When Candice Mama was nine years old, she secretly opened a page in a book she wasn't meant to look at. The picture she saw there revealed something terrible - the dead body of her murdered father. But years later Candice went on to meet and forgive the killer - a man known as "Prime Evil", Eugene de Kock.
"Where did the girl go from Soweto, where did the girl go from Soweto ..."
Whenever The Girl from Soweto by Clarence Carter plays on the radio, 29-year-old Candice Mama smiles - she knows this was one of her father's favorite songs.
Yet she never got to see him sing or dance along to it.
Glenack Masilo Mama died when Candice was just eight months old, so she spent her childhood piecing together an image of him from other people's memories.
"He was someone who really loved life," says Candice. "He was someone who was so just in the moment. If he heard a good song, no matter where he was, he was going to jump up and dance."
Candice was born in South Africa in 1991, as the apartheid system - enforcing strict segregation of races - was slowly being dismantled.
Her mother, Sandra, was mixed race. Glenack, her father, was black, and a member of the Pan Africanist Congress - a group struggling against apartheid alongside the African National Congress (ANC), but opposed to the ANC's principle of equal rights for all nationalities in South Africa.
Candice always knew that her father had been murdered. She even knew the name of the murderer - Eugene de Kock, the notorious commander of the Vlakplaas police unit, a squad responsible for the torture and murder of black anti-apartheid activists. But her mother had spared her the horrifying details.
It was at the age of nine that she found out some of these details herself, after noticing that a book called Into the Heart of Darkness - Confessions of Apartheid's Assassins - had a powerful effect on her mother's visitors.
"Every time people would come over to the house she would ask me to go get this book, and people would cry and I'd hear screaming," Candice says. I'd hear all these odd reactions, or at least what I considered odd at the time, and I just thought to myself, 'I know my dad is in this book, but I want to know, why is he inciting these reactions. ? ''
One day she overheard the page that they turned to.
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"So I told myself, 'OK, when I get the opportunity I'm going to turn to this page and just see.'"
About a week later, when her mother went shopping, Candice climbed on a chair and reached up high to take the book from the top of a cupboard in her mother's bedroom.
She opened it to the page she had heard mentioned, and saw the horrific picture of a burnt body - her father - clutching the steering wheel of a car.
"In my mind, immediately I connected the fact that this was my father, this was how he died and he [Eugene de Kock] is the person who did it. And because I knew what I did was wrong, that I wasn't. allowed to open that book, I held it within myself. "
Not saying anything to her mother, Candice says the resentment within her began to "grow and become something else". But her desire to find out more about her father only increased.
"I found a picture album of his," says Candice. "I saw his pictures and his personality and quotes that he would just stick into this book. He just seemed so enlightened, especially for someone living in the situation he was living in."
"One thing he said was, 'Just because you're black doesn't mean that you can't get ahead in life.' I always find it so fascinating, realizing that this man at 25 had all this knowledge within himself, and I would have wanted to see what became of him. ''
ut the pain and anger Candice was bottling up inside herself eventually began to affect her health.
One night, at the age of 16, she was rushed to hospital with a pain in her chest so severe it was feared she was having a heart attack.
The following day the doctor sat myself and my mum down and he said, 'You know you weren't having a heart attack, but in my over 20-something years of experience, I have never seen stress symptoms so severe in someone your age, '' Candice says.
"He started pointing at all these different things that were manifesting in my body, all these ulcers, all these symptoms, and he said, 'I don't know how to tell you this, but your body's killing you, and if you don 't change something I think you're really going to pass on.' ''
Candice acknowledged there was a problem. "I was not happy, healthy or even living to be honest," she says.
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