percentage here or there. And yet the wealth is still in the hands of mainly the small minority. And unless there is also proper reparations...

for its wrongdoings in the past, there is no true reconciliation. There is no true peace. And that's the step you say was skipped, and that should have been government-driven. Yes, because there were recommendations for reparations as well, and that was not on it. Maybe very small, partially, some of the recommendations, but generally, no. I guess in looking back at the legacy of the colonial period or the apartheid period, some commentators say that even the crime and violence that...

plague parts of South African society today is connected to the flaws of the National Peace Accord. How do you both see that? Do you agree with that? And violence has always been endemic in South Africa, even prior to 1994 elections. Of course. The only difference was the crime was confined. to black, Indian, and colored townships, and not to the whites. As a result of the changes, crime now also cross.

the boundaries of the Group Areas Act. And so when you have inequality and socioeconomic conditions that are rife for crime, you're going to have this. I think that the crime and violence cannot ever be separated from what happened before. You can't take away people's food and their livelihood and everything and then turn around and say, well, why are they stealing?

I ran into a South African woman who opened a jewelry store in my neighborhood. And the first thing she said was, oh, it's so violent. We had to leave. And it's not the country I grew up in. And I think, well, yeah, it's not because you were protected. You were not subjected to state violence. I have never known a South Africa that was safe. I had my great-grandmother who was born in the 1920s.

So live to watch apartheid rise and fall. And she told me there was never no violence. So it goes back a very long way, and it is very much connected to colonialism.

There are really still some astonishing moments also in the justice realm, as you will attest, of course, Prakash. Can you tell us about the recent news around the murder of your client? who we mentioned earlier, Caiaphas Nioka. Yeah. I just want to, for the benefit of the audience, say he died in 87. His family tried to get justice in the 96-97 TRC talks, but...

The case continues even today. Kaifus Nioka, a young black man who was still attending school, high school, was a client of mine. We lived in the same area, but... Same town, I should say, but not the same area because he was black or African, as we would say. And I was classified as an Indian, so I would live in an Indian area. Caiaphas was a young man. He was a student leader.

And the police tried to frame him with false charges. Possession of illegal arms and ammo. I defended him successfully. And the police were very upset because they wanted to put him away for a few years. was visited by the police, security police, and said, you and your Kuli communist lawyer, referring to me. Kuli is a very derogatory term for people of Indian origin.

I'm third generation, maybe fourth generation South African born. My parents were born in South Africa as well. So they had it in for us. So when Caiaphas told me about this, I said, Caiaphas. They are very upset. Just lay low for a while. Stay out of there. Unfortunately, one morning, about 2 a.m. in the morning, in his bedroom, which was in the outbuilding in his parents' backyard,

The police went in and shot him 11 to 12 times in his bed. They killed him in cold blood. Fast forward to today, the TRC family got nothing. One of the four killers, he was a Sergeant Marais. He was a young man at the time. His conscience was eating him up all these years because of what they had done to this young man.

He decided to commit suicide, this policeman. He survived somehow. He thought, God does not want me to die. He went straight to the police station after he was released from the hospital. He confessed about how they had murdered this young man, Caiaphas Nioka. And in the same process, he pled guilty. He didn't want to fight. He pled guilty. He named three other perpetrators who were with him at the time. It's in the courts. Unbelievable. That's the long arc of justice. Yeah.

So you're listening to this. I don't know if you've talked about this before, this story. But just what does that tell you about the arc of justice in South Africa? I'm not sure. I like to think... that this moment of feeling guilty and wanting to come forward is hopeful. I mean, it's a terrible story, right? But I do think that there are people who are just built.

to honor other people's humanity. And that there are moments that come where people think, I need to do right by other people and not, I need to protect myself.

if you don't mind me mentioning this, your next novel is based on some real-life interviews with former political prisoners, women who were political prisoners. Could you just give us a sense of... the kind of weight of history on the lives of ordinary South Africans who've had to spend time in those prisons who are still alive today and carrying that with them.

One question that I asked at the end, and they all separately had the same answer, I said, how do you feel now looking back? And they all said angry. And I... I didn't expect that to be the only answer. I mean, it could be an answer, but not the only answer. They said, very angry. I lost a lot of people. We were mothers. We were all, we mothered.

the nation we were teachers we were nurses we were neighbors we were aunts every one of us felt that we were parenting the nation not just the children but the nation and we feel a lot of our our lives were taken from us. You know, we didn't get to have ordinary lives and we feel angry about that. And you yourself, your own writing, your thinking, your imagining still resides in South Africa. Yeah.

So I started writing because I had survivor's guilt. I felt like it was my duty to tell the stories. When apartheid ended... publishers refused to publish writers who were talking about apartheid. They kept saying, we need to move forward. We don't want to talk about the past. And I felt that there was a lot that had happened, and I was of the generation.

in a very good position to talk about what had happened because I had survived it. And I was afraid of losing stories because any nation, any nation in the world, if you lose your stories, you know, you lose your core. We only survive by keeping our stories alive. And stories, for me, are the map to the future. We get to say, here's what happened before us, and here's what we hope will happen ahead of us. finding our way back to our ancestors as well, right? Telling the ancestors' stories.

But also, I also have to say I agree with the women I interviewed. I also feel angry. You know, I grew up in a place where there would be huge, and I talk about this all the time, there would be huge signs that said, beware of the native. And I feel...

We were always seen as the perpetrators. We were always seen as a violent people. And it still makes me angry to this day because I also see it around the world where people are called terrorists for defending their own nations, for saying we want peace. for ourselves and for our children. And for you, Prakash, the struggle, as you mentioned earlier, extends into actually truth and reconciliation here in this country. Yeah.

I think my experience in South Africa prepared me for my work here in Canada. My work with these issues stemmed as a result of... class actions that arose out of the Indian Residential Schools experience. I had the good fortune of meeting hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of survivors of Indian Residential Schools abuse.

I got to listen to their stories, their personal stories. And they thanked me for listening to them. They thanked me for believing them because for the longest time, they were not believed by anybody who... They dared to tell their story. So there are many parallels, I think. Apartheid was actually modeled on the Indian Act. I know it's a big question, but if there's one thing that you could apply from the learnings, this hard road to a semblance of peace and, you know...

peace and reconciliation and truth in South Africa that you can extend here to Canada, what would that be? Just the one thing? Well, I know it's hard to ask that, but yeah, just one thing. Yeah. If I distill it to one thing, I would say... Nothing about us without us. Meaning you have to work with indigenous peoples, not just consulting them, but if there's any process that you want to evolve, you have to work in partnership with indigenous peoples.

You can't design a process or design a solution and then force it upon people. I mean, I still go by the apartheid slogan, an injury to one is an injury to all. I think we have to always be aware of the fragility of peace, the fragility of freedom, the fragility of democracy. And I think the most powerful thing we can do, and I know that this has happened for me personally, is to understand that the lessons we've learned from colonialism, we've learned together.

All kinds of injustices have happened in many different countries, but I know that for me as an Indigenous person, I understand that the suffering of Indigenous people... in any country is the suffering of all of us, all of indigenous people in the world. And so I know that me making the links between South Africa and Australia and New Zealand and Canada has helped me understand that I'm part of a larger collective and that we...

If we start talking, we have so much in common. So many things that have happened in all these countries are very much the same. So what I've learned is that... strength lies in us all understanding each other and considering ourselves one. She and human rights lawyer Prakash Diyar were my guests for this discussion of South Africa's National Peace Accord.

Part 4 of our series, Inventing Peace, recorded at the Stratford Festival in Ontario. And an update. Since this discussion was recorded, the confessed killer of Caiaphas Gnocchi... was sentenced to 15 years in prison. The two men he implicated will return to court in November 2025. Ideas at Stratford is produced by Pauline Holdsworth. Thank you to the team at the Stratford Festival. Lisa Ayuso is Ideas web producer. Technical assistance, Emily Carvezio. Editing by Lisa Godfrey.

Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I, Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.