“Fanie du Toit is the Executive Director of the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. He has written on, and regularly engages with, reconciliation and transitional justice processes in African countries such as South Africa, Rwanda, Kenya, Sudan, Liberia, Burundi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Uganda. He has edited two volumes and authored of a number of journal articles, shorter essays, and book chapters. He regularly contributes to media debates, both in print and on radio and television. He holds a D.Phil in Philosophy of Religion from Oxford University. Erik Doxtader is a Professor of Rhetoric at the University of South Carolina and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in Cape Town. A past recipient of a MacArthur Foundation-Social Science Research Council Fellowship, he has authored, edited, and co-edited a number of books and essays on the history and dynamics of reconciliation in South Africa, including The Provocations of Amnesty (2003), To Repair the Irreparable: Reparation and Reconstruction in South Africa (2004) and Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa – The Fundamental Documents (2008), and With Faith in the Works of Words: The Beginnings of Reconciliation in South Africa, 1985-1995 (2009). “

In the Balance

South Africans Debate Reconciliation

By Fanie du Toit, Erik Doxtader

Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd

Copyright © 2010 Fanie du Toit and Erik Doxtader
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77009-837-4

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Page,
Introduction: A shared dispute?,
Reconciliation in South Africa,
Good faith is not enough: we have to dialogue,
Reconciliation: engaging with our fears and expectations,
The need for forgiveness and reconciliation,
Forgiven?,
Arriving home? South Africa beyond transition and reconciliation,
Truth, reconciliation and women in South Africa,
Reconciliation and the land question,
Reconciliation between political parties,
Reconciliation in the shadow of ‘100% Zulu Boy’,
No reconciliation without social justice,
One happy family,
Reconciliation as an institutional matter: a personal account,
Reconciliation: a call to reparative humanism,
‘This thing called reconciliation’: forgiveness as part of an interconnectedness-towards-wholeness,
Making good: Melanie Klein and reparation in South Africa,
Reconciliation: a thing that won’t go away,
Contributors,
Further Reading,

CHAPTER 1

Reconciliation in South Africa

Thabo Mbeki

The 1993 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa came into force on 27 April 1994 — South Africa Freedom Day. Its Chapter 15, entitled ‘General and Transitional Provisions’, concluded with a section headed ‘National Unity and Reconciliation’. (The 1996 Constitution confirmed the continuing validity of this section of the 1993 Constitution. In turn, Act 34 of 1995, authorising the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), reiterated the principles that appear below.) This section begins with the vision expressed in bold words: ‘This Constitution provides a historic bridge between the past of a deeply divided society characterised by strife, conflict, untold suffering and injustice, and a future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence and development opportunities for all South Africans, irrespective of colour, race, class, belief or sex. The pursuit of national unity, the well-being of all South African citizens and peace require reconciliation between the people of South Africa and the reconstruction of society.’

In these words, the 1993 Interim Constitution committed ‘the people of South Africa’ to act together to achieve the integrated goals of the well-being of all South Africans, national unity, national reconciliation, peace and the reconstruction of society. The Constitution stated why it was fundamentally important that these objectives should be achieved: ‘This Constitution provides a historic bridge between the past of a deeply divided society characterised by strife, conflict, untold suffering and injustice, and a future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence and development opportunities for all South Africans, irrespective of colour, race, class, belief or sex.’ It therefore visualised the transformation of a ‘deeply divided society’ into a new one brought about through the implementation of policies and programmes focused on building democracy, entrenching a human rights culture, promoting development for all and achieving unity in diversity.

The Constitution openly recognised the fact that our past made it inevitable that we would have to contend with ‘a legacy of hatred, fear, guilt and revenge’. To address the challenge of this legacy, arguing that we should not allow the past to continue to dictate division and conflict in terms of the future, it said: ‘These can now be addressed on the basis that there is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimisation.’ This outlook served as the philosophy that guided the work of the TRC, whose creation the Constitution authorised in these terms: ‘In order to advance such reconciliation and reconstruction, amnesty shall be granted in respect of acts, omissions and offences associated with political objectives and committed in the course of the conflicts of the past.’ In these terms, Parliament was called upon to adopt legislation ‘providing for the mechanisms, criteria and procedures, including tribunals, if any, through which such amnesty shall be dealt with at any time after the law has been passed’.

However, given what we have said, it is clear that the TRC was not visualised as the beginning and the end of the process of national reconciliation. Rather, it was a vitally important intervention to respond constructively to the legacy of ‘hatred, fear, guilt and revenge’, which had to be addressed as a necessary condition to create the atmosphere in which South Africans could together pursue such objectives as national unity, national reconciliation and the well-being of all.

Whatever the shortcomings of the TRC, if any, and despite criticisms of the follow-up to its recommendations, there can be no gainsaying its seminal contribution to our national reconciliation, within the context of its specific mandate. At the same time, the point can justifiably be made that some people concluded, wrongly, that the TRC constituted the beginning and the end of the process of national reconciliation. Contrary to this, the 1993 Constitution defined the wider and essential challenge of national reconciliation as effecting such fundamental transformation of our society as would, in its words, ‘open a new chapter in the history of our country’.

It would therefore seem obvious that to achieve this goal, we must encourage our society as a whole to focus on the perspective and vision which inspired the drafters of the 1993 Constitution, who had the serious and historic responsibility to ensure a peaceful transition from white minority apartheid rule to a new reality in which ‘the people shall govern’. To focus concretely on this perspective and vision will require that we confront precisely the legacy ‘of a deeply divided society’ which the 1993 Constitution enjoined us to address. We must therefore ask and answer the question openly and frankly, however painful this may be: What is it that continues to divide South African society and therefore militates against the achievement of the objectives of national unity and reconciliation, founded fundamentally on the social equity described in the 1993 Constitution as ‘development opportunities for all South Africans, irrespective of colour, race, class, belief or sex’?

To come directly to the central matter at issue: to achieve national unity and reconciliation, we must confront our racist legacy as a historical challenge that faces all South Africans, black and white. Put simply, either we sweep consideration of this racist legacy under the carpet, and therefore abjure the advance to ‘peaceful coexistence’, national unity and reconciliation, or we confront it, consciously and purposively, to pursue the objectives of ‘peaceful coexistence’, national unity and reconciliation. The one excludes the other. The challenge to ‘open a new chapter in the history of our country’, for which the 1993 Constitution called, makes it obligatory that we respond to the challenge to choose between these two approaches, without equivocation.

Our country continues to be defined by the terminal malady of ‘a deeply divided society’, which the 1993 Constitution enjoined us to ‘cure’. This is not to say that nothing has been done in the last fifteen years to address this challenge. However, we still have a long way to go before we can say we have achieved national unity and reconciliation, which were correctly visualised as the defining features and product of a truly democratic, non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous South Africa. The challenge is to generate the necessary united national effort consistently, daily, to take the incremental steps that will lead us to its formation.

South Africa is one of the most diverse countries in the world in terms of its racial and ethnic composition and disparity in standards of living. It also suffers from the consequences created by the fact that to sustain white minority rule, the successive apartheid regimes used this diversity to divide the South African population, setting the racial and ethnic groups one against the other. Thus they nurtured sets of particular and exclusive racial and ethnic consciousness, with each group inspired to pursue its special interests in what amounted to a zero-sum game, predicated on the proposition that a win -win solution was impossible. Accordingly, in terms of this paradigm, the ‘peaceful co -existence and development opportunities for all South Africans, irrespective of colour, race, class, belief or sex’, as visualised in the 1993 Constitution, could never be accomplished.

The tragedy and challenge we face with regard to the pursuit of the objective of national unity and reconciliation is that the divisive and disparate racial and ethnic consciousness to which I have referred remains an important part of what constitutes ‘the mind of the nation’. Further compounding this problem, which describes the subjective plane, this consciousness is based on an objective, material reality which either reflects the subjective understanding we have mentioned or has the potential to do so. To put this matter more directly, the reality we have to deal with is that in contemporary South Africa

• the racial and gender imbalance in the distribution of wealth, income and opportunity persists, despite the relatively rapid increase of the black middle class, and millions of our people continue to live in poverty;

• in various instances access to political power in the context of the democratic order serves as a platform for some to advance particular racial and ethnic interests, subtracting from the pursuit of the goal of national unity and reconciliation; and

• some of the ‘democratic’ public consciousness in our country is predicated on the notion that access to political power means that those in power have the opportunity to provide particular individuals and groups with their ‘turn to eat’, instead of advancing the general welfare.

Ineluctably, therefore, our society has to contend with objective and subjective centrifugal forces which militate against achievement of the goal of national unity and reconciliation. And yet the very survival of our country, and its all-round success, are conditional on its national cohesion based on respect for the concept of ‘unity in diversity’, and therefore the dominance of the centripetal forces that would lead to the ‘peaceful co-existence’ of which the 1993 Constitution spoke.

The strategic challenge we face is to ensure that the interventions of the most powerful and embedded political and socioeconomic forces in our country act to strengthen the centripetal tendencies immanent in our society. To achieve this goal will require a conscious and sustained effort by the millions of our people who understand and stand to benefit from the realisation of the objective of the ‘peaceful co-existence and development opportunities for all South Africans, irrespective of colour, race, class, belief or sex’, and therefore our national unity and reconciliation, combining the objective and the subjective. These are the ordinary people who derive no benefit from the use of political and economic power to benefit a minority, clad in racial or ethnic clothes, and have nowhere to run if our country sinks into crisis because it fails to achieve its vitally necessary national unity and reconciliation.

The challenge ahead of us is, therefore, the mobilisation of the masses of people to ensure that they place the matter of national unity and reconciliation, properly understood, in its rightful place on the national agenda. This will also require that our political parties, business and civil society are mobilised to play their role in this regard, fully conscious of the objective reality that in the medium to long term South Africa will sink or swim depending on whether it achieves the national unity and reconciliation visualised in the 1993 and 1996 Constitutions.

Like all others, our country has to respond to its many, daily and difficult challenges. Inevitably, because of their immediate urgency, these tend to define government and other programmes of the day, making it difficult to focus on the longer-term perspective. Sometimes, what the famous British economist John Maynard Keynes said, ‘In the long run we are all dead’, is cited to argue against paying due attention to the long term. We must act to ensure that in the long run the new South Africa, for whose birth many sacrificed everything, including their lives, does not suffer a painful death because of our failure to do what each one of us should do, daily, to promote ‘the reconstruction of society’ in both its subjective and objective elements and thus to achieve sustainable national unity and reconciliation.

Our success with regard to the ‘reconstruction of society’, the very foundation of a new South Africa characterised by national unity and reconciliation, will require that we achieve such goals as the eradication of poverty, a more equitable distribution of wealth and income, and the empowerment and emancipation of women. Like the 1993 and 1996 Constitutions, we must view and pursue these as national rather than partisan tasks, exactly because they are fundamental to the achievement of the goals of national and social cohesion. Precisely because of this, the vision that must drive us, to guarantee that we create the winning nation which all of us profess to desire, is profoundly stated in Ecclesiastes, which commands us to invest in our future: ‘Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.’

It is vitally important and urgent that a genuinely popular black and white movement develops, involving women and youth, based on this understanding that the new South Africa cannot exist outside the realisation of the objective of national unity and reconciliation. Each one of us, in our own selfish interest, must be ready to invest in our future and therefore make the necessary sacrifices. Accordingly, we must each know what it means to cast our bread upon the waters, knowing that we shall find it after many days, to our benefit.

CHAPTER 2

Good faith is not enough: we have to dialogue

Leon Wessels

Do we know each other?

When the general election results were announced in May 1948 and Jan Smuts, then Prime Minister of South Africa, lost his Standerton seat, somebody shouted from the crowd: ‘Today we avenge the death of Jopie Fourie.’ Every Afrikaner nationalist knows that bitter history: Smuts as Minister of Justice was pivotal in Fourie’s death by firing squad, within days after a hearing by court martial. Fourie had rebelled against a decision by Louis Botha’s government to support the British in the First World War. Fourie could find no reason why South Africa should support the British against Germany in a war when they (the British) had caused the death of 26,000 Afrikaner women and children in the concentration camps. Facing the firing squad, placing his hand on his chest, he said, ‘Hier is ‘n groot Afrikaner hart, groot genoeg om al jul koeëls te ontvang’ (Here is a big Afrikaner heart, big enough to receive all your bullets).

* * *

In 2009 I saw in a newspaper the dramatic pictures of the last moments when Solomon Mahlangu, Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) fighter, was hanged in Pretoria Central prison on 6 April 1979. Every African nationalist knows the history of Mahlangu: he left the country in 1976 after the Soweto uprising at the age of 19. He was sent to Angola where he was chosen for training in an elite force to return to South Africa to carry out a mission commemorating the Soweto uprisings of 1976. On his return, during a gun battle with police, two people were killed. Mahlangu, it is still believed, never fired a shot. He faced the murder charge alone because Monty Motloung, who fired the fatal shots, was caught by police and assaulted until he suffered brain damage. Motloung was declared mentally unfit to stand trial. As he walked to the gallows Mahlangu sang ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ and then said, ‘My blood will nourish the tree that will bear the fruit of freedom.’

Are we reconciled?

What I fail to understand is why we don’t care about each other’s history. Why are we so lazy to learn about our journeys, the pain we have suffered and the pain we have caused each other?

South Africa’s past will just not let us be in peace. Every year on Reconciliation Day (16 December), people ask the question ‘Where do we stand with reconciliation?’ We then raise important matters about racism, poverty and crime that affect the well-being of our nation. We lament that there is still a long road to be travelled.

What concerns me is that reconciliation is too important to be discussed only once a year on Reconciliation Day. One of the biggest mistakes we made was when we believed that after the Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) process, reconciliation would take care of itself without the nurturing of the state and civil society, at national and local levels. There was simply too much anger and unfinished business to have left it on its own. As William Faulkner said, the past is never dead, it is also never past.

When F.W. de Klerk and the National Party walked out of the Government of National Unity, when the Democratic Alliance launched its ‘fight back’ campaign and when the ANC government of Thabo Mbeki committed itself to a ‘we know it all and will go it alone’ attitude, collectively they struck a body-blow against the spirit of reconciliation and the desire to rebuild this country together, personified by Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu.

Perhaps South Africans — all of us — have yet to own Chris Hani’s maxim: ‘We must realise that we never broke the back of the security forces, but you must realise that you never broke the spirit of liberation in the townships; therefore, we must now build this country together.’

(Continues…)Excerpted from In the Balance by Fanie du Toit, Erik Doxtader. Copyright © 2010 Fanie du Toit and Erik Doxtader. Excerpted by permission of Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.