(Vatican Radio) - In 1994, four years after his release from prison, Nelson Mandela
was elected President of South Africa. Two years after this date Veronica Scarisbrick
was invited by Unicef to go on a fact-finding mission to this nation and produced
a series of programmes by the title of ‘Apartheid and After’. In the final part
of this archive series you can hear the testimonies of three different generations
of black South Africans speaking about their personal experience of apartheid and
after. It was 1996 then, when Veronica Scarisbrick spoke to Peter Dadla a 58 year
old man from Soweto who struggled against apartheid all the early years of his life.To
Pinky Vilakazi who belongs to that generation of township students that brought the
apartheid system to its heel: "..I think apartheid worked very hard on making us feel
very dehumanized, very incompetent, just the mere colour of your skin would make you
the most hopeless thing on earth...". And to a sixteen year old, Queeneth, who was
old enough at the time to know the meaning of apartheid, with an awareness she should
forgive but never forget. In the course of her reporting Veronica Scarisbrick also
asked a white Marist Brother, Jude Pieterse, who during the era of apartheid, was
Principal of one of a whites-only exclusive school as well as Secretary of the South
African Bishop's Conference, where the Catholic Church had stood in in all this? Listen: