Thirty years after a bombing intended to kill black people, South Africa still struggles to decide who must carry the cost of reconciliation.

On Christmas Eve 1996, a bomb exploded at a Shoprite in Worcester. Four people were killed, two of them children, and dozens were injured.

The attack was deliberate. It was designed to kill black and coloured shoppers. It was carried out by four young men shaped by far-right extremism and a distorted theology that cast democracy as betrayal and people of colour as enemies.

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For the country, it became another entry in the violent archive of the 1990s.

For survivors, it never became history.

This year marks 30 years since that explosion.

Years later, one of the perpetrators, Stefaans Coetzee, asked from prison to meet the victims.

Most declined.

One person said yes.

Olga Macingwane, who was injured in the blast, agreed to meet him at a correctional facility in Pretoria. That decision altered the moral trajectory of a town.

The courage that shifted the story

Olga did not go because she felt forgiving. She went because she wanted answers.

Trauma leaves unfinished questions lodged in the body:

Why us?

Did you know there were children?

What did you believe about us?

In prison, she encountered acknowledgement without excuse. Stefaans admitted his racism. He admitted hatred. He admitted that the...