CHARMAIN NAIDOO: The darkness in our souls
'Where do you put the darkness of what you have done, and seen?'
I’ve been a journalist for a very long time and in the last 35 years have come to understand that there are no limits to the savagery of human beings. I’ve seen truly brutish behaviour, the stuff of stomach turning revulsion. I’ve seen at first hand people’s unspeakable cruelty to other people, to children, to animals. Some of the things I witnessed were done in the name of the war on injustice during the long and gruelling years of struggle against apartheid. I remember feeling nauseated as, at the end of the day, I took off my blood stained shoes after the Church Street, Pretoria bombing in 1983 and the Khotso House bombing in 1988.It was then, and is now, a mystery to me that such utter barbarity is capable of being committed by people who are, essentially – and mostly – good; or at least have the capacity for goodness. So man’s inhumanity to man is not a surprise to me. Still, two things in the last week have horrified me, again. Both are completely unrelated except that in both...
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