When Tears Became the Language of Reconciliation

On April 15, 1996, Archbishop Desmond Tutu gaveled open the first hearings of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in East London's city hall. The room was thick with decades of grief. Victims of apartheid-era brutality sat just feet from the people who had tortured them, killed their children, or ordered their loved ones to disappear. Tutu, in his purple clerical shirt, kept a box of tissues on the table before him.…