Following the bombing of the Sibasa police station in October 1981, the Vendaland security police persecuted four Lutheran church pastors. This book tells the story of two of these men. The first?person experience of torture of Ndanganeni Peter Phaswana, ably refracted through his capacity for reflection on forgiveness and reparation, offers one lens. The second lens is via the experience of Lillian Tendani Muofhe, as she sought to absorb the murder of her revered husband Isaac Tshifhiwa Muofhe, while mothering her infant daughter.

Both accounts hold up a mirror to South African society, present and past, and offer powerful lenses for engaging with the ways in which trauma lodges, sometimes intractably, in the individual unconscious as well as in the collective unconscious of a society.