Living reconciliation II

In the latter half of 2006 former chief justice Pius Langa delivered an address titled “Transformative Constitutionalism” at the University of Stellenbosch law faculty. In this address he described a link between transformation and reconciliation, stating: “Transformation is not something that occurs only in courtrooms, parliaments and governmental departments. Social transformation is indispensable to our society. In South Africa — it is synonymous with reconciliation. If there is no reconciliation between the people and groups of South Africa we will simply have changed the material conditions and the legal culture of a society that remains fractured and divided by bitterness and hate.” The former chief justice then went on to say that: “I should not be understood as saying that all those who were wounded by apartheid must forgive. Many cannot forgive and we cannot fault them for that. There is no right way to deal with the immense violation that was apartheid. But, as a society, we must keep alive the hope that we can move beyond our past. That requires both a remembering and a forgetting. We must remember what it is that brought us here. But at the same time we must forget the hate and anger that fuelled some of our activities if we are to avoid returning to the same cycle of violence and oppression.”

The chief justice (as he then was) went on to speak of the creation of a climate for reconciliation and emphasised that apartheid’s beneficiaries have a crucial role to play in the creation of such a climate. This does not mean that the blame on the beneficiaries of apartheid is increased, rather, it means that beneficiaries must take responsibility for the creation of a climate for reconciliation. And, using a beautiful metaphor, Langa stated: “The most effective manner to summon the rain of forgiveness is … through social justice, which must include a levelling of socio-economic conditions. Reconciliation therefore supplements, but also requires an improvement of socio-economic conditions. Creating a climate for forgiveness as one of our national projects means that no one takes forgiveness for granted. It can never be a one-sided exercise. That is why I believe that national reconciliation cannot be divorced from the reconstruction of the socio-economic conditions of the country. The responsibility for that, however, goes beyond the government of the day. It is … a national project — for all of us.”

To summarise, the former chief justice basically stated that there can be no sufficient transformation without social reconciliation and that there can be no effective social reconciliation without what he called the “levelling of socio-economic conditions”.

One of the readers of last week’s post left the following comment: “Forgiving: Not possible with stubborn people. The only thing they understand is violence.” I think that Langa’s comments above illustrate exactly how misguided a belief it is to think that forgiveness is not possible because “people” are “stubborn”. Forgiveness is sometimes not possible because people do not see and have not seen how the apologies of the old order tangibly changed the material circumstances of their everyday lives. Forgiveness is sometimes not possible, not because people are stubborn, but because, sixteen years after apartheid officially ended, there are still too many HIV-positive mothers with HIV-positive children who do not receive access to proper education, health, nutrition, housing — you name it. Sometimes forgiveness is not possible, because there are still thousands of men living in mine hostels in sub-human circumstances while mining profits continue to soar. All of this continues to happen while those who were rich under apartheid are, on average, getting richer in post-apartheid South Africa. Sometimes people resort to violence for no other reason but to gain visibility in a time when their plight has become nothing more but another weapon in the arsenal of power politics. (Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek refers to this joined effort to be noticed as passage a l’acte and I will devote more time to this in a future post.)

Another reader of last week’s post, Sarah Henkeman, suggests that the beneficiaries of democracy who are often deemed to have “deracialised” the middle class, should join the beneficiaries of apartheid in asking “who am I that others should be excluded from the tangible and ‘invisible’ privileges that I enjoy? What am I conveniently blind to while I enjoy my liberation?”

It is this kind of self-reflexivity and self-critical awareness that I think much of the “living” of reconciliation is all about. Too often, we criticise the “system”, so-called inevitable structural and infrastructural circumstances that continue to perpetuate apartheid-like social conditions. Or we react with paralysing cynicism that helps no one.

Now, I am not one for sitting around the fire singing feel-good songs and congratulating myself about the fact that I am doing something (albeit something small and not at all enough). Maybe my white guilt prevents / saves me from any form of complacent self-congratulation. But neither do I think that it is all “the system’s objective circumstances” that prevents the kind of structural changes necessary for the social transformation still necessary in South Africa, so that the responsibility for reparations is purely extra-governmental and voluntary. Government cannot hide behind a system — it is the system. But in as much as I am a citizen and a voter in South Africa, I am also part of the system. It is time for the human beings behind the faceless bureaucracy to take responsibility for (the lack of) reparation in South Africa as much as it is the responsibility of the beneficiaries. At the same time, the fact that government is failing the reparations programme does not wash our (the beneficiaries’) hands of our responsibility for reparation. While reparation is part of government’s work, it is not exclusively government’s work. As the former chief justice points out in his address, it is a project for all of us. I am not saying that there is not and there have not been governmental efforts to bring about reparation. But why, for instance, is the President’s Fund still sitting on more than R900 million all these years later? These funds were meant to have been distributed and made available for, among other reparative measures, community reparation and rehabilitation. The 2009/2010 report glibly states “this aspect of reparation is taking longer than expected due to the large number of stakeholders that need to be consulted”. This is just not good enough. Let me repeat that. This is just not good enough.

Sources

Pius Langa “Transformative constitutionalism” 2006 3 Stellenbosch Law Review 351-360.

Department of Justice and Constitutional Development, President’s Fund Annual Report for 2009/2010 available at www.justice.gov.za/reportfiles/other/PresFund_ANR_2009-2010.pdf