Apartheid was the only life I knew. My father was a teacher. A police officer shot him during a {{ g.protest }} when I was still a baby, so I don't remember him at all. What I do know is that we never talked about politics at home — and that it made no difference. Every few months the police came to our house at night. They pulled us out of our beds while we cried, and nobody ever explained why.
We lived in a black {{ g.township }}, in a house with no {{ g.electricity }} and no bathroom. My mother went out to work every single day, and my grandmother and my aunts looked after us. My brother, my sister and I all left school at thirteen, because the family needed the money more than we needed lessons. My mother had to feed three children on her own, and she never once {{ g.complained }}.
I had wanted to go to university and work in an office. Instead I found a job in the kitchen of a white family. I was angry — at them, at the world. I believed that white people were the cause of everything: they had taken my father, they had taken my future, and they treated us like animals.
Then, one evening in February 1990, the television told us that apartheid was going to end. We sang, we laughed, we cried until the morning. Real life changed far more slowly than that night suggested.
I left the kitchen and found work in a small restaurant in a nicer part of town. One afternoon I looked out and saw a tall old man with grey hair. I knew his face at once: he had been an important police officer in the apartheid system, one of the men who had {{ g.ordered }} his officers to {{ g.attack }} the protesters. The man whose officers had killed my father. And there he sat, waiting for his lunch.
How could he eat here, of all places? When his food was ready, I decided to serve it myself. I put the plate down in front of him, looked straight into his grey eyes and said: “You killed my father.” Then I walked back to the kitchen without waiting for an answer.
Nearly two hours later the restaurant closed, and he was still sitting in the corner. “Can I talk to you?” he asked. I sat down opposite him. For a while he said nothing at all. Then: “I'm sorry.”
We talked for an hour. I told him about my mother, about the years without my father, about my life. He told me that he had begun to work against violence towards black people. While he spoke, I thought of something Nelson Mandela once said: that if he had not left his {{ g.bitterness }} and {{ g.hatred }} behind, he would still be a {{ g.prisoner }}. If Mandela could {{ g.forgive }}, then I had to try too.
The old man stood up and held out his hand. I took it, and I looked him in the eye. “I forgive you,” I said. I felt {{ g.relief }}. I don't know whether my mother or my father would have done the same. I only know that it was what I needed to do, so that I could live without hatred.