Ambassador Kiplagat in conversation
April 7, 2009 – The Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Memory Programme, in association with the South African History Archive and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, held a two-day dialogue event last week which explored issues around reconciliation and memory in post-apartheid South Africa.
Over 100 people from civil society, government, academia, business and the memory sectors assembled to discuss the topic of memory and the themes of justice, rights, race and power. There were four main speakers who presented papers and commissioned respondents who helped to initiate discussion on the main issues.
The programme was launched by Constitutional Court judge Kate O’Regan (download her paper), who presented a paper on the theme of justice, reconciliation and the work of memory entitled For Life and Action. Her presentation focused on how societies in transition from brutal and oppressive pasts tend to have a contested notion of justice.
Justice O’Regan and Professor Shadrack Gutto
Her paper proposed the idea that justice is a concept that is influenced by historical factors. “Apartheid was maintained through a plethora of unjust, discriminatory laws,” she said, making the point that this had resulted in a lack of respect for the law and the justice system in South Africa today.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was a way for the new democratic government to address the horrors of apartheid and attempt to foster reconciliation between South Africans.
O’Regan argued that the TRC was flawed in three ways. The narrow definition of human rights violations that the TRC dealt with, and the narrow aim to pursue truth instead of retribution, were central problems. Another flaw was that the TRC equated crimes perpetrated in support of apartheid with those perpetrated against apartheid. This undermined the legitimacy of the commission for many South Africans.
Justice Moseneke, Tokyo Sexwale and Pregs Govender
The new Constitution aimed to create a more just society while attempting to strengthen memories of justice. “Laws, and the process of law enforcement, need to earn the respect from which confidence in justice will grow. It is this task to which our Constitution commits us,” O’Regan said.
Professor Shadrack Gutto from the University of South Africa responded to O’Regan. He noted “the challenge of rebuilding the lost faith in law and the need to build a rule-of-law regime in society” and, responding to her argument on the TRC, asked how we could repair the damage done to victims.
Dale McKinley, a social movement activist, said during the floor discussion: “It is an important dialogue to have. I have a sense that we have lost a lot of debate and that we have ‘silent conformity’ now.” He said ordinary voices had been lost and that people on the margins needed to be heard on this issue.
Dialogue participants in discussion during a tea break
Ciraj Rassool (download his paper) spoke on the topic of Power, Knowledge and the Politics of Public Past. His paper focused on the use of museums and history as public sites for memory. He talked about how the disciplines of history and archaeology had produced accessible conceptions of ‘the public’.
He used the example of the District Six Museum as a location for innovation in the field of public history in South Africa. This museum, he said, was using public engagement to challenge historical knowledge hierarchies and creating exciting new practices of knowledge transaction.
Rassool said: “The central challenge of building democracy post-franchise is reconfiguring the bounds of author and representation of the past.” He touched on issues of “history from below” as a means to create new forms of power and memory of history.
Dr Mohau Pheko responded and concentrated on how it was “important to really see how the public memory has shaped our democratic space”.
Mohau Pheko responds to Professor Ciraj Rassool’s paper on power
This created debate in the audience around the notions of history and memory from below and what kind of a resource memory was in our society. Gabriele Mohale from the University of the Witwatersrand said: “I enjoyed all the presentations, the speakers are such gurus in their fields and the debate ought not to be resolved; the dialogue needs to go on.”
Professor Xolela Mangcu (download his paper) followed with a paper entitled Nelson Mandela and the Unfinished Business of Identity Politics in South Africa. His paper focused on how the politics of an age could influence perceptions of race.
He concluded by saying that due to the efforts of Nelson Mandela and his generation, racism was not the most insistent problem facing South Africa but rather the identity conflict that xenophobic violence had indicated.
“In South Africa we have to work through race, while recognising that as racism recedes a new form of identity politics will emerge to fill the vacuum of hate. For this identity politics we will need more than just political modernism, we will need the whole array of cultural instruments that Biko and his peers utilised to fight existential insecurity.”
Human Rights Commissioner Pregs Govender responded to this paper by acknowledging that “the old patriarchal apartheid state continues to influence the political paradigm”, but said that by recognising the importance of every human being and transforming material society we could move towards regarding ourselves as citizens.
Commissioner Pregs Govender responds to Professor Xolela Mangcu’s presentation on race
The audience then debated ideas of race in our society and how we reconciled ideas of national identity, how we negotiated ethnicity issues as well as how identity construction was influenced by the Black Consciousness movement.
The final presentation was by Human Rights Commissioner Jody Kollapen (download his paper), titled Memory and Reconciliation – The Role of Human Rights.
He said that human rights had increasingly become the language of our times as it framed and provided the foundational principles for a diverse range of challenges that faced the global community.
He highlighted how human rights were being used by the oppressed and marginalised as a means to break the hegemony of power. In South Africa particularly, “the struggle against apartheid was more than simply a struggle to replace a dictatorial minority government with one that was elected. It was substantially a human rights struggle.”
Dialogue participants enjoy the afternoon sun during the lunch break
As a result human rights featured prominently in post-apartheid South Africa and the TRC had been a means to negotiate the transition from the apartheid state to a new democratic state. Kollapen agreed with O’Regan when he said “the TRC did not constitute an adequate basis for addressing the past, in particular the need for restitution, redistribution and transformation.”
The fundamental flaw with the TRC, he argued, was that it dealt mainly with what was illegal during apartheid rather than with the illegality of apartheid. He said this meant that we were dealing with the past in “narrow and confined ways” while approaching the future in expansive and bold terms.
He went on to explain how our initial hopes for human rights in the newly democratic South Africa stood in direct contradiction to reality today. “There is much to suggest that we have not internalised an ethos of human rights. Ongoing racial violence, gender-based violence, homophobic and xenophobic violence suggest that we battle to deal with difference. The constitutional imperative of being ‘united in our diversity’ remains a slogan in many respects.”
Kollapen suggested that commencing a dialogue on this issue was the best way to begin to resolve the complex problems that our society faced.
Professor Patrick Bond (download his paper here), from the Centre for Civil Society and representing Professor Dennis Brutus of the same institution, responded controversially by arguing that the “talk left walk right” approach by the state was a central problem and questioned whether the reliance on a human rights model was appropriate.
Professor Patrick Bond and Piers Pigou listen to Commissioner Jody Kollapen’s presentation
He said that the human rights model had to be understood as a phenomenon associated with a particular phase in the development of global capital. He also proposed the idea that economics had relegated human rights to a “domestic level”.
The audience appreciated this contradictory response and vigorously debated the issues raised. Paul Tichmann, the curator of the Luthuli Museum, said: “It was great to have debate. It brings out a lot of contradictions and challenges and this is good because the danger is that we don’t challenge things enough.”
In the concluding session, which provided space for perspectives from Germany and Kenya, Gerd Stephan from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation said that the dialogue had been a valuable starting point as it had raised the issue of creating new methodologies for memory work.
He was followed by Bethuel Kiplagat, executive director of the Africa Peace Forum, who said talking about memory was valuable and important in forging a new future. “Our past is important but we can’t allow the past to blind us to the opportunity of the future,” he added.
Verne Harris of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, the organiser of the event, closed the dialogue by “committing to make this a continuing conversation. We have got to get it out of an elite space and begin to engage communities”.