Forgiveness Redefined: A young woman's journey towards forgiving the apartheid assassin who brutally murdered her father

By Candice Mama

Forgiveness Redefined is Candice Mama's honest and healing story. It tells how she found ways to deal with the death of her father, Glenack Masilo Mama, and to forgive the notorious apartheid assassin Eugene de Kock, the man responsible for his brutal murder.
We follow Candice's journey of discovering how her father died, how this affected her and how she battled the demons of depression before the age of sixteen. But most importantly, we follow her journey towards beating the odds and rising above her heartbreaks.
Candice Mama is today still under the age of 30, but has been named as one of Vogue Paris' most inspiring women alongside glittering names such as Michelle Obama. She has taken backstage selfies with music crooner Seal and travels all over the world to talk about her journey. This bubbly, inspiring young author tells how she shed some of the worst layers of grief and became an inspiration for others.
We learn about her perplexing, unconventional childhood, her search for identity, and the beautiful bond she formed, posthumously, with a father she never had the opportunity to get to know in person.
She also tells, in her own words, about the life-changing encounter between her family and her father's killer.
Candice tenderly opens up about the result of the trauma of her father's death on her entire family, and meeting her mother for the first time at the age of four. She tells about the confusing, yet fascinating, dynamics that later unfolded as she discovered pieces of herself, rediscovered relationships with her own family and came to forgiveness and understanding.
This book serves as inspiration for other young – and older – people to look at their own stories through different lenses. Candice's experiences are not unique, and she offers healing thoughts to others who suffered similar trauma by sharing the details of her own story.
Forgiveness Redefined is a touching, personal story by a young woman who learned too early about pain, loss and rejection – but who also learned how to overcome those burdens and live joyfully.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tracey McDonald Publishers
• Release date: Oct 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9780639992815

Book preview

First published by Tracey McDonald Publishers, 2019

Suite No. 53, Private Bag X903, Bryanston, South Africa, 2021

www.traceymcdonaldpublishers.com

Copyright © Candice Mama, 2019

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-0-6399928-0-8

e-ISBN (ePUB) 978-0-6399928-1-5

Text design and typesetting by Patricia Crain, Empressa

Editing by Lia Labuschagne

Cover design by Ron Olivier, incynq solutions

Digital conversion by Wouter Reinders

To every person who has battled

and come out stronger.

PROLOGUE

In some way or another, life will crush you and challenge you beyond what you believe to be your bearable limit.

We will fall, we will fail, but we will rise.

For someone who is a couple years shy of 30, I have lived through a lot. I didn’t know just how much until I told the man I was seeing. I saw his face change so many times during my very brief overview that I realised I needed to pull it back, because he was shocked at the outline of my life.

I recall that after about ten minutes of my run-through, he stopped mid putting on his socks, and said, ‘Holy shit, Cands!’

In this book I decided to tell my story from my point of view. I fully realise that two people can sit in the same room, experience the exact same thing, yet walk out with two completely different versions of reality.

I am also aware that memory is not the most reliable source of information. Small details will change the further removed a memory becomes, and memories are susceptible to change once new information is introduced to the subconscious mind.

Having said all of this, I am petrified to let the world get to know all of me, and not just the beautifully polished aspects I have worked so hard to showcase. I am so happy being the positive, upbeat, forgiveness girl, and I am so indescribably proud of myself for being able to be her – because for a long time in my life, as you will come to read, I was anything but happy or forgiving.

The journey of writing one’s story is a complicated one, as there’s no linear way to format the detours of our existence, the yin and yang of every moment we experience. This will be true for each person reading this: you have a story which is deeply complex and filled with contrasts, overcoming and challenging the fibre of who you are.

I do find though that much of life can be summed up by the following quote from Steve Jobs:

‘You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.’

Reflecting on my life through this book from a place of healing, has allowed me to see exactly how the traumas we experience manifest themselves in every area of our lives, whether we consciously realise it or not.

Our lives unfold in the following areas, at times simultaneously:

Physically

Our health

Mentally

Our beliefs, thoughts, mental health and processing

Emotionally

Our relationships with others and ourselves

Spiritually

Our purpose on earth – what we innately want to bring to our immediate or surrounding environments

In this book I do not want to reflect on my life from a psychological point of view – although some of its aspects may be intertwined with my story – but rather from my own lived reality.

I have found that most of my healing did not occur in a therapy room – which I do not wish to discredit – but rather from, at times, the crushing reality of my own mortality, regardless of my age. At times my healing came from encountering stories from people who had experienced unfavourable circumstances, but mostly it came from trial and error and from the acknowledgement that my wound was hurting all those around me.

In many ways I have written this book for the younger version of myself to assist not only in sharing my story, but in giving permission to those who feel that they have to stand alone to know how to identify how their pain evolves and affects them on a daily basis, that their story has legitimacy, and most importantly that they are always strong enough to rise again.

You don’t have to merely survive the past; you have the capacity to use it to fuel, and propel, you into thriving in the future.

You are not a victim of the events that have happened, or to the person or people who have caused you pain. Do you know how I know this to be a fact? Because you and I are still standing, breathing and fighting.

What was designed to break you, built you, because you decided to let it build you. Allowing that is no small feat.

CHAPTER ONE

PAIN IN MY HEART

I tossed and turned, trying to shake off the uneasiness that suddenly snuck up on me. Sleep had been my trusted ally and rarely betrayed me – which made my restlessness even more unnerving.

I took a deep breath and kicked off my blanket, attributing my sleeplessness to the sticky summer night. The moonlight shone through the small opening in my curtains, creating shadows on the wall. I focused on the slight summer breeze changing the shapes of the shadows.

Becoming entranced, I closed my eyes before a sharp pain hit the left side of my chest, taking my breath away. Uncontrollable tears rolled down my face as my heart rate rapidly increased and the left side of my body felt paralysed with pain.

Rolling off the side of my bed I staggered, clutching my heart, fighting for air, towards my mother’s bedroom.

Thoughts raced through my mind: ‘I am an athlete, I’m young and I eat relatively healthily. I can’t be having a heart attack.’

Gasping for air I stumbled into my mother’s room, out of breath and clutching my chest.

‘I think I’m having a heart attack,’ I stammered.

My mom, who had worked in the medical aid industry for most of her professional life, started asking me questions.

‘What does it feel like?’ she whispered half asleep, rubbing her eyes and trying to adjust to what was happening and what she was seeing.

‘Pain in my heart…’ I said, unable to explain the constricting feeling overwhelming my body as my heart continued to race and my breath became shorter.

‘I think I am going to die,’ I sighed out as I bent over and clutched my knees.

She had already got out of bed, and walked to her closet, pulling on jeans and grabbing a jacket.

Almost as though I had zoned out, I barely deciphered my mother’s hurried tone and words: ‘You’re not dying. Go to the car!’

As I began stumbling to the car, fear set in and expanded as though it were a virus. One thought breeding numerous other thoughts, all running rampant in my mind. The more I tried to calm my mind, the more it seemed as though the probability of dying was my actual reality.

I was no stranger to the idea of death. I had contemplated it, danced around it, avoided it and even planned for it on numerous occasions. However, no matter how much you know you have wanted to die in the past and possibly even in the present, when the Grim Reaper actually knocks at your door unexpectedly, there is an almost immediate fight response that you cannot control.

I liken the mind to a computer system – when a virus hits the hard drive, its default response is to override the system and attempt to reboot itself.

I came to understand why it was physically impossible to kill yourself by holding your breath under water or using your hands to strangle yourself, because the human mind is designed for survival. Even if you are your own enemy, you cannot convince your subconscious mind to submit itself to death, even in the final moments when it seems like a very real possibility.

My thoughts ran between ‘I’m dying, oh God I’m really dying,’ and ‘I’ll never be able to fall in love or have children.’

That latter thought surprised me. My deepest desire had always been, and in many ways remains, to truly experience deep and authentic love and to have children. I do not recall ever not wanting that. Somehow the possibility of me not being able to ever have that became gut-wrenchingly painful.

Unbeknownst to me, tears had continued streaming down my face. I was crying not so much for the physical pain I was experiencing, but the inability to tie up the loose ends I started to feel I had. My spaghetti strap tank top and boxer shorts absorbed my tears.

The car door slammed as the car revved out of the garage and my mother kept her gaze between me and the road, her hands pale as she gripped the steering wheel tightly, while the night sky danced on her face and the stillness of the night amplified the moment. Music played quietly in the vehicle as the sound of the car’s engine racing down the road drowned it out.

As we began approaching the hospital, my mother broke the intensity of the car ride by asking me yes or no questions.

‘Is the pain still there?’

I nodded.

‘I’m going to need you to answer me with words, because I can’t look at you and drive at the same time,’ she said agitatedly, with a bite of panic in her tone.

‘Yes.’

I leaned my body into my knees, attempting to self-soothe.

‘We’re almost there. Which side is in pain?’

‘By my heart.’

In between my responses confusion set in, my tears refusing to cease.

‘But you wanted to die,’ I think to myself.

‘Not like this…’

A full dialogue further unfolded in my mind, leading me down various avenues. Before I knew it, I saw myself at my own funeral, a sea of people dressed in black everywhere – all crying, especially my younger brother. I saw my school mates around my grave and my casket being lowered into the ground, symbolising to everyone watching how fleeting and fickle life is. Youth had been a traitor. It had promised us or tricked us into believing that we were in charge of our own mortality. That death was reserved for the old, greying and wrinkled. Never us. Death was the constant companion of the old. But here I was – the anomaly.

I knew people would go home and recite the words ‘Life is short!’, followed by a promise to themselves never to take it for granted. However, as the tragedy became a distant memory, they would slowly go back to how their lives had always been, and forget that death is actually a companion to us all.

Finally, we pulled into the emergency bay. I am not aware of whether I walked or was wheeled into the doctor’s office.

I was met by commotion and nurses all around me. The doctor asked me questions to try and identify exactly what I was going through, and I do not recall what transpired next after being given an injection.

Later I opened my eyes, feeling both rested and as if my body had been put through a washing machine, aching in small places.

My throat felt slightly swollen and dry. I looked around the dimly-lit, sterile room which emitted a feeling of cold detachment.

I was the only person in the ward. The curtains for the other three single beds hung open.

I shuffled and placed my pillow against the bedrest to support my back as I sat up, trying to recollect the moments before getting to the hospital. I licked my lips, attempting to wet my mouth and get rid of my dry, cracked lips and ease the irritation in my throat.

‘Good God, how the hell did I end up here?’

The vision of my funeral meshed together with the palpitations that had snuck up on me in my sacred place. My bed, my bedroom.

No matter how much darkness I was in, my bed was Switzerland. It was a no-man’s-land. It was where I laid down the weapons of war that relentlessly waged in my mind. My pillow and I had a beautiful, almost holy, relationship.

I had sworn to reserve shedding my tears in the bath or in the shower where they would merge with the water that cleansed and cocooned my pain. And my pillow had taken on the role of allowing me to sneak away from my thoughts, if only for a while, every night.

‘But last night had been different…’

I felt something that I should have regarded as a milestone, having been devoid of emotions for what felt like an eternity; yet had only been a few months.

I remember watching a YouTube video where the man preached that hatred is the worst of human emotions – something he referred to as low vibrational, destructive and a cause of suicide.

At the time I nodded as I attempted to contextualise and redeem my own anger and hatred. It was only when I arrived at the door of apathy that I disagreed with his summation – not entirely, but enough to know that at least for me anger and hatred had not been the road that paved my suicidal mind; instead it was the rage that burned me up, coursing through my veins and rushing to my brain.

Was the very fuel for my athleticism the desire to explode at someone? Would it propel my body forward at races, looking for every sign of