Country of My Skull is a 1998 nonfiction book by Antjie Krog about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It is based on Krog's experience as a radio reporter, covering the Commission from 1996 to 1998 for the South African Broadcasting Corporation. The book explores the successes and failures of the Commission, the effects of the proceedings on her personally, and the possibility of genuine reconciliation in post-Apartheid South Africa.
Country of My Skull blends poetry, prose, reporting, and verbatim testimony from the Commission — one critic calls it "a hybrid work, written at the edges of reportage, memoir, and metafiction." It was Krog's first work in English. She drafted it in Afrikaans and translated it for publication. It was edited by Ivan Vladislavic.
It was published in the United States by Times Books in 1999, as Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa. In 2004, the book was adapted into the film In My Country, directed by John Boorman and starring Samuel L. Jackson and Juliette Binoche.
Contents and themes
The book centres on the public hearings of the Commission, which Krog and other journalists followed to venues across the country. It collects accounts from the hearings, including testimony from witnesses — some of it vivid and disturbing — and documents the progress of the Commission, including several scandals in the press. At the same time, the book follows Krog's personal experience during this period, including the effects on her personal life and mental health, as she attempts to grapple with the country's bloody history, with the unfolding social and political landscape of democratic South Africa, and with moral questions about complicity, guilt, forgiveness, and responsibility.
These moral questions especially preoccupy Krog because she is a white Afrikaner who retains a strong attachment to Afrikaans culture and history, even as she is horrified by the ravages of Apartheid. (The book is dedicated to "every victim who had an Afrikaner surname on her lips.") Her sense of belonging in the new South Africa depends on the possibility of constructing a new Afrikaner identity. Krog is also occupied by questions about language: about the inadequacy of any language to express the depth of suffering experienced under Apartheid, and particularly about the association of her native tongue, Afrikaans, with Apartheid. She asks, "How do I live with the fact that all the words used to humiliate, all the orders given to kill, belonged to the language of my heart?" In reflecting on these questions, Krog draws on the moral philosophy, and notably the philosophy of ubuntu, of such figures as President Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was the head of the Commission. She is occasionally deeply moved by exhibitions of these philosophies, and she admires Tutu in particular, calling him "the compass" and the core of the Commission — most importantly, "It is he who finds language for what is happening." For example, as Krog watches Tutu plead personally with Winnie Mandela to testify truthfully, she has an intense emotional reaction: Ah, the Commission! The deepest heart of my heart. Heart that can only come from this soil — brave — with its teeth firmly in the jugular of the only truth that matters. And that heart is black. I belong to that blinding black African heart. My throat floats up in tears — my pen falls to the floor, I blubber behind my hand, my glasses fog up — for one brief, shimmering moment this country, this country is also truly mine. She writes of the Commission, "here the marginalised voice speaks to the public ear, the unspeakable is spoken — and translated — the personal story brought from the innermost depths of the individual binds us anew to the collective." However, she also criticises various aspects of the Commission, for example pointing out the inadequacy of the government's approach to reparations and the exploitation of the hearings for political purposes.
Krog ultimately judges herself and other whites to have been complicit in Apartheid's crimes against humanity. Country of My Skull ends with a request in verse: