By David Marchese Photo illustration by Bráulio Amado

Twenty-five years ago, after the end of apartheid, South Africa established its Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The commission’s subsequent public hearings were an attempt to provide victims of the country’s brutal white-nationalist regime a healing forum in which to tell their stories and also be told the truth — by perpetrators, often speaking in exchange for amnesty — about what happened to loved ones who were killed or disappeared. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela was a psychologist on the T.R.C. who worked to elicit testimony from victims and perpetrators, most famously Eugene de Kock, a member of the South African police force who admitted to scores of state-sanctioned murders. Her encounters with de Kock formed the basis of her critically acclaimed 2003 book, “A Human Being Died That Night,” which was adapted in 2013 into a similarly acclaimed play of the same name. In the years since the T.R.C., Gobodo-Madikizela, now 65 and a professor at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, has become a leading authority on remorse and forgiveness, two subjects that remain fraught in her country as well as our own. “Healing is not an endpoint, a goal that we reach,” she says. “We have to look at it in its complexity. But the process can’t happen on its own.”