COUNTRY OF MY SKULL.

• Author: North, James
• Position: Review

COUNTRY OF MY SKULL By Antjie Krog Random House, $27.50

I "knew" who murdered my friend Griffiths Mxenge, the black South African human rights lawyer and underground member the African National Congress, as soon as I read about his death in the newspaper in November 1981. His killers tried to make it look like a nighttime robbery, cutting his throat and stabbing him so viciously the knife got caught behind his ribs. But I knew the apartheid regime, in some way, was behind his death.

I also knew the regime was responsible for killing other friends of mine: Anton Lubowski, the white human rights lawyer, a young man of great courage and humor; David Webster, also white, a gentle anthropologist who helped start a support committee for political detainees; and Petrus (Nzima) Nyawose and his wife, Jabu Nyawose, two black trade union activists, former garment workers, who belonged to the outlawed ANC. Every time I vote, even when I'm annoyed at the narrow range of choices, I think of Petrus, who was killed by a car bomb when he was 37 years old, without ever having cast a ballot.

The only questions were secondary ones. From how high up the chain of command came the orders to commit these and other murders, and to arm and abet the "third force" paramilitary bands that contributed to 20,000 deaths in the last years of apartheid? Did white Cabinet ministers, or even apartheid presidents P.W. Botha and F.W. de Klerk, order the killing directly? Or did the highest officials make the same kind of indirect suggestions that the English King Henry II did to encourage his knights to murder the principled archbishop Thomas Becket--some modern version of "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" It was possible in a few cases that zealous mid- or lower-echelon security police, perhaps in league with the neo-fascist right, killed on their own. One thing was certain: The apartheid police never pursued any of the killers, who therefore knew they could act with impunity.

Antjie Krog's skillful, passionate new book about South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission makes it clear that black South Africans felt just as I did. Krog is a poet-turned-journalist, and she followed the Commission on its lengthy journey around South Africa as it listened to witnesses from Cape Town to the Limpopo River, taking more than 20,000 statements. She explains that blacks were not surprised to learn that the people who had kidnapped, tortured, and murdered their children and...