For two-and-a-half years South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission was on everybody's lips. Newspapers and radio programs reported daily on the work of the Commission, and the faces of victims and offenders alike appeared on millions of television screens. In Chronicle of the Truth Commission, Pieter Meiring sheds light on the work of the Truth Commission: the stories and testimonies of victims, the applications for amnesty by offenders guilty of violating human rights, the necessary confrontations with the past, and the need for forgiveness and reconciliation. Meiring presents the course of the Truth Commission as a symbolic quest, an epic journey back into the past and onwards to the new future, a great trek that would leave not a single South African unaffected.
