South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission
held hearings for 30 months delving into the nation's tortured past. I was
there from the first hearing to the last. On the
eve of the commission's final report in 1998, The Inquirer published Apartheid's
Secrets. The series focused on one episode that preoccupied
the truth commission, the 1985 murder of the anti-apartheid activists
known as the Cradock Four. The inquiry illustrated the strengths and the shortcomings of South
Africa's effort to unearth its buried secrets. The five-part series,
written in a narrative format, was the result of interviewing dozens of
witnesses, attending hundreds of hours of commission hearings and
examining thousands of pages of commission records.
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Cradock
residents pass a wall where slogans remain from the apartheid
era. (Eric Mencher / Inquirer Staff)
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