The day I hugged apartheid's 'Prime Evil'

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/jun/09/eugene-de-kock-apartheid-a-human-being-died-that-night

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We arrived at Pretoria Central Prison on a special family visiting day. There were long queues, and we were searched twice before a bus took us across the vast compound. Paperwork was handed in, followed by more waiting, then we were let into a large visiting area, partly open to the air. There was a tuck shop where visitors could buy burgers, sweets and soft drinks for prisoners. The space was filled with short benches facing each other.

I waited by the entrance and noticed an open doorway with a guard. Beyond this, I could see a metal grill door. A tall, dark-haired man in orange prison clothes stood behind it. He wore glasses and seemed nervous, as if he had been waiting for some time. It was Eugene de Kock. After a few seconds, we made eye contact. He waved. I waved back and smiled at the man I am currently playing on the London stage – a former police colonel and assassin who did such unspeakable things during apartheid that he became known as Prime Evil.

With me is Noma Dumezweni, who plays Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela in the play. Called A Human Being Died That Night, the drama is based on the book she wrote about her encounters with De Kock while serving on the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. The two met at the maximum security wing of this jail, the professor and the former head of South Africa's death squad, which tortured and killed opponents of apartheid. De Kock had been sentenced to 212 years in 1996. He went before the TRC, expressed deep sorrow, and offered information about how his victims died and the location of their bodies. His sentence stood.

We sat on the benches and spoke for an hour. I can't remember our first words, but they may have resembled De Kock's opening remark to Gobodo-Madikizela in the play: "It's a pleasure to meet you." The conversation flowed easily and covered a lot of ground beyond just his past and our experience of doing the play. Napoleon and the second world war were touched on – he has been doing a lot of reading in prison, and was obviously always an intelligent man.

De Kock said his friends had kept him informed about the play, which tackles the nature of evil and the power that forgiveness bestows on the forgiver. Those who had seen it had reported back favourably. He talked about his superiors, who were never charged with any crimes, and he recalled his refusal to let one of them wash his feet as an act of atonement while visiting him in jail. "You come and spend some time in prison with me," he told the man. "Then I'll think about letting you do that."

He spoke of his instruction to his men that anyone harming non-combatant women or children would receive summary justice from him. He spoke of the possibility of parole and his hopes for a life after prison. It was one of the most extraordinary hours of my life.

Nicholas Wright's stage adaptation of the book is not a documentary but a semi-fiction, one that could easily be transposed to Cambodia, Rwanda, Nazi Germany or Maoist China – wherever ideologies validate mass murder. When it toured South Africa earlier this year, we wondered how its reception would vary from place to place. Cape Town audiences (middle-aged, liberal, maybe 85% white) were shaken. I remember a couple sitting in their seats for 20 minutes after the show, animatedly debating what they had seen. I saw an Afrikaner woman in her 50s crying at the bar, saying De Kock could have been her brother, and that a whole generation of middle-aged white men had been damaged by not discussing their experiences in the fight to preserve apartheid.

A young black comedian said it was the first time he had thought of people like De Kock as anything other than monsters. We got the thumbs-up from Gobodo-Madikizela and a huge hug from Mrs Tutu, while the archbishop said he thought that bringing this play to South Africa continued the work of the TRC.

We were told, however, that Cape Town is a strange little bubble and that Johannesburg is the real South Africa. Reactions would be different there, not least because we would be closer to where many of the terrible events talked about in the play happened – closer to Vlakplaas, the headquarters of De Kock's secret unit, and just a few miles from Pretoria Central Prison.

Jo'burg was indeed different: bigger, more metropolitan, more aggressive, more dynamic. Audiences were younger and maybe 60% black. There was less restraint, more laughter, more under-the-breath muttering, and a much stronger feeling that the play was telling the story of this place. After one performance, a man casually informed me that, the night before, he had had dinner with the brother of someone De Kock talks about killing.

We played to an audience of schoolchildren, all of whom were born after the events of the play, and who knew little about the recent history of their country. We played to the Zimbabweans running the theatre bar, all Manchester United fans and all politically literate. We played to De Kock's lawyer from the 1990s. And we played to the daughter of a woman De Kock had killed.

Gobodo-Madikizela was there that night and described taking this woman to meet De Kock in prison a few years back. The woman had been very young when her mother was murdered. De Kock and the woman sat so close they breathed the same air, Gobodo-Madikizela said. The woman talked of the comfort she had received from talking to one of the last people to see her mother alive, of hearing him relate what had happened, and of receiving his apology.

People often ask me if I think the man I portray should be released. Like Gobodo-Madikizela, I do, for two reasons. Firstly, even though you can argue that his sentence – two life terms plus 212 years – was fully justified by his terrible crimes, I feel you have to place this in context: hundreds of people could have been charged with similar crimes, but he was one of only a handful put through that process. And of that handful, he is the only one still in prison. So the justice meted out to him was part of a fundamentally unjust settlement, a settlement that was necessary, however, for the political stability of the new South Africa. Given that the 212 years have been written off and he has served the necessary time – nearly 20 years – to be eligible for parole, I think he should be released.

Secondly, I don't think prison should be solely for punishment, with no possibility of rehabilitation and forgiveness. Everything I have learned about De Kock has made me believe he has been on a profound moral journey, actively helping to locate missing persons from the years of apartheid, and also working to convert white supremacists in prison. I believe he has courageously acknowledged the evil he did and has worked hard to become a different man. He is not a monster. He is a man deserving of his freedom.

In one of our aftershow discussions – having played to an audience of psychologists, psychiatrists and psychotherapists – we heard from a black social worker helping people in Soweto deal with the wounds of the terrible ANC versus Inkatha violence of 1990-94. He recalled hearing an unrepentant young man boasting about the thrill of slaughter. Strangely, the social worker still felt the urge to give that killer a hug, because he could see the damage within. When Noma and I got up to say goodbye to De Kock, we hugged him, and he hugged us back. It felt like the right thing to do.

• A Human Being Died That Night is at the Hampstead theatre, London NW3, until 21 June. Box office: 020-7722 9301.

• Review: A Human Being Died That Night