Thirty years after South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) held its first hearings on 15 April 1996, families of apartheid-era victims say they remain without justice, with hundreds of cases referred to prosecutors never pursued. The struggle of families like those of the Cradock Four — four anti-apartheid activists abducted and killed by security police in 1985 — has come to symbolise the commission's unfulfilled promise; though the killers confessed at TRC hearings and were denied amnesty, none were ever prosecuted, and a third inquest into the murders only opened in June 2024. Critics argue that successive African National Congress governments, led by former presidents Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, effectively buried TRC referrals in exchange for protecting ANC members from scrutiny — an allegation both men deny — leaving victims' families to conclude that the landmark process, while a powerful moment of public truth-telling, ultimately failed to deliver accountability.