Appealing for forgiveness

JOHANNESBURG -- He tied up the old woman and grabbed her hands. She wore a diamond ring. "Give it to me, or I'll cut off your finger!" he yelled. The woman struggled to take off the ring. It wouldn't budge. Finally, as the robber readied his knife, the ring slipped free.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nearly six years later, Collin Ketshabile, 26, emerged from prison after serving a sentence for the robbery, and hunted for the woman again.

This time he came to ask for forgiveness.

In a country known for its exceedingly high rate of violent crime -- the number of robberies alone in South Africa has risen 95 percent in the past decade -- forgiveness is precious and rare. But an organization called Khulisa has begun to tackle the overwhelming problem of violence one criminal at a time. It includes bringing nearly 40 offenders face to face recently with their victims to say they are sorry.

This is called restorative justice, and its aim is to heal both offender and victim.

Not every offender or victim wants to, or is able to, go through the process. Some crimes, said Khulisa founder Lesley Ann van Selm, leave such pain that a victim or a relative of the victim is unable to forgive. Some offenders are unable to apologize.

But van Selm said that in many cases the victim, with the help of social workers, is prepared to meet with their tormentor as long as they are convinced the offender has genuine intentions.

Joan van Blerk, 73, and her husband, Gert, were among them. At 6 a.m. on May 26, 1997, in the middle-class Kensington neighborhood of Johannesburg, Ketshabile and a friend armed with a pistol broke into the van Blerks' house. Gert van Blerk was not home. Ketshabile tied up Joan van Blerk, and the two robbers spent 90 minutes ransacking the house, taking her diamond ring and entire collection of jewelry, including a locket her sister gave her in 1946 "that had three different colors of gold."

Two hours later, Ketshabile was caught, and he served 4 1/2 years in jail. His friend escaped.

"Collin wanted to cut my finger off," Joan van Blerk said in her living room one day last week, as Ketshabile listened a few feet away, avoiding her eyes and sitting on the same couch on which he had bound her. "If he had cut it off, I doubt I would have been able to forgive him."

She laughed. Ketshabile looked up. "But he didn't -- I am very happy for that -- and for Collin, there is forgiveness."

Their story is even more remarkable because of how much the van Blerks have suffered from crime. A year after the robbery, a gunman shot dead their only son, Michael, in their driveway. The gunman also shot Gert van Blerk in the head, and although he survived, the bullet wound has paralyzed him from the waist down and impaired his speech.

Joan van Blerk said she agreed to meet with Ketshabile because a social worker at Khulisa said he wanted to change his life. "I felt that if it helps him be a good citizen of South Africa, then I have done something meaningful with my life," van Blerk said.

They also agreed to meet in a public setting -- at Leeuwkop Prison in February, along with three other pairs of offenders and victims. The pleas for forgiveness were made before an audience of supporters, prisoners, and journalists, a scene orchestrated by Khulisa in hopes of propelling its work to a larger audience as well as persuading more offenders to participate. In addition to Ketshabile, one offender seeking forgiveness had hijacked a car. Another had raped. And a third had stolen money from her mother to support a drug addiction.

For Joan van Blerk, the outcome of the meeting was not as she expected. She was thinking of Ketshabile. She wasn't thinking of herself. But she found a sense of peace as she walked away.

"Forgiving Collin has allowed me to put the matter behind me," she said. "There's no anger, no bad feeling, nothing that lingers from the whole bad incident. For that, I'm very grateful.

"When you're carrying anger around inside you, it's quite a burden. I know. I'm carrying that around with me because of what happened to my son," she said. "I am still so angry. But not anymore with Collin. It's gone, it's gone."

It's gone, mostly, for Ketshabile as well. He visits the van Blerks regularly and still seems amazed that they have forgiven him.

"I am a changed person now, living a positive life," said Ketshabile, who works at Khulisa. "Meeting my victim, Mrs. Joan, has made me a bit stronger, given me a concrete end. It has helped me forgive myself.

"If I could visit the van Blerks every day, I would," he said.

Khulisa was founded seven years ago by van Selm, 48, who was running a marketing company. One day she went into a prison, and it changed her. "I saw a wealth of potential and saw such opportunity with young people, who were screaming for help," she said.

She formed the nongovernmental organization and began developing programs to help rehabilitate prisoners. She sees her work as a different kind of marketing.

"What I'm doing now is marketing hope, marketing programs to the government and hopefully an international audience, and marketing rehabilitation to offenders," she said. "My experience is gained from making huge mistakes and learning from them, and continuing to learn."

Khulisa -- it means "something that is growing" in Zulu -- now has 30 employees, most of them offenders who have graduated from one of the organization's programs. It also has drawn upon specialists such as criminologists for help. So far, the organization has worked with more than 1,000 offenders. It recently contacted 67 graduates of its programs who were out of jail, and found 54 of them were in what they called "self-sustaining situations" -- either working for companies or working for themselves.

It represents an 80 percent prevention rate so far of a relapse back to crime. That stands in sharp contrast to research in South Africa indicating that 85 percent of released prisoners relapse into crime within six months of getting out of jail. One of the keys to the program is finding jobs for offenders. Van Selm often takes offenders directly to companies to plead for work.

"If someone is out on parole, and they go back home and don't have anything to do, what are they going to do? Go out and commit more crime," said Tsakane Mangwane-Bok, projects manager at the Embassy of Finland in Pretoria, one of Khulisa's funders. "They are taking those young people out of a situation they were in and trying to renew their lives."

Mangwane-Bok said the program is "about giving people a second chance in life. We know people do wrong things, but if they are really prepared to change their lifestyle, they can stay out of crime and be proper role models. If you grew up in a crowded township in South Africa and you're a criminal, you dress up well, you have a fancy car, and kids think, `Why should I go to school?' They are seen as a role model, but actually they are not."

Van Selm hopes to win a major contract from the South African government next year to work with juvenile offenders; a new child justice bill before parliament may force the state to place about 50,000 children in programs outside jail, she said. But her efforts to get state funding for adult programs have failed. "Right up front, in every conversation, they say, `We've got no money,' " she said.

Next year, she will take several former prisoners to London, where they will appear before the British government and charity groups, in hopes her ideas will take root. She also dreams of bringing the programs to the United States.

At the van Blerk home, just 10 minutes from the center of Johannesburg, Joan van Blerk sat on her porch next to Ketshabile.

"You know," she told him, "people tell me all the time that I was crazy to do this. But I am really happy I did it. I have put it all behind me."

John Donnelly can be reached at donnelly@globe.com.