APARTHEID AFTERMATH: Can you ever find a way to forgive?'' asks Gillian Slovo, whose mother was killed by a letter bomb.

"He has such a strong sense of family," she says.

He is Nelson Mandela. She is novelist Gillian Slovo, 49, the middle of the three daughters of Ruth First and Joe Slovo, anti-apartheid freedom fighters in South Africa who paid a big price for their politics.

First was killed Aug. 17, 1982, by a letter bomb sent to her in exile in Mozambique. Joe Slovo, once South Africa's Public Enemy Number 1, died of cancer in 1995 while he was Minister of Housing in Mandela's African National Congress government.

In fact, the last word Joe Slovo spoke was to Mandela. The country's president had come the morning he died, sat by his bed and chatted softly. As he got up to leave, he rested his cheek against the ailing man's forehead and said, ``Goodbye, Joe." And Joe replied, ``Cheers."

When he died that night, a message was sent to Mandela, who later told them he'd telephoned everyone he could think of, including ANC secretary Cyril Ramaphosa and (now South Africa's president) Thabo Mbeki before he got a lift to the Cape Town cottage to comfort Gillian and her sisters. That's when Mandela said he was sorry it was the children of his comrades who are paying the price for their parent's battles.

When Gillian Slovo was in Toronto recently to promote her 10th book, she readily acknowledged South Africa still shapes her life and therefore her work.

That is especially true for her latest book, a work of fiction called Red Dust. She calls the novel — about the Truth Commission moseying into a small South African town — "a spaghetti Western updated." The story evolved from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as well as her own experience of witnessing the killers of her mother seek amnesty.

``I don't think you can ever be quite prepared for what it's like to sit in the same room, in the same space ... as your mother's killers and listen while they present the reasons that they should never be brought to justice for her murder," Slovo says.

The mastermind behind the murder plot was Craig Williamson, one of South Africa's most hated men and certainly one of its busiest in the days when secret police roamed the country. When the bomb-maker heard Williamson was applying for amnesty (and naming names), he too appeared before the commission and confessed.

In novel Red Dust, Truth Commission enters small town

But it was Williamson who captured Slovo's attention.

``With Williamson, it became obvious he hated us. He hated my mother and he killed her," Slovo says.

She was shocked. She had thought it wasn't personal, but about politics, about a war.

She was also horrified to realize that attending the commission hearings created a strange, repugnant intimacy between her and her mother's killers. She got to know them so well, it was as if they'd been on familiar terms for years.

That made her think about "the strength of the bonds that tie old enemies together" and even though she told the story of her parents in a 1997 book of non-fiction (Every Secret Thing), she reverted to fiction to try and understand all the ramifications a Truth and Reconciliation Commission can have.

``Can you ever find a way to forgive? Is it possible to look (killers and torturers) in the eye and say, `I forgive'?," she says. ``There is so much conflict in the world. How do you live with peace?"

She says she's awed by what she sees now in South Africa and in Mandela, her father figure.

``He really has moral probity (that) you don't see. He really is a wonder," she says. ``In certain ways, South African society is the same. Its only hope is that the black society is so ready to forgive."

Many South African whites find it hard to believe the blacks can forgive them, they feel so much guilt, she adds. After years of hearing the details of white-on-black brutality, torture and murder (the commission began in 1995), South Africans don't want to hear any more, she says.

But Williamson, the man who ordered the murder of her mother, was granted amnesty. Slovo and her sisters are appealing that decision.

"I think it is better to know the truth," she says. "But knowing the truth doesn't end it."