What is reconciliation? Animal, mineral or vegetable?

Submitted by Anton I Botha

I thought I knew — after all, I live in a country that practically defined the term. Like many, I believed that South Africa showed the rest of the world what “true” reconciliation was, and that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, was a model to be envied and followed. I would even be willing to confess that I was under the preconceived impression that South Africa was leaps and bounds ahead of other countries on this front, and I would happily have climbed atop my moral high horse if pushed to do so.

Before my travels to other similarly “reconciled societies” in the south of the United States and Northern Ireland and again through South Africa brought these preconceptions into serious question, I expected only confirmation of what I already knew.

Although not yet perfect, all three societies claim to have achieved unprecedented levels of “reconciliation”, as measured by an end to political violence and all forms of institutional oppression. Furthermore, active efforts are being made to right the wrongs of the past, be it economically, through affirmative action; socially, through the creation of monuments and museums dedicated to those who have struggled; or politically, through peace and power-sharing agreements.

These were my preconception before we undertook this near-epic journey with 18 students and three academics proportionally representing each country to investigate this thing called “reconciliation”. In all honesty I did not expect any serious challenges to my presumptions. We spent equal amounts of time in each country investigating places and seeking out people to deepen our understanding of this “phenomenon”, and at the end of the journey I have had to reconsider fundamentally all I thought I knew about reconciliation.

I have now realised that it is only when one starts to interact with the people of these historically divided and troubled societies that one understands that “true” reconciliation is still to come.

The main reason for this controversial point of view boils down to one word I frequently heard spoken by all concerned, regardless of the country, and I even caught myself using it to explain the socio-economic problems of South Africa. That word is “them”.

This was the first indication of trouble in “reconciliation paradise”. The concept of the “other”, defined as those on the outside of the in-group, is alive and well in the supposed paragons of reconciliation we visited. Politically correct discourse, however, does not allow “us” to refer to the “other” as “white” or “black”, “Protestant” or “Catholic”, or “terrorist”, and so on. Instead we conveniently hide behind a lexicon of thinly disguised “thems”.

Of course we know that a white farmer is referring to poor black people when he talks about “them”; when a white US southerner refers to “them”, he or she has in mind the African-Americans who seem incapable of lifting “themselves” out of a cycle of perpetual poverty, even though there seems to be an abundance of economic opportunity. Equally, when you hear black South Africans refer to “them” you know that they mean the “rich whites” who refuse to share their wealth, or the “makwerekwere” who supposedly took their jobs. Similarly, when African-Americans use it they are referring to white southerners who seem incapable of understanding their economic oppression. In Northern Ireland the concept is more finely nuanced, with a plethora of “others”, including — but not limited to — Protestants, Catholics, loyalists, Republicans, Orangemen, Apprentice Boys, the IRA, loyalist-paramilitaries, Sinn Féin, the Democratic Unionist Party and so forth.

Across diverse societal contexts, and regardless of which “in-group” invokes this word, it carries a disturbingly universal signification. For all who use the word, “them” denotes those to whom we have made concessions, those we are compelled to tolerate, those with whom we now co-exist for the sake of non-violence.

Reconciliation in a society well versed in a “lexicon of thems” becomes extremely problematic as it is based on “tolerance”, a word of which I have also become very w(e)ary during my travels.

“Tolerance” basically implies the following: “I constitute you as the ‘other’ since I don’t agree with your political, social and/or economic views. However, I have to tolerate them for the sake of non-violence and economic stability.” Understood in this way, tolerance does not seem to resonate with a healthy conception of reconciliation.

Some of my travel companions argued that tolerance is merely the first step in the process of reconciliation, and that true empathy is the ultimate aim. Therefore, reconciliation requires the ability to cultivate an empathic society based on the understanding and acceptance of each other’s validity claims. My question to the proponents of this understanding of reconciliation is this: if two historically conflicting groups both have legitimate claims in their respective idioms, and there is no objective way of “awarding” more legitimacy to either group without suppressing the legitimacy of the other, how is empathy possible?

A case in point is the South African land-claims situation. White farmers have occupied certain areas of land for generations and have worked these effectively, producing a food surplus for the nation. The land in question was appropriated illegitimately by a government that no longer exists and bought by people who are no longer alive. The native inhabitants who formerly occupied the appropriated land are also for the most part dead, but surely their offspring have a legitimate claim to the land taken from their ancestors? How do we redistribute the land? One party has economic and the other historic claims. Both, in my opinion, have legitimate claims that can only be considered, justified or otherwise within the limits of an ideological or idiomatic perspective.

In the South of the US and in South Africa where conflict for a time took the form of legitimate resistance to an oppressive socio-political regime, the historical claims concerning “right” and “wrong” on a broad political level seem clear to us now. However, the post-conflict era lacks the “luxury” of ethical clarity, and I would argue that Northern Ireland has rarely in its history had such “luxury”.

All three societies are now characterised by opposing groups with equally legitimate claims to existence in that particular geographical area and an inability to empathise with the “other” for reasons of “idiomatic legitimacy”. The various groups are unable to see the opposing point of view as legitimate because that would render their own illegitimate. This is, of course, an unacceptable outcome for most. A French philosopher named Jean-François Lyotard described this situation via his concept known as the differend. In the most basic terms the differend refers to the logical inability of two conflicting idioms to recognise the other’s legitimacy. This logical inability is brought about by a lack of objective means to discern one’s legitimacy from another perspective based on pure reason.

In essence, what Lyotard is stating is that two conflict groups are not speaking the same “language”. Both groups might be able to converse in a common language, say English, and observe the same rules of grammar; however, when it comes to talking about matters concerning legitimacy — that is, who is right and who is wrong — they might as well be speaking Greek and Swahili to each other. Communication breaks down because each party has a legitimate point to defend and is willing to do so with violence. This puts both parties back into a state of either conflict or mere tolerance.

The limit of empathy thus shows itself in its impossible requirement: to empathise with the other requires that one gives up one’s own claims. This once again brings about a state of mere tolerance; historically conflicting groups therefore exist in a perpetual state of tension, and this tension is evident in each society. In South Africa it is expressed through violent crime, in Northern Ireland by the Orange marches; and in the US more subtly by the growing agitation around affirmative-action legislation. Although I am sure these tensions would be denied by many, they were abundantly clear to me through my encounters.

A query that naturally emanates from this discussion is this: If all institutional oppression has already been removed, and a society has moved from oppression to reconciliation, why does this discourse of “us” and “them” persist? If, by extension, tolerance and empathy are not the driving mechanisms of true reconciliation, then what is? My thesis here is that “true” reconciliation is only achieved when the “other” ceases to exist. But this, we know, is impossible.

At this point I would like to invoke two theorists to attempt to address these questions and perhaps make one or two suggestions on how true reconciliation can be worked towards, rather than achieved. Firstly, world-renowned social theorist Ulrich Beck confirms that the concepts of “us” and “them” are mechanisms used to construct conventional individual and group identities (Beck has discussed these mechanisms in the context of nationalism, but they also apply to divided societies within national borders).

We seem to think that we cannot define ourselves if we have no “other”. Why do terms such as “African-American” and “white” even exist? Why am I seen as a “white South African”? Well, because it seems we as humans have a strong need to identify ourselves. This need, it could be argued, arises out of some historic biological necessity to belong to an “in-group” for survival purposes, thereby providing some sense of security. This necessity for identity has evolved to a point where it seems unlikely that we can define ourselves without an “other”. This is a consequence of binary thinking: a thought-pattern that has paralysed us for far too long. So long in fact, it seems intrinsic for humankind to think only in terms of binary oppositions: man-women, east-west, black-white, Christian-Muslim, Catholic-Protestant, good-evil and so forth.

Binary logic is so easy; it helps us make sense of the world in simple, one-dimensional terms. “You are either for us or against us; we have a legitimate claim, therefore yours must be illegitimate; we are right, therefore, you must be wrong.” Yet, we have only to look to nature to realise that the world does not operate according to simplistic, one-dimensional binaries. The real world is complex and multidimensional, and the issues we face in conflicting societies are rarely, if ever, simple cases of right and wrong. Rather, they are complex interplays of idioms that have been brought into conflict because of competition for resources — be it land, access to capital, or political power.

Trapped by binary thinking, conflicting societies have found two equally unsatisfactory ways of resolving this issue of “us-them” conflicts. Firstly, by completely wiping out the “other” (as seen throughout history — for example, the near annihilation of the Native American population to the point of political insignificance); or secondly, by uniting through the creation of another “other”.

Examples of this strategy became apparent in all three societies. School teachers reported (with pride sometimes) that black and white American schoolchildren were overcoming their differences by ganging up to bully Latin-American pupils. Similarly, Protestant and Catholic pupils in Northern Ireland as well as black and white South African children joined forces to isolate and intimidate immigrants. In this way historically conflicting groups have managed to overcome their differences by creating another “other”. Isn’t this just a perpetual cycle of violation and injustice that once again creates conditions for a violent, oppressive and discriminatory future that will require acts of reconciliation?

Beck argues that societies should eliminate the binary oppositions marked by the concepts of “us” and “them” by committing to a grand project of cosmopolitanism, where there is no more “us” and “them”, just citizens of the world — “one grand us”. Beck hastens to add that such cosmopolitanism would not mean homogeneity of any kind, but a simultaneous affirmation of cultural, social and political differences, and a common world or cosmopolitan citizenship. In practice it would mean intercultural sensitivity for the purpose of enriching difference, while recognising our unavoidable need for cooperation. This is, of course, easier said than done. Lyotard, in turn, suggests that the best possible solution to a situation in which a differend occurs would be to create a new idiom or “language” by means of which previously conflicting groups have a common reference point from which to extract shared norms and values. In its most basic form it involves creating a new idiom with which everybody can identify.

Although this sounds near impossible, all three societies have in a limited way shown how a common idiom can be created. In the American South, the blues has played a notable role in the project of reconciliation. The music, artists and mythology surrounding this wonderful art form have provided many people in the South the means to overcome their narrow idiomatic perspectives and reconcile under a new idiom that transcends the troubles of the past. Members of both the black and white communities have bought into this art form and it is now seen as “cool” by both sides of the divide. It provides a healthy nucleus around which people can really start communicating, and it is a common area of interest that has sparked off a million different conversations after a long cross-racial silence.

On a practical level people like Bill Luckett and Morgan Freeman provide clear examples of how a love for the blues can overcome historical differences and oppression in favour of a shared passion for an art form. Their co-owned blues club, aptly name Ground Zero, in my opinion has done more for reconciliation in the South than most politicians.

In South Africa, sport has played a similar role. The 1995 Rugby World Cup win allowed a nation freshly out of conflict to focus on something other than politics and provided a new idiom around which people from all creeds could rally. Northern Ireland showed the way to a new idiom through visual arts as alluded to by Liam Kelly in his book Thinking Long: Contemporary Art in the North of Ireland. This form of art allows people to rethink the status quo, and once again allows for a new means of communication and by extension a new set of “words” to carry out brand-new conversations.

Sadly, these moments of idiomatic transcendence are few and far between in the respective societies; however, they serve as a guiding compass to point us in the right direction. So far, these different mechanisms — music, sport and art — have contributed to the project of reconciliation in an accidental and indirect way. Imagine if we could focus these efforts deliberately and directly on a society struggling with reconciliation. Arts, sport and music can help us construct new “languages” to overcome differences, and can provide us with novel narratives to create a new sense of shared values. They can create new material symbols with fresh meaning and renewed significance, and provide us with other rituals to break the bonds of the past and create a common, shared future. Arts, music and sport, I say, could potentially do more for reconciliation than any politician or truth and reconciliation commission ever could.

Anton I Botha is studying towards an MCom at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University