Three months after Nelson Mandela was released from prison, in April of 1990,  I received from the South African government,  a letter bomb, hidden inside the pages of two religious magazines.  Among other injuries, I was left with no hands and one eye. For me it is always important to say that I had a sense that God was with me – that the great promise of the Christian scriptures had been kept – “Lo I am with you always even to the end of the age.”

What enabled me to heal? To travel towards wholeness. Excellent medical treatment both in Zimbabwe and in Australia, Yes.
But also I received messages of prayer, love and support from across the globe.
My own story was listened to, acknowledged, reverenced, recognised and given a moral content.
Every person has a story to tell. Every story needs a listener.

I would like to emphasize the difference between knowledge and acknowledgment and its importance for healing individuals, communities and nations.  Families can have guilty secrets. There is abuse in a family.  Everybody knows. There is knowledge but no acknowledgment, perhaps even denial.  What is true of individuals and families is also true of nations.

Where torture, or forms of abuse,  have  taken place, the torturer will tell the tortured that no mark will be left so no-one will believe that they have been tortured.  Finally healing begins, when it is publically acknowledged that yes, you were tortured, and it was wrong.  Torture inverts the moral order.  Acknowledgment helps to recreate the moral order.

I have spent some time with the Sami people in the northern part of Sweden.  There the church has acknowledged its role in oppression.  However the wider community has not been educated about the history of the oppression.  So knowledge and acknowledgment are both important on the journey to healing.

When I received a letter bomb, I became a victim. I  physically survived so I was a survivor. I realized that if I was filled with hatred, self pity,  bitterness and desire for revenge, then I would be a victim for ever.

One of South Africa's great leaders, Chief Albert Lutuli, once said, “those who think of themselves
as victims eventually become the victimizers of others.”  This is as much true of what happens in intimate space as within nations and between nations.  We don't have to look very far to find dramatic examples.  People give themselves permission to do terrible things to others because of what was done to them.  Of course sometimes there is competition for victimhood.

There is also the relationship between political violence, legitimized or not, and what happens in the privacy of the bedroom.  Armed conflict comes to an end for the society or the individual but does not necessarily end in the home where there maybe self harm or harm to others in the form of domestic or sexual violence.

The life giving alternative to victims becoming victimisers is that victims should become victors, not in a militaristic sense   Rather those who have become objects of history, become subjects of history once more.  The key as to whether victims becomes victimisers or victors often lies with whether or not there has been acknowledgment

In South Africa, we did have a considerable amount of acknowledgment in terms of the role of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission which listened to the stories of 23 000 people..

My question was what about those who did not qualify to come to the Commission.  What happened to their stories?  When horrible things happen to human beings, it is normal to harbour feelings such as bitterness, hatred and desire for revenge.  The problem is that those feelings destroy us.  For our own sake, we have to find the way of detoxifying, of vomiting out the poison.

It was in the context of reflections of my own journey and that of the nation that some of us developed an intervention, which we call a Healing of the Memories workshop.  This particular intervention takes two and a half days.  We promise people one step on the road to healing.  However for some the step maybe life changing especially if a story is being told for the first time.

We know that in situations of conflict or abuse there will be those who need clinical interventions.  Relatively speaking this is often a very small population.  There is often a much larger group of people who are sub clinical, but still have unfinished business from the past.  They need a safe space where events from the past can be addressed and where they can begin to let go of destructive feelings.  Even in situations where many have suffered, people often feel very isolated as they don't know what others are feeling.  A new sense of belonging emerges when I tell my story and there are multiple witnesses.

We often say in our Institute, those who would be the healers of others must be on their own journey of healing.  Permission and space is needed for chaplains to deal with their own stuff, and the impact of the lives we lead.  Lest we too become victimizers rather than victors.

In  conclusion may I just say that the Institute for Healing of Memories has worked in a variety of contexts across the globe, with combatants and civilians, in post and present conflict situations, in relation to HIV and AIDS, with refugees, prisoners, victims of war here in South Africa, in Zimbabwe, Uganda, the US, Northern Ireland, Fiji, Ausralia, Germany and the UK.

Every context is unique with its own particular history and circumstances.  But at the deepest level,  we are one human family, capable of beautiful and horrible deeds, sharing the same destructive and lifegiving emotions and feelings.