South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission held hearings for 30 months delving into the nation's tortured past. I was there from the first hearing to the last. On the eve of the commission's final report in 1998, The Inquirer published Apartheid's Secrets. The series focused on one episode that preoccupied the truth commission, the 1985 murder of the anti-apartheid activists known as the Cradock Four. The inquiry illustrated the strengths and the shortcomings of South Africa's effort to unearth its buried secrets. The five-part series, written in a narrative format, was the result of interviewing dozens of witnesses, attending hundreds of hours of commission hearings and examining thousands of pages of commission records. 
Cradock residents pass a wall where slogans remain from the apartheid era.  (Eric Mencher / Inquirer Staff)

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