That title is figurative - South African nights are generally short, since it's not that far from the equator. But I just saw the film LONG NIGHT'S JOURNEY INTO DAY at a celebratory* weekend at Berlin's House of World Cultures (next to the Chancellor's "washing machine" palace).

It's from 2000 and documents the TRC, which at that time was still going on. A profound attempt at bringing closure, if not always justice, to an ethically ravaged country. (And I didn't forget the "n" there!)

If you've actually lived there (I have, over a decade) and recognise some of the faces as ones that appeared on TV or in newspapers at the time the murders happened, it's heart-wrenching to watch at times. Even should you not have.

If we're all looking at Ferguson or the East Ukraine or elsewhere big boys are playing with guns, watch this documentary and be reminded of how much is destroyed when one human life - with all its complex development up to that moment, all the other people hitched to it more or less tightly - is trodden, shot or stabbed into bloody oblivion.

Although it isn't fashionable nowadays in Africa and elsewhere to do so, I greatly admire the idea of the TRC. But, watching this movie, the TRC does seem to have been ahead of its time by far.

• Tutu, a great talker, but also a very spirited pacifist fighter for what he believes in, seems to be on a mission of bright optimism, removed from the drudge (mostly) of the survivors.
• The perpetrators are essentially trying to save their skins. One was convinced until the end he was doing what was right for "his people".
• The female commissioners were friendly and wise, but in the end probably too aloof.
• The surviving mothers were the true forgivers, although in the final scenes even they show how deeply divisive racism makes everyone involved - they kept asking the black cop, who'd helped shoot their "terrorist" sons, how he could have done this to his "own blood".

I suppose the visual divides humans set up will be with us for a long time yet. Woman/man, dark-haired/blond-haired, dark-skinned/light-skinned... who cares?! In the end, we all do. We fight racism with racism, all the while spreading violence. Which breeds more violence.

We can probably forget the less visible differences ever really becoming as hotly contested: E.g. education, esp. of the political(ly neutral) kind. Even those that are visible in the clothes & environs of the protagonists of these sad stories: E.g. economic elitism vs. poverty.

In the end the feminist Iris Films, who made this foursome of clips on as many TRC cases (a selection from many thousands), managed to point me at one divide, which seems believable: (I misquote Orwell's 1984...) If there's any hope for the future, it lies in the peace-bringing women.

Daughters, journalists, commissioners (perhaps even one or other top politician, with numbers finally increasing!), mothers. Crying for beloved countries. But then getting up, hugging the bloodied once-big boys, moving on.