In the summer of 1996, five minutes before the news broadcast began, a telephone rang in a South African television studio. The producer on duty, Roger Lucey, picked up the receiver. Lucey had been one of South Africa's leading singers, until the secret police destroyed his career - and his life - because he opposed the apartheid regime.

"Roger, Paul speaking," said the voice on the phone.

Lucey was enraged: He was certain one of his friends was playing a practical joke - pretending to be Paul Erasmus, the secret police agent who led the campaign against him, and the first to admit his crimes in the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Lucey vehemently cursed the man before suddenly realizing it was his former arch enemy.

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"Paul, how are you?" he said. "Fine. And you?" After a brief exchange, Lucey made a decision: To forgive. His life was immediately transformed, as was the life of his former oppressor.



Copenhagen, 2002. "The humanity within us refuses to permit us to do to others what they did to us." That concept guided the TRC's call for forgiveness - rather than punishment - to heal the trauma of violence and persecution.

At the second Freemuse - 3rd World Conference on Music and Censorship to promote musical freedom of expression around the world - attendees saw that message implemented before their eyes. Lucey and Erasmus sat on stage, publicly telling their story for the first time. Erasmus described enlisting in the secret police, and his assignment to bring down the popular singer and freedom fighter seated to his left. They had considered assassinating Lucey, but rejected this in favor of ordering Erasmus to hound him until he was destroyed. Lucey described the deterioration of his career following unruly behavior during his performances, threats against his life, unexplained cancellations by club owners, and the sudden disappearance of his records from store shelves.

Erasmus said he and his colleagues injected tear gas into the ventilation system where Lucey and his band, the Zub-Zub Marauders, were performing, dispersing the audience; employed threats and violence to force record companies, stores and clubs to drop Lucey from their programs; and beat those who attended Lucey's concerts.

"I thought it a shame, because he was so talented and I liked his music, but for me he was another 'red' we had to destroy. I believed what they taught us - that rock and roll, black music and jazz were part of an international plot to control the hearts and souls of white youth."

Lucey said his career disintegrated to the point where he stopped recording and performing, and described how his last effort to revive it, by disguising himself as a woman, was also exposed. He was finally forced to abandon music. Impoverished and depressed, he became addicted to drugs and lost his family. Despite all that, the process of forgiveness is complete: Lucey's profound friendship with his former persecutor is visible. Throughout the conference, they were always together.



Istanbul, 2006. Before returning to the stage of the third Freemuse conference last month in Istanbul, Lucey and Erasmus explained how the whole thing started.

"As a boy, I befriended the son of a black woman who cleaned houses in the neighborhood. My father wasn't a political man or an intellectual - he was an artist and an eccentric type. He didn't disapprove of the friendship," Lucey explained. "We grew up together, and like many oppressed people, my friend was involved in things that weren't exactly legit. I was attracted to that and joined him on trips to his home, 40 minutes by bus, and I found myself in different worlds that none of us white children had ever seen.

"Those were the townships, black towns and villages. They frightened us. They told us they were crawling with terrorists and communists who wanted to annihilate South Africa. It was forbidden to stay there, by law, and a white caught in a township could be in terrible trouble. I was a boy. It took a while before I began to think, hey, something is wrong here. I saw wonderful humanity that did not fit what they taught me."

Lucey chose music despite the fire it drew from the totalitarian regime. He attracted huge crowds and did not limit himself to abstract lyrics. He sang riveting songs like "Lungile Tabalaza," in which he candidly described the death of a young, black man who "fell" from the fifth floor of the secret police building in Johannesburg.

"I always believed that musicians and artists were obligated to reflect reality in the most sincere way. That's what pushed me to be a musician at a young age," he said. "I still believe that, more than ever."

Sitting in his hotel room in front of a laptop, Erasmus went over pictures from his past that depict terrifying scenes of violence and death. At 50, Erasmus is two years younger than Lucey. He told how he chose a path that led him to pursue the singer.

"No, I didn't want to be a policeman, at all," he responded when asked if he enlisted at will. "When I finished school at age 17, the army drafted me for three years, to the artillery corps, at the edge of the country, and I was supposed to be separated from my girlfriend for a year and a half until my first leave. Then I heard there was an alternative - to enlist in the police for only a year. I planned to do it quickly and finish.

"But then June 16 came [the 1976 Soweto Uprising]. The entire country went up in flames. It was a primal event that changed my life, like many other young people like me. I was certain I was doing the right thing, saving my homeland from the communism that threatened to destroy and control it. All means were just.

"I never gave apartheid a second thought. It was completely natural to me," Erasmus continued. "And when I grew up, the war against the blacks was not related to race, as far as I was concerned. I believed they represented communism and were threatening the integrity of our nation. As security officials, our responses worsened over the years. We became terrorists ourselves. We solved problems, like Roger, in our own ways, without arrests, trials or publicity. It was a secret war. Only later did I realize we were subjected to brainwashing - all of us."

Erasmus became the secret police official responsible for sabotage and disinformation. He described daily acts of assault, arson, torture and poisoning. His unit, the State Security Council Arm (Stratcom), also slandered leaders of the African National Congress, claiming they were secret agents of the apartheid regime. Their comrades then executed some of them by "necklacing," putting a tire full of gasoline around their necks and setting it on fire.

Erasmus was also personally responsible for a series of libelous claims against Winnie Mandela. He maintains that members of the British Parliament, senior American government officials and international journalists assisted him. Mandela was accused of adultery, drug addiction, plotting to assassinate opposition members and finally, the murder of Stompi Sepei in 1988.

"I ruined Winnie's life, and her marriage to Nelson," Erasmus said. "But she forgave me, and even 'adopted' my daughter and gave her her wedding ring as a present."



Lucey and Erasmus began to tell their tale in the Bilgi University auditorium, in Istanbul.

"Only the understanding of what caused Paul to do all that to me, what motivated him, liberated me and freed me from the rage I carried within me," Lucey said. "Thanks to him, I got my life back. My daughter renewed her relations with me. She wanted to get to know me again."

"The process was the same for me," said Erasmus. "I also lost my wife, my children. Only recently did my son return, and I started a new friendship with my ex-wife. For me, confession was healing, and thanks to that, I started sleeping at night. But after I started speaking out, former colleagues threatened to kill my family and attempted to kill me: My body is full of shrapnel and scars. They used the same methods I had implemented. I developed enormous hatred for them and the entire system that led me to become what I was. I don't believe there is such a thing as a 'natural born killer,' like they said about me. Society makes people be like that. Man is not born evil. It took me many years to forgive them, to get rid of that hatred."



They joined the audience to watch scenes from "Stopping the Music," a documentary telling their story produced by the Freemuse nonprofit organization.

Lucey: "Now, we travel throughout the country with the film, conducting workshops for high school students. Many children have no idea what happened in South Africa. Many were infected by their parents' prejudice. We prove that reconciliation is possible, and that forgiveness permits us to move forward with our lives."

Erasmus: "Everyone needs to know what happened in the past. It's best if it comes from a firsthand source, from those who committed the atrocities themselves. It's an important part of rebuilding bridges between races. There's a saying, 'If you don't bury the past, it will bury you.' Perhaps that's true, but we should only bury the past after we come to terms with it."

He described how his colleagues disappeared after the fall of apartheid. Some became alcoholics, and many committed suicide.

"After I got my son back and recovered from drugs and alcohol, I found I needed to help them, persuade them to speak out, tell their stories, confess - I am one of the lucky few who had that opportunity."

Both men said many are stuck in denial.

Lucey: "A well-known joke says today you can't find a white man in Africa who supported apartheid. But in my day, all my musician friends were not willing to integrate. They told me to let it be - politics and music don't go together. People like that now revise their biographies to say they opposed the regime, and people who had a very good time and got rich abroad claim that they were in the diaspora. Two things saved us: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the constitution, in which we decided to abolish capital punishment."

Each of the two men is now writing a book. Erasmus' contains chapters that may create a stir. He reveals a connection between apartheid and British governments, and their collaboration in crimes including murder, arson and oppression; how former president De Klerk established a secret "third army" to engage in mass murder; and how police used human subjects in Namibia to train, abandoning all human restraint while engaging in unbridled mass murder and rape. "After the first kill, it all gets easier," he confessed.

Lucey described how he suffered from the boycott of South Africa. "I couldn't perform in England because of my nationality, despite my opposition to the regime. In America, recording companies broke off contact when they heard my record sales were nonexistent. They didn't understand that the reason was the boycott in my country. They refused to invest in me.

"Now times have changed. We don't throw people in jail without a trial, and there are no cases of death during detention. Nevertheless, I still try to express reality in my songs, because many things have not changed, like poverty and suffering. In my 20s, I could permit myself to indulge in love songs. Unfortunately, the older I get, the less love there is to sing about."

He closed the meeting with a song: "Like a runaway on a desert island... / It's so easy to deceive / It's so easy to believe..." In the darkness, the audience could hardly hold back its tears.