COUNTRY OF MY SKULL
Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa.
By Antjie Krog.
403 pp. New York:
Times Books/Random House. $27.50.

FAULT LINES
Journeys Into the New South Africa.
By David Goodman.
Photographs by Paul Weinberg.
400 pp. Berkeley:
University of California Press. $29.95.

outh Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which began its hearings in April 1996, was supposed to be part of the country's moral cleansing and to carry it beyond the culture of atrocity. It was also intended to compensate the victims of apartheid violence and bring some of the perpetrators to account.

For two years the hearings were followed almost daily by members of the press, including Antjie Krog, who reported for the South African Broadcasting Corporation. ''Country of My Skull'' is her account of the commission's work and the effect on her of the many testimonies she heard. During those two years, whatever the intentions of the hearings, South Africa -- and Krog along with it -- remained transfixed by its own capacity for violence. Meanwhile, the question of victims' compensation remained unresolved, and, though most of the commission's work concluded at the end of 1998, its Amnesty Committee, which received nearly 8,000 petitions from applicants on all sides of the conflict, remained sitting.

For reconciliation to succeed, a lot of criminals would have to walk free, but this can't have been easy to countenance for the victims of a security officer like Capt. Jeffrey Benzien, who was pardoned in February of this year. In July 1997, confronted by the judges of the commission and a witness from the African National Congress whom he had tortured, Benzien testified that he could not recall whether he had put electrodes on the victim's nose or genitals or rectum -- I could have used any one of those methods.'' Krog does not cite this evidence of casual amnesia in her book. Yet in the scene she goes on to describe, Benzien's memory is as clear as a bell.

Tony Yengeni, another of Benzien's victims, whom he had subjected to ''the wet bag'' -- a form of suffocation torture -- requires his former captor to demonstrate the technique to the judges. Benzien simulates the torture, squatting over a black ''victim'' whose head is shrouded in a bag, as the photojournalists jostle for angles. Krog calls it ''one of the most loaded and disturbing images in the life of the Truth Commission.''

By stage-managing this graphic re-enactment, Yengeni, now an eminent A.N.C. politician, seeks both to come to terms with his interrogation and to shame his interrogator. Benzien was stung, but moments later he took revenge by recalling how quickly Yengeni had given away his comrades. ''Do you remember, Mr. Yengeni, that within 30 minutes you betrayed Jennifer Schreiner? Do you remember pointing out Bongani Jonas to us on the highway?''

Benzien's retort, Krog tells us, ''shatters Yengeni's political profile right across the country.'' At the same time, she suspects that it is a moment of relief. ''Yengeni sits there -- as if begging this man to say it all, as if betrayal or cowardice can only make sense to him in the presence of this man.''

The exchange between Benzien and his victim shows the commission in its most commendable light. The truth is told, brutal symbolic blows are struck, and if reconciliation between tormentor and victim is minimal, the latter at least is closer to some private settling of accounts. It's as if the very word ''victim'' falls away from him, becoming a technicality in much the same way as the term ''spouse'' is shed by the petitioner at the end of a divorce suit. ''A torturer's success,'' Krog writes, ''depends on his intimate knowledge of the human psyche'' -- and a morbid intimacy, a travesty of marriage, exists between torturer and tortured during long periods of interrogation. Yengeni got his divorce -- at a price.

The commission's ideal was to preside over the far messier separation between apartheid and the ''new South Africa,'' and then to steer the parties toward a healthier arrangement. In the service of this national agenda, ''reconciliation'' is best understood not as a truce between individual victims and perpetrators but as an acknowledgment of the systemic cruelty meted out year after year to tens of thousands. For every Jeffrey Benzien who testified -- and there were many -- the injustice of the past was acknowledged, which is why it was important that Antjie Krog and her colleagues were always on the press benches.

At its best, the Truth Commission combined the techniques of therapy and the Christian rite of confession. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who headed the commission, became for Krog a guiding light, the key figure in the process. His authority was grounded in the simple belief that ''you can only be human in a humane society. If you live with hatred and revenge in your heart, you dehumanize not only yourself, but your community.''

The shadow lurking beneath the surface, as Krog recognizes, was politics. Amnesty was not just a lofty expression of Nelson Mandela's capacity to forgive. It was a vital compromise reached by the A.N.C. and its white National Party counterparts in the negotiations that paved the way for the 1994 elections. The idea was to avoid a descent into vengeance when midnight struck. It would allow the A.N.C. too, to consign its own human rights abuses to the past -- mostly crimes against its rank and file in military camps outside the country during the liberation struggle.

Amnesty, in the final formulation, was available to anyone who gave a full accounting of his misdeeds and could show that these were politically motivated. The knowledge that civil or criminal prosecution remained a possibility led many to apply -- not just state security staff or killers from the largely Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party, but township supporters of the A.N.C. guilty of many atrocities against suspected informers and ''sellouts.''

In her most lucid chapter, Krog shows how the A.N.C. played the party card against the commission, insisting on vetting members' applications and submitting a carefully edited package to the Amnesty Committee. South Africa's former President F. W. de Klerk, too, used his appearance not as an occasion to come clean but as an appeal to his National Party constituency: ''De Klerk isn't there to look the past in the eye,'' she writes. ''He's there to minimize the damage and to play on the sentiments of his voters.''

The commission was never a moral or therapeutic instrument of transition. Politics was always its underlying ''truth,'' while ''reconciliation'' was a way of short-circuiting the dangers of a ''victor's justice'' and the possibility of further conflict. Indeed, amnesty has led many former detainees and bereaved families to argue that there is no justice of any kind.

Yet as Frank Chikane, the head of the South African Council of Churches, points out to David Goodman in ''Fault Lines,'' without amnesty none of the killers would have come forward, ''and you'd depend on investigative capacity to find out'' what they did. South Africa does not have that capacity. In his journey through post-apartheid South Africa, Goodman, a freelance journalist, discovers that justice is also absent in the social and economic life of the country. He is interested in the post-apartheid struggles now coalescing around wealth creation. ''Fault Lines'' is prone to numbing cliche: the smiles of welcoming Africans are ''broad,'' the landscape ''stretches for miles'' and -- wouldn't you know it? -- South Africa is a ''land of wrenching contrast.''

But there is careful, sympathetic reporting here about the growing distance between organized labor and the A.N.C. Goodman also shows very clearly how black business can run aground on the militancy of the old, anti-apartheid labor unions.

He worries, above all, that ''a black aristocracy has ascended to power,'' and that ''a black elite is rushing in to replace a white elite with little concern for distributing the wealth.'' Yet capital flight, driven by the fear of wage-led inflation in unionized sectors, presents as many dangers as the ''self-imposed structural adjustment program,'' as one union leader calls it, that Mandela's Government is now pursuing.

''It's a delicate balance,'' the same labor leader tells Goodman. But it has the makings of an impasse, and the longer it goes on, the more precarious the ''new South Africa'' will look. National reconciliation, like majority rule, will mean very little while majority poverty threatens to engulf it.

Jeremy Harding, a senior editor at The London Review of Books, reported on South Africa from the end of the 1980's until the 1994 elections.