Uncanny Times: The Case of Eugene de Kock

ABSTRACT

This article focuses specifically on post-apartheid representations of Eugene de Kock, who is seen as one of the bookends to the first, more optimistic, phase of South Africa’s post-apartheid moment. The other bookend, also discussed briefly here, is Nelson Mandela, the country’s first democratically elected president. De Kock was a notorious apartheid-era assassin and commanding officer of Vlakplaas, infamously associated with the extra-judicial torture and execution of anti-apartheid freedom fighters in the 1980s. I isolate this time-frame, from Mandela to de Kock, to comment specifically on what can be seen as a distortion of temporality in South African public life – a kind of disjuncture between time and history, to use David Scott’s formulation (2). I argue that this distortion is characteristic of the post-revolutionary present, not only in South Africa, but in many other parts of the world where a struggle for freedom terminates in a neoliberal order. The figure of the prison is central to this discussion: indeed, the prison is understood as one of the privileged sites where meaning is made and contested in the imagination of a national identity. Also central to this discussion is Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s remarkably prescient 2003 book about her encounters with de Kock in the ‘C-Max’ section of Pretoria Central prison, A Human Being Died That Night.

KEYWORDS:

• prison writing
• Eugene de Kock
• Nelson Mandela
• Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela
• South African non-fiction
• the uncanny

Introduction

This article is interested in the historical interval between the end of apartheid in South Africa and the present moment, with its attendant sense of disillusionment and failure. An important point of departure is David Scott’s monograph Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Memory, Justice. Scott uses the Grenada Revolution of 1979–1983 as a case study to show how, in the present moment, our lived experience of time – temporality – has become disjointed from the teleological progression of historical narrative. In the traditional understanding of revolution, an older order is succeeded by a new version of the future. In contemporary experience, however, there is a sense in which history stalls, failing to deliver its promise, engendering a form of free-floating temporality that is disconnected from both the future and the past. In Scott’s words,

The existential rhythms of that enduring relation between past, present and future have been broken – or at least, they have somehow been very significantly interrupted. So much so that now remains from the past stick unaccountably to the hinges of temporality we hitherto relied on to furnish ourselves with the confidence that we are in fact going somewhere – somewhere after and maybe better than where we currently are. Time, in short, has become less yielding, less promising than we have grown to expect it should be. And what we are left with are aftermaths in which the present seems stricken with immobility and pain and ruin; a certain experience of temporal afterness prevails in which the traces of futures past hang like the remnant of a voile curtain over what feels uncannily like an endlessly extending present. (6)

I would like to argue that precisely such a break occurred between the release of Nelson Mandela and the eventual release of Eugene de Kock, 21 years into South Africa’s democratic era. Instead of superseding the past in a dialectical progression, South Africa entered a kind of uncanny interregnum, marked by the psychological trauma of a ‘past that will not go away, a past that returns, unbidden, involuntarily, to taunt or unsettle or somehow mangle the present’ (Scott 13). In narrative accounts, de Kock emerges as the living symbol and embodiment of such a traumatic past, foreclosing the dream of a post-revolutionary future, demonstrating what Scott refers to as the divergence of temporality and historicity (12). In this article, Mandela is referred to relatively briefly in order to frame the more substantial analysis of post-apartheid representations of Eugene de Kock.

Central to my argument is the material reality of the South African prison. Under apartheid, the prison was charged with revolutionary meaning. The history of the fall of apartheid can be read as a history of prisons: the liberation of the revolutionary leaders from prison coincided with a fantasy of revolution and social change. The prison and history have traditionally been closely entangled in the South African narrative. Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 was properly speaking an historical event, inaugurating the possibility of a radical new future that was always already being assembled behind the closed doors of prisons all over the country like Victor Verster, Pretoria Central, Pollsmoor and Robben Island. On the one hand, then, the prison was a privileged site of historical disruption and a symbol of historical change. As an institution, however, the prison was concomitantly resistant to historical transformation. Prison conditions did not change significantly with the transition to democracy. In the quotidian, circular time of the prison, very little altered with the advent of democracy: to be inside prison meant to be removed from history, subject to a free-floating, disconnected form of temporality. If prisons were intimately involved in the fantasy of historical change, the actual site of the prison conjoined past and future in a way that was oblivious to revolutionary change. The prison, then, is at once a marker of change and disruption, and a place of stasis and continuity. We can say that the prison of Nelson Mandela represented the idea of temporality in lockstep with historical progression, while the prison of Eugene de Kock represented a rupture between historicity and temporality. It is this second kind of prison, associated with temporal rupture, which forms the main focus of my analysis.

Possibly more than any other figure in South African history, Nelson Mandela took the experience of imprisonment and transformed it into a metaphor for national endurance, resistance and triumph. His autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, is essentially a prison memoir, devoted in large part to the eighteen years that he spent on Robben Island. Under apartheid, Robben Island became a potent metonym of apartheid rule, and Mandela its most famous and symbolically charged inmate. When Mandela was finally released from prison in 1990, after 27 years of incarceration, the eyes of the entire world turned to this event. As Deborah Posel notes, ‘Mandela’s exit from prison would … signify the beginnings of a symbolically powerful realignment between South Africa and the wider world, away from the prevailing rendition of global racist pariah toward greater international recognition and applause’ (78). As a text, Long Walk to Freedom itself participates in naming and producing the realignment to which Posel refers. As I have argued at length elsewhere, it is essentially a Bildungsroman, a story of personal maturation narrated from the perspective of a more judicious adulthood (Roux 205–23). As a young man, Mandela is portrayed as headstrong and often fiercely individualistic. As the narrative progresses, the orientation becomes increasingly social until Mandela speaks as an all-encompassing ‘we’ on behalf of a nascent new nation: ‘At every opportunity, I said all South Africans must now unite and join hands and say we are one country, one nation, one people, marching together into the future’ (745).

Throughout this process, Robben Island plays the important role of a nation-in-miniature, where collective identity is forged. ‘We regarded the struggle in prison,’ writes Mandela, ‘as a microcosm of the struggle as a whole’ (464). He is careful to underplay the divisions and friction between prisoners on Robben Island, presenting instead the now-familiar image of the prison as a ‘university’ for activists, where people from different backgrounds and allegiances came together in order to learn from each other and strengthen the bonds between them. As Nelson Mandela remarks, ‘In the struggle, Robben Island was known as “the University”’ (556). This portrayal of unity and harmony is belied by historical facts: in fact, Robben Island was always driven by factional divisions, especially between the ANC and the PAC. In particular. Mandela fails to remark on his long-standing feud with Govan Mbeki and Raymond Mhlaba about the advisability of negotiating with the apartheid regime (Buntman 125).

Barbara Harlow remarks that ‘the prison memoirs of political detainees are not written for the sake of a “book of one’s own,” rather they are collective documents, testimonies written by individuals to their common struggle’ (120). We should understand, however, that there were different notions of the collective on Robben Island, and that Mandela’s voice was one among many: the dominance of his voice in the national narrative was subtended by contestation. Mandela’s image of the apartheid prison eventually became central to the national understanding of history, but its dominance had more to do with political exigencies than Mandela’s unchallenged leadership. When South Africa’s Constitutional Court was opened by Mandela in 1995, he remarked,

The last time I appeared in court was to hear whether or not I was going to be sentenced to death. Fortunately for myself and my colleagues we were not. Today I rise not as an accused, but on behalf of the people of South Africa, to inaugurate a court South Africa has never had, a court on which hinges the future of our democracy. (Constitutional Court)

In 2004, the Constitutional Court was relocated to the site of a notorious apartheid-era prison known as the Fort and renamed Constitution Hill. In terms of architectural symbolism, the legal bedrock of the new democratic dispensation was erected on the remnants of the apartheid prison, serving both as a reminder of the past and a definitive break with it. In this way, the prison became a significant marker of historical time, inseparable from the narrative of suffering under apartheid followed by post-apartheid descriptions of the prison as a place of community, resistance, survival and triumph (Riouful 24–27). The prison serves to separate ‘then’ and ‘now,’ instating a revolutionary present characterized by its disconnection from the past. In Scott’s terms, the displacement of the apartheid prison signalled a revolutionary event and opened up the space for the fulfilment of an idea of the future.

In contrast, when Eugene de Kock, one of the apartheid regime’s most infamous murderers, was released from prison on parole in 2015, he encountered a very different country to the hopeful nation that greeted Mandela back in 1990. By then, South Africa’s 21-year-old experiment with democracy was under considerable strain. For South Africa, the post-apartheid period aligned itself with other emerging democracies around the world in the sudden, shocking corporatisation of society and a persistent inequality gap. A relatively small class of elites had increasingly been building barriers of containment to protect themselves from the spectacle and effects of widespread poverty, retreating into what Slavoj Žižek terms a ‘copula,’ a ‘world interior whose boundaries are invisible, yet virtually insurmountable from without, and which is now inhabited by the one and a half billion “winners” of globalization’ (4). South Africa’s inability to address poverty and inequality was fuelling a panic about crime, a panic that served both as a response to the actual dangers of crime and an ‘index of undoing, of things falling apart, of doubts about the legitimacy of the law itself,’ as the Comaroffs put it (6). In this grim context, the unthinkable happened: the police force of the new democratic South African government massacred 34 striking mine workers and injured another 78 seriously in Marikana in the North West province (South African History Online). The Marikana massacre marked an important moment in the demise of South African optimism about the post-apartheid era. As Annel Pieterse observes, ‘the Marikana massacre clearly destabilizes the transition narrative from a progressive historical trajectory from oppression and inequality to freedom’ (58).

Meanwhile, the idea of the prison had become unyoked from its historic position as a site of political struggle. Prisons retreated from the day-to-day consciousness of the majority of the country’s citizens. Simultaneously, prison writing – once one of the dominant political literary genres in the country – all but disappeared. The prison life writing that continued to appear tended to be collaborative, like Heather Parker Lewis’s The Prison Speaks (2003), Julia Landau’s Journey to Myself: Writing by Women from Prison in South Africa (2004), Margie Orford’s Fifteen Men (2008) or Carla van der Spuy’s Blood on her Hands: Women Behind Bars (2015). Literature about life in prison also became scarcer, with a few notable exceptions, such as Jonny Steinberg’s ground-breaking book The Number (2004) and Ruth Hopkins’ The Misery Merchants: Life and Death in a Private South African Prison (2020). Prison conditions also remained dire, despite the new democratic government’s stated commitment to reform the carceral system. While there were about 110 000 people in prison at the end of apartheid, the figure stood at 154 000 in 2020 (World Prison Brief: South Africa). Many prisons are severely overcrowded, and corruption is rife. The annual reports of the Judicial Inspectorate for Correctional Services routinely record the shocking abuse of prisoners, the lack of adequate healthcare, the massive prevalence of prison rape and the disintegration of prison infrastructure. In his foreword to the 2021 report for the Judicial Inspectorate, Justice Edwin Cameron notes that

In South Africa, we incarcerate more than any country in Africa and the 12th highest in the world. Our prison population has burgeoned since 1995. Despite our lavish human rights-embedded approach to crime and punishment, our strategy has been the blunt misplaced instrument of mass incarceration – a noxious concoction of mandatory minimum sentences, tightening bail and parole and the hopelessly misdirected ‘war on drugs’. (9–10)

In other words, there is a strong continuity between life in the apartheid era prison and life in the post-apartheid prison – one that belies the historical discontinuity dramatized by the Constitutional Court buildings.

When Eugene de Kock was convicted in 1996 on eighty-nine charges and sentenced to 212 years in prison, this was the prison that he would enter: no longer a historically significant site of sacrifice and resistance, but rather a quotidian, dispiriting zone of invisibility, far removed from public consciousness. Under apartheid, de Kock was the commanding officer of C10, a covert counter-insurgency unit of the South African Police that kidnapped, tortured and murdered various anti-apartheid activists from the 1980s right into the early 1990s. He operated from Vlakplaas, a 44-hectare farm near Pretoria, purchased by the South African Police in 1981 (de Kock 18). As the activities of de Kock’s unit came to light, the press dubbed him ‘Prime Evil’: ‘he had become the living symbol of the horror and rottenness of apartheid’ (de Kock 25). Despite providing a comprehensive account of his activities to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), he was convicted in 1996 on 89 charges and sentenced to 212 years behind bars. The reasoning was that he had not simply been following orders but had gone rogue – that his unit had started torturing and murdering perceived anti-apartheid activists on its own, without government knowledge. Towards the end of apartheid, C10 was also involved in theft and fraud – a desperate last-minute looting spree when it became obvious that the apartheid regime was falling. When Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela first started interviewing him for her book A Human Being Died That Night (2003), de Kock was detained in the maximum security ‘C-Max’ section of Pretoria Central Prison, along with other prisoners classified as extremely dangerous.

A Human Being Died That Night provides an intimate account of Gobodo-Madikizela’s conversations with de Kock, whom she first encountered as a TRC commissioner in 1997 when he appeared before the commission in order to testify about his role in a bomb explosion that killed three black policemen. The book offers a sensitive account of Gobodo-Madikizela’s vacillating sense of revulsion and sympathy as she negotiates her relationship with de Kock in the grey, claustrophobic space of the interview room in C-Max. As Gobodo-Madikizela’s examines her own complex thoughts and feelings, her account broadens to a meditation on the nature of justice and forgiveness in the aftermath of apartheid. As Isaac Ndlovu points out, while the book offers a historical and political overview of an episode in apartheid rule, ‘Gobodo-Madikizela’s use of the first person narrative voice in relating her conversations with de Kock makes their encounters a deeply personal experience’ (401). A Human Being Died That Night is also remarkable, as Hedley Twidle observes, for being ‘the first work of non-fiction in which a South African woman of colour writes extensively, and psychobiographically, about a white man’ (4). Gobodo-Madikizela’s encounters with de Kock are framed by the frame of the TRC, still a powerful organising narrative logic in the 2000s. The TRC was preoccupied first and foremost with collecting and curating the untold stories of both victims and perpetrators of apartheid in order to create a more comprehensive archive of this period in South African history. In other words, its goal was to remember and record stories that might otherwise have been forgotten. However, it also had a more personal aim: the act of confession was regarded as a potentially painful form of liberation from the past, one that could result in the reconciliation that was necessary to move on from the violence and heartache of apartheid and facilitate a more just, equitable society that facilitated peaceful coexistence. The themes of forgiveness and understanding run through Gobodo-Madikizela’s book, even as these terms are subjected to constant scrutiny and critique. In many ways, she approaches de Kock’s story in the way a TRC commissioner might approach a repentant human rights violator, with a sensitivity to social and personal context, and alive to the possibility of redemption.

At the same time, the space of the prison itself demands a particular kind of narrative frame. The prison is not merely a backdrop to the subjectivities that speak from behind its walls, but is designed, in its modern form at least, to shape and discipline subjectivity itself. ‘Responding to the sovereignty of the punishment apparatus,’ notes Doran Larson, ‘prison writing is at once indexical of the precise conditions in which it is created, and susceptible to a global tropology, a prison poetics’ (145). In other words, the material conditions of the prison itself determine and mediate the kinds of stories that can be told from inside its walls. Before Gobodo-Madikizela starts her first prison interview with de Kock, she learns that he will be in shackles, and she is warned to exercise caution: ‘I should keep sharp objects away from de Kock to make sure he couldn’t reach out and grab them to use as weapons’ (18). This idea of de Kock as a physically violent person is underscored and dramatized by the prison authorities in a way that objectifies him as something inhuman, beyond the compass of ordinary intersubjectivity, sharpening the contrast with the process of rehumanization that the book describes. Indeed, the vacillation between the two becomes an important ambivalence in the unfolding of the narrative. It is the prison itself that concretizes what emerges as a central theme. If the TRC is structured around the power of confession, then so is the prison apparatus: de Kock is kept in isolation in C-Max, enjoying only minimal human contact. Under such conditions, the desire to tell one’s story becomes irrepressible; an affirmation of one’s existence as a person among others. The language of penitentiary has historically been the language of confession and repentance. The rise of the modern penitentiary brought with it the demand to render an individualizing account of the crime, to describe the incarcerated person in terms of the criminal act and to demand a penitent confession as a condition for clemency, institutionalized in practices such as parole. If this is the discourse adopted by de Kock, it is at least in part because this is the kind of story that the prison enjoins. The confessional mode, then, arises at the intersection of three discursive forms: the language of the TRC, the language of the prison and the language between psychologist and patient.

Even more importantly for the purposes of this article, the prison foregrounds and supplements the sense of the uncanny that runs through Gobodo-Madikizela’s narrative. It is perhaps this experience of the uncanny that most explicitly gives A Human Being Died That Night its sense of prescience and contemporary topicality. As is well-known, Freud explained the uncanny in this way: ‘among instances of frightening things there must be one class in which the frightening element can be shown to be something repressed which recurs. This class of frightening things would then constitute the uncanny’ (217). For Freud, the uncanny is not something new or alien, but rather ‘something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression’ (217). In the uncanny, we find the coincidence of opposites: what is ‘homely’ (heimlich) turns out to be the same thing as the uncanny (unheimlich) (217). From the outset of the narrative, Gobodo-Madikizela is struck by a sense of different temporalities that seem to co-exist in disconcerting double exposure. When she drives through Pretoria to locate the prison, she takes care to foreground Pretoria’s dissociation from apartheid rule:

It was the city where Nelson Mandela had been inaugurated as the first president of a democratic South Africa. A workforce that reflected this new South Africa had replaced many of the white men and women who had been the civil servants of one of the most brutally repressive regimes in modern history. This day, on my way to the Central Prison, I’d driven into Pretoria to experience the atmosphere that came along with this new phase in my country’s existence. (2)

However, she is soon overcome by a sense of peril and foreboding:

I lost my sense of direction and was driving around in circles through Pretoria’s busy streets. It was a surreal scene in which the forbidding architecture of the apartheid era assumed a menacing air and the one-way streets seemed to entangle me in a maze from which I couldn’t free myself. (3)

In this foreshadowing of the emotional confusion that her encounter with de Kock will later precipitate, Gobodo-Madikizela encounters something deeply familiar in the present, even though it belongs to the past. It is as if two spatial architectures become superimposed on one another, inexorably drawing her back into a traumatic past. If de Kock is himself an uncanny figure, it is first of all because of his ordinariness; his familiarity. The C-Max section of the prison presents a stage that promises a kind of alterity, the shackled apparition of one of apartheid’s monsters. Instead, Gobodo Madikizela encounters a polite, somewhat shy man and recognizes a ‘flicker of boyishness, of uncertainty’ (6). Even as she registers his apparent ordinariness, however, she is conscious of the fact that he represented the worst excesses of apartheid rule: ‘The embodiment of evil stood there politely smiling at me’ (6).

This sense of the uncanny is perhaps most evident in Gobodo-Madikizela’s description of de Kock’s trigger hand. During one of her interviews with him, she is suddenly overcome by de Kock’s distress at the pain he caused. She notes: ‘Relating to him in the only way one does in such human circumstances, I touched his shaking hand, surprising myself’ (32). She struggles, after the physical contact, to continue with the interview as if nothing had happened. ‘I felt guilty,’ she says, ‘for having expressed even momentary sympathy and wondered if my heart had actually crossed the moral line from compassion, which allows one to maintain a measure of distance, to identifying with de Kock’ (32–33). In her next interview with him, one of the first things he says to her is, ‘You know, Pumla, that was my trigger hand you touched’ (39). She reacts: ‘I have not, up until now, been able to free myself from the grip of that statement nor to soften its visceral impact’ (39). As Richard Kearny observes, ‘this was no cheap grace, no act of facile sentiment. If anything, the strange unpredictable moment signalled an event of “impossible hospitality”’ (81). In this properly uncanny moment of ‘impossible hospitality,’ a normal, everyday human gesture of compassion suddenly turns into an encounter with its opposite – with merciless inhumanity. And the merciless, inhuman hand, is equally a thankful, human hand: an impossible translation into opposites, where what is homely is unhomely and what is unhomely is after all homely. This encounter with the hand is a powerful synecdoche for the effect of de Kock as it is registered in cultural forms: the brutality that had to be forgotten is suddenly brought to the surface of civic life, uncanny because it appears in the form of a normal person appealing for forgiveness, somewhat belatedly, in the surpassed and now almost disparaged conciliatory language of the TRC.

As a kind of surplus object, something with no definite place, de Kock’s hand also speaks to the question of whether he should be understood in political or personal terms. In some ways, Gobodo-Madikizela’s book continually struggles with the question of what is at stake in humanizing a figure like de Kock. De Kock occupied a strange interstitial and somewhat paradoxical position in the post-apartheid years as the embodiment of the illegitimate excess of the illegitimate system of apartheid, at once an ordinary criminal and a prototypical representative of a political system. If we return to the etymological root of the word ‘amnesty’ – to forget, amnesia – it is as if for amnesty to be affected successfully, de Kock had to be forgotten, erased from the visible surface of society. His imprisonment was part of the post-apartheid project of forgetting – also analysed in detail by other, later writers, such as Jacob Dlamini in his masterful book, Askari (2014). However, this process of forgetting could never be fully realized. Gobodo-Madikizela’s book represents one of the first sustained attempts to return de Kock to visibility. In many ways, it challenges the ‘Prime Evil’ label and insists on seeing him as the product of the system that he served. As Gobodo-Madikizela notes,

The prosecutor in de Kock’s case paid little or no attention to the question of structural and systemic crimes – the surrounding ideological/political philosophy, the setting up of Vlakplaas, and an administrative-executive system that protected and directed de Kock to commit the crimes for which he is now serving two life sentences. (60–61)

We can say that, among other things, it not only ‘humanizes’ de Kock, but also repoliticizes him, displacing the idea of a wrathful, sadistic, monstrous individual with something more complex and socially generated. In Roger Bromley’s words, ‘the book is an attempt – a necessary attempt for giving memory a future – to rehabilitate through narrative a figure of destruction who absented himself voluntarily from a shared notion of humanity in order to render other humans without signifying power’ (270).

De Kock never quite disappeared, as he was supposed to, into the invisible zone of the post-apartheid South African penal system: in the figure of de Kock, we encounter a ghost of the political prison, its flickering, ambiguous afterlife. He both is and is not a political prisoner: he represents the criminal excess of apartheid, yet that criminal excess was, after all, at the heart of the political system. Or, as Gobodo-Madikizela puts it, ‘killing apartheid’s opponents became South Africa’s dirty little family secret that everyone could see but no one openly talked about for fear that the house of cards called apartheid might come crashing down’ (66). Indeed, the break with the past, exemplified by the distinction between the apartheid ‘political’ prison and the post-apartheid penitentiary, is in many respects less definitive and clear-cut than the dominant linear narrative of South African history might suggest. In many respects, South Africa’s political transition simply meant that a group of white entrepreneurs and corporatists who exploited apartheid labour conditions were joined by a group of black elites, who found it convenient to impose neoliberal beliefs on uncontrolled markets onto an already-existent, racially defined group of poor people. The real transition, an economic one, simply never happened. When de Kock was eventually released from prison in 2015, his release was consonant with the increasing re-emergence, in South African public life, of unresolved fragments of South Africa’s past – and this re-emergence now demands a form of confrontation that threatens to destabilize the act of repression that enabled the fragile stability of the post-apartheid narrative. ‘Doing time,’ in de Kock’s case, can be read as a form of historical delaying. A Human Being Died That Night is conscious of the possibility of this scenario. While the book is attentive to the liberatory capacities of empathy and forgiveness, Gobodo-Madikizela also strikes a prophetic note of caution: ‘True social transformation – and healing of victims – will come about only if the issues of economic justice and the myriad problems that post-apartheid South Africa faces are addressed’ (126).

The prison that de Kock leaves behind – beyond its symbolic function – is living testimony to South Africa’s failure to break fully with the past. Certainly, the abolishment of race and ideology as legitimate grounds for imprisonment signalled a massive social shift. But it was a social shift that was not experienced by most as a violent shock, because prisons did not undergo a radical transformation: they became, instead, repositories for the mostly black class of unemployed people. Political dissidence could no longer be punished directly, but the prison continues to fulfil a political purpose: one that is contiguous with apartheid, and which relates to the extraction of wealth and sustaining conditions of inequality. After apartheid, prisons might be more invisible, but they are also growing, extending in increasingly altered forms into whole communities that revolve around inadequate state-administered subsistence grants and crime. The post-apartheid prison that de Kock was freed from provides the material explanation for his uncanny effect: he returns not as an archaic remnant of a superseded history of violence, but as a reminder of the unresolved nature of this history, its continuing reach in the volatile present. To have de Kock among us is to confront the fragility of the political solution reached with the transition to democracy.

What Gobodo-Madikizela offers us is a close transection, at an individual level, of this uncanny sense of a past that refuses to recede and continues to intrude on the present. Throughout A Human Being Died That Night, de Kock is represented as doubled, both a vulnerable, relatable figure and a representative of a history of brutality and violence. He seems suspended between the world of the living and the dead, a kind of spectral remnant of a human being, imprisoned as much by the angry voices of the people he murdered as by the prison walls. ‘Ultimately,’ Gobodo-Madikizela writes, ‘what I heard was the voice of an outcast begging to rejoin the world of the living. His past, it seems, was unbearable. But his future, stained as it was with the memory of lives snuffed out, was also unbearable’ (115).

De Kock’s release on parole in 2015 was a quiet and somewhat mysterious affair. While prison officials confirmed that he had been released, journalists were unable to trace his location. De Kock had apparently requested that details of his release should not be made public (SAPA). More than a year later, de Kock’s lawyer maintained that he was being held in prison again against his will: ‘They will not let him go home. They wanted him to go into witness protection and he refused’ (Ngoepe). The next time he emerged was at the Franschhoek Literary Festival in 2016, for the launch of a new book about him by Annemarie Jansen. His presence elicited shock and outrage. As a staff writer for the Mail & Guardian noted: ‘Was there a part of de Kock that hoped to be publically [sic] shamed? Was his arrival an act of self-flagellation or willful ignorance? And should I be speculating about his motives, when that places the focus on the perpetrator rather than his many victims?’ He was eventually asked to leave by the author Lauren Beukes: ‘I asked him if he was Eugene de Kock and he said yes, then I told him it was inappropriate that he was there and told him that people are in tears that you are here and I think you should leave’ (Gxuluwe). We can compare de Kock’s release, slipping in and out of visibility, traumatic, surreptitious and shadowy, to Mandela’s exultant and internationally publicized emergence from prison onto the world stage. ‘Time and history’, writes Scott in Omens of Adversity, ‘once barely distinguishable, seem no longer synchronized, much less synonymous – as though time had found itself betrayed by history, or that history now confronted us as inauthentic time’ (2). De Kock’s release symbolises precisely the kind of instance alluded to by Scott, where temporality has accrued a non-linear quality, unmoored from the larger narratives of progress and development that a nation tells itself. If Mandela’s release was released into history, de Kock was released into the uncanny temporality of present-day post-apartheid South Africa.

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Daniel Roux

Daniel Roux is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Stellenbosch University. His research focuses mainly on prison writing, and his publications include the entry on South African prison literature in The Cambridge History of South Africa (2012) and a chapter on Mandela’s writing in The Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela (2014). More recently, his research has shifted to writing from and about Guantanamo Bay.