FORGIVENESS IN THE POLIS: SEEKING RECONCILIATION IN POSTAPARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA

Assessing a Theology and Idiom of Forgiveness as a Foundation

for Conflict Resolution and National Reconciliation

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of

the Department of Theology and Religion Studies
Villanova University

In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Arts
in
Theology

by
William H. LeMaire
Completed April, 2007
Under the Direction of
Dr. Darlene Weaver

UMI Number: 1441189

Copyright 2007 by
LeMaire, William H.
All rights reserved.

UMI Microform 1441189

Copyright 2007 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company.
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unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

ProQuest Information and Learning Company

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Table of Contents

Abstract ........................................................................................................................... iv
Introduction.......................................................................................................................1
Chapter One Truth Commissions and the Influence of the TRCs Creation and
Structure on its Strategies for Reconciliation ..................................................8
The Truth About Truth Commissions .................................................10
The Fall of Apartheid..............................................................................12
TRC Created in the Shadow of Violence and Compromise ...................15
Settling for the Truth?.............................................................................16
Allied Narratives: Truth-telling and Forgiveness ...................................18
Launching the TRC.................................................................................19
Time and the TRC...................................................................................27
The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually.......................................................31
Chapter Two The TRCs Formulation and Application of Forgiveness
Combined Christian and African Frames of Forgiving and Communion ..33
A Theology of Forgiveness.....................................................................34
The Influence of Pastoral Theology........................................................37
Reconciliation Begins with Forgiveness.................................................40
Ubuntu and the Africanization of the TRCs Forgiveness Theology..41
Theoretical Problems with Forgiveness Theology and Ubuntu..............45
Connecting Ubuntu with Forgiveness Theology ....................................46
Chapter Three Amid Expressions of Forgiveness, Ambivalence about Justice .....49
Chapter Four Standing On Holy Ground: The Liturgical Character
of the TRC .........................................................................................................59
Standing on Holy Ground .......................................................................60
Chapter Five Issues Surrounding TRC Formulations of Reconciliation,
Forgiveness, Repentance, and Justice .............................................................64
Forgiveness, the Medium for Reconciliation..........................................65
What About Justice? ...............................................................................69
The Problem With Justice.......................................................................71
Conclusion Implications of Forgiveness for Social and Political Reconciliation ..74
Bibliography ...................................................................................................................80

ii

Table of Exhibits

Exhibit 1: Truth Commissions 1974-2004.......................................................................9

Exhibit 2: Do you think the TRC will be able to find out what really happened with
human rights violations? (May 1995) ...........................................................28
Exhibit 3: Do you think the TRC has been a good or bad thing for the country?
(Nov 1998) ....................................................................................................29
Exhibit 4: Perception of Apartheid ................................................................................30
Exhibit 5: Atrocities Committed by the Apartheid Regime ..........................................30
Exhibit 6: What is Necessary for Reconciliation? .........................................................78

iii

Abstract

South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was a secular agency
that came to be characterized by a theological narrative of forgiveness. Personal
forgiveness and interpersonal reconciliation emerged as a theme in the testimony of
thousands of victims of human rights abuses associated with the enforcement of
apartheid. Indeed, both forgiveness and reconciliation itself came to be articulated in a
theological framework and idiom, presenting significant issues for those who viewed
reconciliation in terms of justice and restitution. This project will advance the thesis that
far from being a weak or anemic response to violence, or a rejection of justice and
restitution, forgiveness is a dynamic medium for a final reconciliation that includes
justice. Accordingly, future truth commissions would do well to consider the
incorporation of a narrative of forgiveness into their overall strategy as both a moral
imperative and a medium for social and political reconciliation.

iv

FORGIVENESS IN THE POLIS: SEEKING RECONCILIATION

IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA
Assessing a Theology and Idiom of Forgiveness as a Foundation
for Conflict Resolution and National Reconciliation

Introduction
Operating from 1995 to 1998, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of
South Africa stands as one of the most unusual and hopeful social phenomena in one of
the most violent periods in history. It fell to a commission of seventeen diverse South
African citizens to sift through over three decades of political crimes and human rights
violations emanating from apartheid, that nations regime of political oppression and
systematic, enforced racism. Their charge was to listen to the painful narratives of both
the victims and the agents of apartheid and, as one commissioner was to later say, hold
up a mirror to reflect the complete picture of South Africas apartheid past.1 By
establishing a truthful and shared account of the past it was hoped the nation could begin
to bring closure to the wounds and social divisions still roiling in apartheids wake.
Nothing less than the future of the nation was considered to be at stake. There was a very
real concern that if the white minority feared for its safety under a black-controlled
government and if the long-oppressed black population sought revenge for its long
torment, a new cycle of violence could erupt again along racial fault lines.2

Boraine, Alex, A Country Unmasked: Inside South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 326.
2
Villa-Vicencio, Charles, Restorative Justice in Social Context: The South African Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, in Burying the Past: Making Peace and Doing Justice After Civil Conflict,
ed. Nigel Biggar, (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2001), p. 208. Villa-Vicencio captures
this fear of all-against-all violence in the remarks of Thabo Mbeki, currently president of the Republic of
South Africa but a member of the African National Congress helping write a new constitution in 1993
when he remarked: Within the ANC [African National Congress] the cry was to catch the bastards and
hang them but we realized you could not simultaneously prepare for a peaceful transition while saying
we want to catch and hang people If we had taken this route I dont know where the country would be

The general format of South Africas TRC was that of a Truth Commission, an
increasingly applied instrument for promoting political and social reconciliation
following civil conflict. Truth commissions typically feature the testimony of victims of
oppression as well as that of the human agents of that oppression, who offer a full
accounting of their actions in exchange for amnesty. Of special interest to this thesis, is
that the South African TRC was a secular institution that came to be significantly
characterized and influenced by its appropriation of a theological understanding of
forgiveness expressed in Christian religious symbols, values, and idiom. The efficacy of
evoking personal forgiveness and interpersonal reconciliation in conflict resolution
arenas as both starting point and the medium or motive force for achieving post-conflict
political and social reconciliation will be examined. As a corollary, this examination will
seek to discover whether this fusion of secular agency and religious values holds promise
for future efforts in post-conflict reconciliation.
The move to frame the testimony of its witnesses within a master narrative of
forgiveness was the unique and controversial contribution of South Africas TRC and
especially that of the commissions chairperson, Desmond Tutu, then the Anglican
archbishop of Cape Town. Tutu and others on the TRC recognized that few
relationships, whether personal or institutional, would survive without the quality of
forgiveness. Focusing only on the wounded memories of the past, which truth-telling
awakens, can become a tool for the continuation of violence. There comes a time when

today. Had there been the threat of Nuremberg-style trials over members of the apartheid security
establishment, we would never have undergone peaceful change.

forgiveness needs to take place, writes Tutus TRC Deputy Chairperson, Alex Boraine,
in order to deal with the past.3
Principal among the Christian ideals characterizing the work of the TRC was its
employment of a Christian theology of forgiveness4 in which forgiveness is construed as
the free gift of a loving God in which Jesus sacrifice upon the cross and His resurrection
is both the personification of Gods grace and a model for human forgiveness. In this
paradigm, forgiveness is offered antecedent to, or in absence of, contrition or a secular
form of justice. Indeed, forgiveness, in naming and acknowledging the act to be
forgiven, represents its own form of justice. At the same time, in the understanding of
Tutu and the TRC, this theological foundation of forgiveness did not exclude or dispense
with repentance and restitution. Rather, forgiveness was posited as a force that both
actuates and propels a continuum that leads to reconciliation; along that continuum,
repentance and redress may occur. Retributive justice models may produce a forbearance
of violence and political stability. Without forgiveness, however, reconciliation in the
sense of a fully restored, harmonious relationship and society will not occur, thus the
sense behind the title of Tutus memoir of the TRC, No Future Without Forgiveness.
In this conception, truth-telling, unalloyed by forgiveness, lacks orientation. By
exposing the horror and injustice of past acts, truth-telling may just as easily fuel revenge
or violence. Alternatively, truth-telling, when framed in a disposition of forgiveness and
3

Boraine, 440.
Petersen, Rodney L., A Theology of Forgiveness: Terminology, Rhetoric, & the Dialectic of Interfaith
Relationships, in Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Religion, Public Policy, & Conflict Transformation,
eds., Raymond G. Helmick, S.J., and Rodney L. Petersen, (Philadelphia & London: Templeton Foundation
Press, 2001), 3. I am employing this term, theology of forgiveness, most directly from Petersen,
although it is not original to him; it appears often in the scholarly, trade, and consumer presses. While
forgiveness is often associated with religious or spiritual teachings, forgiveness itself is a human action
motivated by any number of sources, including love, pragmatism, fear, or a desire for release. So while
forgiveness was typically formulated during the TRC from a theological platform, it will become clear in
this paper that the offer of forgiveness was influenced by a variety of motivations.

a restoration of personal relationships, provides the energy that feeds the process that
leads to social and political reconciliation.
Forgiveness theology, as practiced by the TRC, was not highly systematized; it
was a concrete, applied theology that originated out of a disposition of pastoral care, was
expressed through a Christian narrative of forgiveness, but was also conditioned by
political realities and an African worldview. Forgiveness theology was, to a degree,
Africanized, constructed on the example of Christ and Christian anthropological
understandings of imago Dei, but understood within the indigenous African sense of the
mutuality of humanity which is reflected in the African vernacular as ubuntu. Ubuntu
has been described as an indigenous African perspective or weltanschauung in which
each individuals humanity is ideally expressed through their relationship to others, or put
differently, a person becomes a person through other people. Highly constitutive of the
black South African worldview, ubuntus desire for reconciliation, fellowship, and
connection proved fertile soil for the Christian ideal of forgiveness, something Tutu
understood intuitively.
Another, and controversial, feature of the commissions work was its religious
ambiance which was reflected through prayers, hymns, and religious terms that imbued
the proceedings with what has been characterized as a liturgical character.5 The
influence and impact of religious content was considered inappropriate by a number of
observers and not a few commissioners who found the role of religion within a secular
authority unsuitable and off-putting.

Graybill, Lyn S., Truth & Reconciliation in South Africa: Miracle or Model?, (Boulder, London: Lynne
Rienner Publishers, 2002), 27. Graybill attributes the coining of this liturgical character to South African
theologian John de Gruchy.

It will be demonstrated through the course of this thesis that the objectives and
strategies employed by the TRC were heavily influenced by the nature of its
commissioning and its structure. While the TRC functioned as a quasi-judicial
institution, its enforcement and juridical freedoms were circumscribed. Further, in terms
of compensating victims for medical care or rehabilitation, it was limited to
recommendations; it had little flexibility in disbursing financial aid. Funds for helping
victims reestablish shattered lives were tragically meager and were a subject of debate as
late as 2003 while amnesty applicants were often granted freedom from further
prosecution on the spot.
These diminished juridical and compensatory capacities of the TRC were part of
the high price paid to bring the apartheid regime of South Africa to the negotiation table
and to the eventual sharing of political power in South Africa. Accordingly, it has been
argued that the TRCs work was more symbolic than substantive, and there is some truth
to this. Nonetheless, it is also undeniable that the work and spectacle of the TRC
captivated South Africa, as well as much of the world, as the apartheid drama played out
in the stories of ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary experience. For the first
time in nearly fifty years, the nation of South Africa and the world-at-large heard, often
in graphic, vivid testimony, from some 20,000 victims who recounted the killings,
kidnappings, sexual assaults, forced relocations, and sadistic torture required to enforce
the racial divide. The transcripts of the victim hearings produce harrowing details of
physical and psychological torture that is hard to imagine could be conceived by humans
much less inflicted upon one another. In the face of the radical evil of apartheid, it was
frustrating for many that the TRCs license for punitive measures was small to

nonexistent. At the same time, as the nakedness of apartheids brutality became exposed
in the light of the TRCs inquiry, before the print and electronic media of the nation and
world, it became clear that the long nightmare was coming to a close and an attendant
amount of shame would shine on many, both individually and collectively as a society.
This metaphor of light and darkness and the nature of truth and forgiveness were captured
in the title of the award-winning documentary about the TRCs activity, Long Nights
Journey into Day.6
Conceptually, South Africa as do most nations dealing with deeply divisive
internal conflicts could have chosen from three options in dealing with the aftermath of
apartheid: a collective amnesia in pursuit of simply moving forward, trials and
punishment of apartheids agents, and truth-telling. The approach adopted by South
Africa truth-telling often called the Third Way in political circles today, represented
a delicate and intermediate position between the other two approaches. Compromise
solutions encounter their own limitations and, in the example of the TRC, these
limitations were seen in the inherent tension it faced in seeking a balance between justice
and forgiveness that could lead to meaningful reconciliation in the nation.
In pursuing this critical examination of the application of forgiveness theology to
conflict resolution, this study will proceed first with an analysis of the recent history of
truth commissions as well as an analysis of the specific composition, background, and
issues encountered in creating and operating the TRC. Citizen opinion surveys will
suggest that despite ubiquitous and ongoing criticism of the TRC, there is empirical
evidence that truth-telling, as a strategy for reconciliation, is bearing fruit. Because I
6

Another award-winning documentary that deals with South Africas TRC is Facing the Truth, produced
by Bill Moyers for the Public Broadcasting System. More on this resource can be found at the PBS web
site: http://www.pbs.org/pov/tvraceinitiative/facingthetruth/.

maintain that the theology of forgiveness applied by the TRC was a hybrid, multidimensional formulation, the paper will then move to deconstruct the TRCs applied
theology in order to examine its many sources and influences. Interestingly, these
influences, sometimes contradictory in their theoretical modes, were, when commingled,
a surprisingly robust admixture. Succeeding chapters will examine how the TRCs
conception of forgiveness was injected into the hearings and how forgiveness theology
might answer the key question of whether forgiveness takes place outside of justice.
This critical examination of the TRCs deployment of a theological understanding
of forgiveness as a grand narrative for the TRC will reveal that forgiveness was
considered the starting point and the constitutive medium for a process that would
culminate in social and political reconciliation. Within that path, created by forgiveness,
a new disposition would make possible the positive engagement with other essential
markets along this continuum: repentance, redress, and restitution. Rather than being an
anemic alternative to retribution, as many fear, forgiveness, modeled on the narrative of
the cross and resurrection, can make present a robust motive force capable of interrupting
and breaking through intractable cycles of violence. This makes forgiveness, properly
applied in the conflict resolution process, a dynamic ally of truth-telling and suitable for
consideration in other post-conflict arenas. Through a theology of forgiveness expressed
in a religious idiom, the TRC pointed to a new future of reconciliation and restoration
whose beginning point and medium was forgiveness.

CHAPTER ONE
Truth Commissions and the Influence of the TRCs Creation and Structure
on its Strategies for Reconciliation

Truth Commissions are temporary, quasi-judicial bodies established in the wake

of an extended period of civil strife, charged with ascertaining the authenticity of the
claims of crimes, violence, and human rights violations that occurred during the discord.
Typically a truth commission builds this public record and history of a conflict by
eliciting the stories of both victims and their oppressors. Most commission charters call
for offering perpetrators of political crimes and human rights violations full or partial
amnesty for their testimony. The proposition for the truth commission scheme is that by
bringing a welter of conflicting narratives together, and especially giving voice to the
suppressed narratives of disenfranchised individuals and groups, a new and shared
account of what happened during a contentious period will emerge. This new, balanced
recollection of the past will provide, it is hoped, a starting point for the healing and the
eventual transcendence of deep social divisions produced by the conflict.
Indeed, while their effectiveness is often debated, nations struggling with internal
turmoil have increasingly turned to truth commissions as an avenue through which to
restore political stability and social harmony. In the twenty-year span between 1974 and
1994 fifteen Truth Commissions were charged with investigating the details behind
human rights violations following a period of political oppression and violence.7 In the
next seven years, however, between 1995 and 2002, an additional twelve commissions

Hayner, Priscilla, Fifteen Truth Commissions1974 to 1994: A Comparative Study, Human Rights
Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Nov. 1994), 601-603.

Exhibit 1. Truth Commissions, 197420048

Country
Uganda

Date of Commission
1974

Time Covered
1971-1974

Report Publicly Issued?

1975

Bolivia

1982-1984

1967-1982

Commission Disbanded

Argentina

1983-1984

1976-1983

1985

Uruguay

1985

1973-1982

1985

Zimbabwe

1985

1983

No

Uganda

1986-1995

1962-1986

No

Philippines

1986

1972-1986

No

Nepal

1990-1991

1961-1990

1994

Chile

1990-1991

1973-1990

1991

Chad

1991-1992

1982-1990

1992

Germany

1992-1994

1949-1989

1994

El Salvador

1992-1993

1980-1991

1993

Rwanda

1992-1993

1990-1992

1993

Sri Lanka

1994-1997

1988-1994

1997

Haiti

1995-1996

1991-1994

Limited, 1996

Burundi

1995-1996

1993-1995

1996

South Africa

1995-2000

1960-1994

1998

Ecuador

1996-1997

1979-1996

Commission Disbanded

Guatemala

1997-1999

1962-1996

1999

Nigeria

1999-2001

1966-1999

Report in Process

Peru

2000-2002

1980-2000

2003

Uruguay

2000-2001

1973-1985

Report in Process

Panama

2001-2002

1968-1989

2002

Yugoslavia

2002

1991-2001

Commission Ongoing

East Timor

2002

1974-1999

Commission Ongoing

Sierra Leone

2002

1991-1999

Commission Ongoing

Ghana

2002

1966-2001

Commission Ongoing

Brahm, Eric, Truth Commissions, Beyond Intractability, Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess, Conflict
Research Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted June, 2004 and accessed at
http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/truth_commissions/.

commenced operation.9 As Exhibit 1 illustrates, the preponderance of truth commission

activity has been in Latin America and Africa. This is an interesting phenomenon in
itself. Efforts at restorative justice are far more likely to emerge in lesser-developed
nations than among the more liberal democracies of the West. What underlies this
disparity may represent an interesting avenue of research; it cannot, however, be
encompassed in this paper.

The Truth About Truth Commissions

Advocates of truth commissions argue that a full reckoning with the past is
necessary in order that former opponents be able to look to a peaceful, shared future in a
restored state. Truth commissions, however, are seldom as cathartic as hoped with
victims successfully purging their memories of emotional trauma and perpetrators
releasing their burdens through contrition and repentance. For many past commissions,
the fix was in from the beginning as the commissions themselves were the outcome of
protracted negotiation between political forces.10 Often, in order even to establish a
commission, the political power structures extracted a general and blanket amnesty for its
leadership which, in turn, mitigated any catharsis victims might expect from finally
sharing their long suppressed stories. Too often as well, truth commissions have been a
tool for governments to assure the international community that some level of justice has
been attained and, in turn, confer or restore legitimacy to the government. In the majority
of cases, truth commission hearings have been conducted with little transparency either to
the nations citizens or the world. Because each of the twenty-seven commissions

9
10

Ibid.
Ibid.

10

established between 1974 and 2002 were engineered around highly particular
circumstances, it is difficult to categorize and measure their outcomes. Their continued
and increasing application in internal conflicts throughout the world, however, suggest
some level of satisfaction or utility with the outcome? For some, even the creation of a
commission represents a victory in that it represents an acknowledgement that a full and
open accounting of what is the truth remains to be heard. On the other hand, if, as in a
number of cases, the commission reports were either rejected by the government, their
contents heavily redacted, or not made available to the public in totality, then some feel
they have been victimized a second time. While truth commissions do penetrate many
dark areas of a nations past, few of have been lauded as having defined truth in
absolute terms or considered to have seamlessly repaired divisions in society.
In the overall context of truth commissions, however, South Africas Truth and
Reconciliation Commission is remarkable in a number of ways. While the Chilean
Commission of 1990-1991 also had a stated goal of reconciliation, its activities were far
from transparent and its pre-negotiated blanket amnesty for perpetrators is seldom held
up as a model for reconciliation efforts.11 The South African TRC, on the other hand,
was the first truth commission to complement the probing for truth through the testimony
of victims and perpetrators with a sustained scheme to reconcile the personal and social
relationships of those affected and, in doing so, build a base for national reconciliation
and unity. The South African TRC is also singularly interesting because it was the first
example of a truth commission established not by presidential decree but by a
parliamentary body, thus it had unique popular legitimacy. No TRC had previously had
the subpoena powers of South Africas TRC which could, if necessary, subpoena
11

Ibid.

11

witnesses and compel disclosure of information from government agencies. Finally, and
perhaps most importantly, no other commission of this nature featured as much
transparency as did the South African TRC characterized as it was by extensive print and
electronic media coverage. This coverage was amplified worldwide by the international
media. Entire sessions were televised within South Africa, carried on the radio, and
transcripts of all hearings are today accessible in both print and online formats.12

The Fall of Apartheid

The South African TRC was Janus-like with one face turned toward the past and
another looking to the future. The great bulk of its work was to produce as full an
exposure as possible of the injury South Africas peoples had inflicted upon each other.
This was to include not only white-on-black human rights violations but also black-onblack and black-on-white transgressions. No part of South African society escaped
apartheids tentacles of fear, trepidation, loss, and pain. Indeed, South Africa had seemed
to slide into a Hobbesian all-against-all violence that spared none its evil. It was, in fact,
the murder of Amy Biehl, a U.S. student and human rights advocate attracted to South
Africas plight by her admiration for Nelson Mandelas struggles, that galvanized the
attention of the American public in the 1980s.
The TRC had much listening to do. South Africas immediate past was scarred
by the worlds most openly egregious regime of racial separation and discrimination.
Whites, comprising only thirteen percent of the total population of South Africa,
monopolized economic and political power, effectively subordinating black South
12

Amstutz, Mark R., The Healing of Nations: The Promise and Limits of Political Forgiveness, (New
York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), 194. Transcripts of TRC testimony can be accessed
online at www.doj.gov.za/trc/trc_frameset.

12

Africans to political impotence. Legislation passed in 1948 by the National Party had
erected a pervasive network of laws categorizing people by race and establishing
different rights and activities for each category. These classifications were meant to
establish a separate but equal status but services as well as civil and property rights for
non-white South Africans were inferior to whites.13 The exclusionist nature of apartheid
mobilized the oppressed groups into political movements intent on protesting and
reversing the abuses of apartheid. In turn, the apartheid government of South Africa, in
increasingly desperate efforts to survive in power, used both overt and covert tactics to
subdue these movements, including killings, kidnappings, and torture. In the course of
nearly fifty years of apartheid, South Africas diverse social and ethnic groups had
produced a cacophony of narratives, each attuned to its particular account of history and
justification of its actions.
In the 1980s as internal opposition to the governments apartheid policy grew and
international political and economic pressure in the form of boycotts increased, the South
African government, dominated by the white National Party, was increasingly forced to
recognize new winds of change.14 Indeed, even among the largely white electorate there
was recognition that the nation could not long endure being labeled an international
pariah and being estranged from the international community. Electoral support for the
ruling National Party, which had ranged as high as 66 percent in the late 1970s, had

13

Chapman, Audrey and Spong, Bernard, eds., Religion and Reconciliation in South Africa: Voices of
Religious Leaders, (Philadephia and London: Templeton Foundation Press, 2003), 3-6.
14
Johnston, Douglas, The Churches and Apartheid in South Africa, in Religion, The Missing Dimension
of Statecraft, eds., Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson, (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1994), 195-196. In addition to U.N. trade and political sanctions, individual states further isolated the
South African government. In 1985, the United States imposed limited U.S. trade and financial sanctions
against South Africa. Perhaps more damaging, however, were actions by individual corporations, bowing
to U.S. public sentiment to curtail business relations with South Africa. By 1986 massive U.S.
disinvestment was beginning to impact South Africa.

13

dropped to 48 percent by the late 1980s. The real beginning of the end for apartheid was
sealed with the rise of a new generation of leadership represented by F.W. de Klerk, cowinner with Tutu of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize. While de Klerk was to later earn Tutus
disapprobation for failing to apologize for apartheid during the TRC hearings, de Klerks
government did work with opposition parties toward resolving the climate of violence in
the country and moving toward a more inclusive government.15
Critical to understanding the creation and eventual structure of the TRC is that
significant violence continued apace for several years in advance of the nations first
universal suffrage elections, April 26-29, 1994, as the National Party and the nations
leading opposition parties negotiated and maneuvered for maximum advantage.16 Just one
year earlier, in 1993, Chris Hani, a popular black African rights advocate, perhaps second
in popularity only to Nelson Mandela, was murdered by two white Conservative Party
members.17 Hanis death represented a serious crisis for the multiparty negotiating process
steering the country toward a new constitution and universal elections. Every expectation
was that the townships would explode, spiraling out of control and plunging South Africa
into anarchy, writes political scientist Timothy D. Sisk. Only the intervention of Nelson
Mandela in a nationally televised address, although he was not yet president, and
exceptional crisis management by the leading black political parties averted disaster.18

15

Jerome Sachane, Politics of transition: South African Peace Process and the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, A Case Study, paper delivered at the Peace for Africa Conference, Rome, 20 October 2001.
Conference proceedings (Fribourg, Switzerland: Editions Rotex-Service, 2001), 205-206.
16
Ibid., 222-224. The year1992 was a particularly bloody year with perhaps as many as 1,500 people killed
in a variety of actions, including the so-called Boipatong Massacre in June when more than 40 people were
killed in one incident as well as the Bisho Massacre, near East London when 29 people were killed in a
march organized by the ANC. The high level of violence nearly scuttled the early and still fragile talks on
establishing a new constitution for the nation.
17
Graybill, 7.
18
Sisk, Timothy D., Democratization in South Africa: The Elusive Social Contract, (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1995), 228.

14

TRC Created in the Shadow of Violence and Compromise

In the elections of 1994, the African National Congress (ANC) party won 252
seats, or nearly 63 percent of the seats in the National Assembly while the previously
ruling National Party managed 82 seats. The remaining 66 seats were split among a
number of smaller political groups.19 While the African National Congress now
controlled nearly two-thirds of the institution and Nelson Mandela, head of the ANC, was
elected president of the nation, the distribution of real power was not as decisive as the
election might signal. Pressured into elections and a new constitution by both internal
and international forces, the National Party had lost considerable political power but still
retained substantial influence, if not outright control of security personnel and
organizations in the country. The business community, heavily invested in the apartheid
structure, was almost entirely in the hands of the white community. Indeed, whites (at
thirteen percent of the population) accounted for sixty-five percent of total personal
income in the country.20 In effect, then, the National Party remained a formidable force.
The lead-up to the elections and the formation of a racially inclusive government had
been the product of delicate, contentious negotiations. The TRC was now charged with
not only maintaining the balance but restoring social harmony as well.
In other words, in post-apartheid South Africa there was no room for victors
justice, modeled after the Nuremburg Trials. In South Africa there was no crisp
demarcation of winners and losers. Everything about the political landscape after
1994 reflected that post-apartheid South Africa would be the outcome of a negotiated
19

Ibid., 298. Also receiving seats were the Inkatha Freedom Party (43), Freedom Front (9), Democratic
Party (7), Pan Africanist Congress (5), and Christian Democratic Party (2).
20
Chapman, 3-6.

15

settlement, including the TRC. It is difficult to convince someone to share power when
the intent is to put them on trial after the negotiation. South Africas powerful military
and security bosses had already told Mandela and the majority ANC that they would not
provide security for the crucial elections of 1994 unless some credible form of amnesty
from prosecution was proffered. So, again, in South Africa as in so many other truth
commission venues, amnesty-for-truth-telling became the pragmatic partner of the TRCs
work toward restoration and reconciliation.21 Indeed, in the enabling legislation for the
TRC, amnesty is mentioned fifty times, reconciliation appears fifteen times, and
forgiveness, which came to play a central role in the TRC outcome, not at all.22

Settling for the Truth?

South African lawmakers had three strategic paths from which to choose in
confronting the nations past and establishing a beginning point for the future: amnesia,
punishment, and truth-telling.23 Each course presented its own set of values and
problems.
A collective amnesia, or maybe a collective denial, avoids dealing with the past.
The enormity and complexity of past injustices appear too daunting and too crippling to
be engaged directly and concretely; it is better to focus on today and tomorrow.
Remembering the past means dealing with the past. This avoidance-of-the-past strategy
is frequently the most expedient political course but nations seldom escape the residue of

21

Cobban, Helena, Religion and Violence, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, December
2005, Vol. 73, No. 4, 1128.
22
Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act 1995 [Act 95-34, 26 July 1995].
23
Amstutz, 192.

16

the past which frequently reemerges in the future manifest in a variety of social and
political ills.24
A strictly legal and retributive approach, considering the large number (7,000) of
those who subsequently made application for amnesty, would have overwhelmed the
South African court system financially and operationally. Alex Boraine, TRC deputy
chair writes, the costs of trials would have taken resources away from essential social
development. The demand on the fiscus for housing, education, health care, job creation,
and so on meant that virtually all social services would have had to be put on hold if a
huge outlay were to be expended on long and protracted trials.25 Boraines sentiments
are echoed by a number of others writing on the TRC. Obtaining convictions in a court
of law would have been made more difficult by collecting evidence for crimes committed
over forty years of apartheids grip. He adds, there is a strong possibility that the
majority of those accused would have been found not guilty because of a lack of skillful
prosecutors and a lack of evidence.26 Tutu puts the issue of trial costs into perspective
with two high-profile cases in 1995 and 1996 involving several police and former
military personnel that took eighteen months in which to build and prosecute a case at
overall expenses of US$1 million and US$2 million respectively.27 Realistically, formal
trials on a massive scale were never a serious option based on operational realities and
24

Collective amnesia, it could be argued, characterized the United States approach to the injustices of
slavery with its attendant and ongoing negative impact on race relations in the U.S. A lack of oversight and
federal intervention in the post-war South led to innumerable Jim Crow laws that continued to
disenfranchise former slaves and their descendants. More contemporaneously, President Gerald R. Fords
granting of amnesty to former president Richard M. Nixon was self-described as an attempt to supplant
expediency for a more thoroughgoing dealing with the past.
25
Boraine, 285-286.
26
Ibid., 286.
27
Tutu, Desmond, No Future Without Forgiveness, (New York: Image Books, div. of Doubleday, 1999)
22-23. The two cases involved Colonel Eugene de Kock, former head of a police death squad, and General
Magnus Malan, former Minister of Defence. Because de Kock was a former state employee, the state had
to cover his legal bill. De Kock was successfully prosecuted but Malan and the other defendants in that
case were acquitted.

17

economics. Few observers believed the fledgling and cash-strapped new government
could have funded the legal retribution recourse unless the number of prosecutions was
quite small and highly discretionary. Those qualifiers would, in turn, have produced
problems and widespread complaints in themselves.

Allied Narratives: Truth-telling and Forgiveness

Indeed, in the end, truth-telling represented a practical and intermediate approach
between the extremes of impunity and comprehensive trials, between denial and
retribution. A record of the past would be established through the public hearings of the
TRC, amnesty would be granted for adding to the truth of the past, and recommendations
would be made for financial reparations for victims of apartheid. Fundamentally, the
TRC became the locus for the beginning of the deconstruction of apartheid. It became
the place where the stories of tens of thousands of South Africans, both victims and
perpetrators, would blend into a new and collective narrative of the past. This narrative
would, it was hoped, produce a platform for reconciling the social divisions in South
Africa and for creating a new society based on harmony, not a suppressed discord.
While the idea of pursuing reconciliation through truth-telling was the foundation
for the TRC, there is an inherent danger in recalling the past if the narrative becomes
mired in past injustices. This is why the TRC, guided by its chairman, Tutu, sought to
reorient and frame the emerging narrative within a context of forgiveness, forgiveness
formulated around the Christian narratives of Jesus, the cross, and resurrection as
representing the paradigm for forgiveness. This conditioning of truth-telling with a

18

theology of forgiveness played a significant role in the TRCs operations and strategy and
will be examined further in Chapter Two.
Truth-telling and forgiveness make an especially potent pairing. Truth-telling is
the language of rights, says William ONeill, adding that truth-telling represents an
acknowledgement of wrongdoing and, as a result, makes redress possible.28 While truthtelling may unveil an act of injustice, how that past act is oriented toward the future,
however, is critical to reconciliation. Both condemnation and forgiveness name a wrong
as a wrong, but forgiveness seeks to begin a new process that, while not disregarding
justice, sees justice not as an end itself but as part of a continuum that culminates in
personal and social restoration and reconciliation. In the sense that the TRC employed
forgiveness, forgiveness does not mean justice and redress do not matter or are shunted
aside, it means the process toward both may truly begin. In that way truth-telling and
forgiveness both are part of the process of reconciliation.29

Launching the TRC

An end to violence and an eventual reconciliation of South Africas peoples was
very much on the minds of those drafting South Africas new constitution. The following
excerpt is from the postamble to the Interim Constitution of 1993. Note the use of the
indigenous African term ubuntu in the second paragraph. Ubuntu, an African concept
that originates out of an African worldview, played a pivotal role in both the formulation
of forgiveness in the TRC as well as its reception among the victims of violence. While

28

ONeill, William, The Violent Bear it Away: Religion, Rights, and Reconciliation, keynote address at
the Sixth Annual Graduate Student Symposium, Florida State University, March 23-23, 2007.
29
Volf, Miroslav, Forgiveness, Reconciliation, & Justice: A Christian Contribution to a More Peaceful
Social Environment, in Helmick, 27-48.

19

the foundation for ubuntu will be developed in greater detail in the following chapter, the
essential thread that runs through ubuntu is that we achieve the fullness of our own
humanity only through our relationships and dealings with others.
This Constitution provides a historic bridge between the past of a deeply
divided society characterized 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.
The adoption of this Constitution lays the secure foundation for the people
of South Africa to transcend the divisions and strife of the past which
generated gross violations of human rights, the transgression of
humanitarian principles in violent conflicts and the legacy of hatred, fear,
guilt and revenge. These can now be addressed on the basis that there is a
need for understanding but not vengeance, a need for reparation but not
for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not victimization.
In order to advance such reconciliation and reconstruction, amnesty shall be
granted in respect to acts, omissions and offences associated with political
objectives and committed in the course of the conflicts of the past.30
Reconciliation and restoration as opposed to retribution and vengeance was
now set as the keystone for reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa. The eventual
instrument of this reconciliation, South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
was chartered by the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995. This
legislation provided for investigations and hearings aimed at establishing as complete a
picture as possible of the nature, causes, and the extent of gross human rights violations.
The TRC was to also make recommendations for the rehabilitation of victims and grant
amnesty to persons making full disclosure of all relevant facts relating to acts associated

30

Postamble to the Interim Constitution (Act no 200 of 1993, after Section 251).

20

with a political objective.31 The TRC was, in effect, a quasi-judicial body assembled to
hear both people who claimed to have been victims of gross human rights violations as
well as perpetrators of these violations, for whom testimony meant the opportunity to
secure amnesty from prosecution.
The charter for the TRC called for its work to encompass human rights violations
from 1960 to 1994 and to complete its work by 1998.32 The TRC was to be comprised of
three committees. The Human Rights Violations Committee (HRVC), of which Anglican
Archbishop Desmond Tutu acted as chairperson (as well as being the chair of the entire
Commission), was charged with uncovering systematic patterns of abuse under apartheid,
identifying motives and perspectives responsible for these patterns of abuse, establishing
the identity of individuals and institutions behind the perpetrations, and ascertaining
whether the violations were the deliberate manifestations of state or factional planning.33
Its mandate was to listen to the testimony of victims of violence in order to restore their
human and civil dignity as well as listen to the friends and relatives of those killed or
missing in order to establish and make known the fate or whereabouts of the victims.
Tutu underscores the human hurt experienced by the families of missing victims with the

31

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report (TRC Report), Vol. 1, 24, 48, 270,277.
The Final Report, accessible in six volumes, is available online at www.info.gov.za/otherdocs/2003/trc/.
32
Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, 1994. While the apartheid laws were passed and
implemented in 1948, a cutoff date of 1960 was established which, at first glance, appears to be arbitrary
but does encompass the infamous Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 where sixty-nine people were killed
protesting the nations Pass laws. The 1994 end date marks the date of universal suffrage elections and
Nelson Mandelas rise to the presidency. The legislation is accessible online at
www.fas.org/irp/world/rsa/act95_034.
33
TRC Report, Vol. 1, 277.

21

recounting of one mothers cry: Please cant you bring back even just a bone of my child
so that I can bury him?34
The HRVC was, in the end, to take statements and hear the oral testimony of over
21,000 people who suffered either directly or indirectly as family survivors of those who
had disappeared, had been killed or tortured.35 The committee was charged with shining
a light into the darkest recesses of South Africas recent history of apartheid. It was to be
a painful experience for everyone but, as one of the slogans of the anti-apartheid
movement asserts: The truth hurts, but silence kills.36
The Amnesty Committee was charged with facilitating the granting of amnesty to
persons who made full disclosure of all the relevant facts relating to human rights
violations. Critical to earning amnesty was the condition that crimes had to be shown to
be politically, not criminally, motivated and the whole truth about the violation was to be
told by the person seeking amnesty. An act was considered political when it had been
committed by a member or supporter of a publicly known political organization or
liberation movement or by an employee of the state either acting in furtherance of a
political struggle or with the object of countering or otherwise resisting said struggle.
Further, to fit into this political crime template, it had to have been committed in the
course and scope of his or her duties and within the scope of his or her express or implied
authority.37 Another consideration was whether or not the crime or violation was
proportionate to the threat posed by the victim.

34

Ibid., 8.
Ibid., 20.
36
Tutu, 107. The experience of listening to the stories of victims day-after-day led Tutu to refer to the
commission members as wounded healers. TRC Report, Vol. 6, Ch. 1, Foreword of Archbishop
Desmond Tutu.
37
Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act (no. 34 of 1995).
35

22

Two early cases adjudicated by the Amnesty Committee illustrate the committees
process and thinking in terms of amnesty. Two of the first individuals to appear before
the Amnesty Committee, in May of 1996, Boy Diale and Christopher Makgale, although
previously convicted in a court of law for the murder of Glad Mokgatle, were both
granted amnesty. Mokgatle had been appointed by the Bophuthatswana homeland
president to be chair of the Tribal Council for the Bafokeng tribe of which both Diale and
Makgale were members. Naming Mokgatle to this position was perceived as a rebuke as
well as a threat to the Bafokeng tribe for refusing incorporation into the Bophuthatswana
homeland. The Bafokeng people saw this as a clear usurpation of their rights and
autonomy. The applicants maintained, and the committee agreed, that the applicants
believed they were acting on behalf of their people in terms of a political struggle that
was opposed to an oppressive, aggrandizing regime. Thus, the crime was associated with
a political objective and met the test for amnesty.38
By contrast, in a second set of amnesty decisions handed down in September of
1996, amnesty was denied for Johan van Eyk and Hendrik Gerber, both of whom had
been convicted of murdering Samuel Nganakga. All three had been employed by a
Johannesburg security service. Van Eyk and Gerber, however, suspected that fellow
employee Nganakga was stealing from the company. Taking justice into their own
hands, they tortured Nganaka by applying electric shocks to his testicles, hanging him
upside down from a tree, and setting fire underneath him. When he tried to flee, he was
shot dead. The amnesty seekers then burned and buried his body. Van Eyk and Gerber
justified their actions on their assertion that Nganaka was a member of the Pan-African
Congress and represented a threat to the state. Because they could neither produce
38

Graybill, 63.

23

evidence of this claim, nor could they demonstrate why they were authorized to act on
behalf of the state, their application was denied. They suspected Nganakga of being a
thief, nothing more. This case, as well as the large number of denied applications, leads
Lyn Graybill to conclude that many amnesty applicants were common criminals who
were hoping they could frame their acts in political terms and objectives.39
The Amnesty Committee proceedings featured a far more procedural approach
and demeanor. While it might be argued that amnesty is a secular form of justice, the
committee did not seek to produce any atmosphere other than that of a workmanlike
attempt to get to the bottom of things. While the Human Rights Violations Committee
sought to contextualize its mission in terms of forgiveness and reconciliation, the
Amnesty Committee kept its focus on full disclosure, not remorse and repentance.
Remorse or repentance, while offered by a significant number of those giving testimony,
were not requirements for amnesty, a major sticking point with many but one that may
have contained more wisdom than originally thought. Indeed, that was Tutus eventual
assessment believing that if the applicant was too effusive in their repentance, they would
have been condemned for laying it on thick to impress the Amnesty Committee. By
the same token, a formal, abrupt testimony would have been scored for reflecting
callousness. It was, as Tutu maintains, a no win situation.40
In the end, the amnesty committee was overwhelmed with 7,127 applications for
amnesty received as of June 30, 1998. At the June 30 cutoff date for applications, only
4,443 applications had been acted upon with just 122 of those requests for amnesty fully
granted. In this first wave of finalized applications, over 3,000 were dismissed as having
39

Ibid., 63-64. The Pan-Africanist Congress was an outlawed political party at the time because it
contained factions with Maoist political leanings.
40
Tutu, 50.

24

no politically-motivated cause; indeed nearly 65% of the applications were from people
already in custody. Another 2,684 applications remained to be finalized after the cutoff
date and had to be processed and adjudicated after the cutoff date. Coping with this sheer
volume as well as internal committee disputes of what constituted political motivation,
kept the number of final amnesty grants to less than 1,000.41
Amnesty and the questions surrounding amnesty roiled both the process and
outcome of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As indicated earlier, the term
amnesty appeared fifty times in the enabling legislation for the TRC compared to
fifteen usages of reconciliation. The opportunity for amnesty was a prime force behind
bringing the National Party to the negotiating table. Dullah Omar, one of the ANC
negotiators of the interim constitution, is frank about the central role amnesty played in
creating a new government: The amnesty clause in our interim constitution is the result
of political negotiation [W]ithout that amnesty provision, there would have been no
political settlement. It was the one issue that stood in the way of democratic elections.42
Throughout the sitting of the TRC, and to this day, many believe the perceived doublestandard of granting perpetrators of violence an easy amnesty while victims had to
await the outcome of recommendations for reparations for their sufferings and losses
made for a skewed and unjust process. Tutu, in his memoir of the TRC, recognizes these
limitations of the commission and in that context tries to look beyond these imperfections
to a bigger picture. Conceding that amnesty was a central part of the mission of the TRC

41

TRC Report, Vol. 1, 276.

Omar, Dullah, Opening Address, reporting the TRC Conference, Johannesburg, March 1-2, 1996, in
Graybill, 59.

42

25

and that its provision was negotiated by black as well as white politicians, Tutu remarks,
our freedom has been bought at a very great price.43
Few paid a higher price than Fr. Michael Lapsley, former pastor of the ANC
whose hands were blown off by a letter bomb from the South African security police.
While Fr. Lapsleys views will be examined in more detail later, his overall perspective is
contained in a remark attributed to him in a newspaper report: No trials means no
justice.44 Amnesty was bitter medicine for the many alleged victims of the perpetrators,
but it was a medicine the nation prepared to ingest in the pursuit of reconciliation and
social harmony. This perspective that some perpetrators were walking away from
horrific acts of inhumanity with impunity caused many to complain that the victims of
violations were being victimized again, this time by the TRC itself. This recognition of
its own imperfection is another factor that drove the commission to great lengths to
demonstrate a pastoral compassion and respect for the victims who had been so
conspicuously denied them in the past.
In a sense, compassion was the only compensation the TRC could immediately
offer victims. The Rehabilitation and Reparations Committee (RRC), the third
component of the TRC, was charged with gathering information on the fate and
whereabouts of victims as well as the nature and extent of their suffering. Considering
these harms, the RRC made recommendations, both for urgent interim measures as well
as reparations that might mitigate the injuries and any loss of property. Like the Amnesty
Committee, the RRC also faced a near-impossible task. Tutu writes:

43

Tutu, 54.
Koch, Eddie, quoting Lapsley in The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Mail & Guardian, May
19-25, 1995; in Graybill, 59.
44

26

We agreed there was no way in which anyone could compensate, for

instance, a family for the brutal murder of their beloved husband, father,
and breadwinner. There is really no way of computing the devastation of
such a loss Thus our recommendations to the President and Parliament
provided that a sum of money reasonably significant in amount would be
paid to those designated as victims, but that it would be acknowledged that
it was really meant to be symbolic rather than substantial.45
While, in principle, a qualified applicant for amnesty, complying with the
requirements for full disclosure, could be granted amnesty on the spot, successful
applicants to the RRC were shuffled off into political and bureaucratic limbo. No wonder
then, when the publics perspective of the TRC is considered, especially in its early days,
many looked upon the TRC as justice not only delayed but justice denied.

Time and the TRC

On October 28, 1998, the Commission presented its final report. Perhaps because
so much was expected or hoped for from the TRC it was the subject of controversy
even before the first hearing was held. While the TRC commissioners and its supporters
have written numerous books and articles and delivered hundreds of speeches explaining
and defending its goals and outcomes, the important measure is what do the people of
South Africa think of the TRC and its results? It should come as no surprise that when
probing public opinion in South Africa about the TRC there is considerable divergence
along racial lines. The first two survey results shown (Exhibits 2-3) reflect attitudes
toward the work of the TRC in May 1995, about six months before the TRC had its first
hearing, and November 1998, just weeks after the issuance of the TRC Report.
45

Tutu, 61-62. While the TRC recommended victim reparation grants of US$3,830 a year for six years for
those qualifying, the government, by 2000, had budgeted but a fifth of that total for a period of three years.
As of 2 June 2006, according to an article in the South African Mail & Guardian, most survivors called to
give evidence at the TRCs Human Rights Violations Committee received a single reparations payment of
R30,000, or about US$4,000.

27

Exhibit 2. Do you think the TRC will be able to find out what really happened with
human rights violations? (May 1995)
100%
12.3%
90%

23.2%

70%

28.4%
35.8%

15.5%

80%
16.6%

63.3%

60%

11.4%

No
Don't know
Yes

42.0%

50%
40%
71.8%
30%

8.7%

59.8%

52.7%

20%
29.6%

28.0%

10%
0%
Total

African

Coloured

Indian

White

Data: Human Science Research Council, Omnibus, May 1995 (Pretoria: HSRC/Mark Data. Pretoria: 1995)

While black South Africans and those of Indian extraction were optimistic about
the TRCs efficacy in 1995, whites, in particular, were pessimistic (Exhibit 2).46 At the
end of the commissions work in 1998, fifty-seven percent of all South Africans
believed the TRC had been either a very good thing or a good thing for the country
(Exhibit 3).47 Measured along racial cleavages, however, seventy-two percent of
African respondents were positive about the TRC compared to just fifteen percent of
whites. As time moves on, however, there seems to be some convergence in views.

46

Theissen, Gunnar, Object of Trust and Hatred: Public Attitudes Towards the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, chapter within Truth and Reconciliation: Has the TRC Delivered, eds., Audrey Chapman
and Hugo van der Merwe, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, to be published 2007), 45.
47
Ibid., 45.

28

Exhibit 3. Do you think the TRC has been a good or bad thing for the country? (Nov 1998)
100%
90%

6%
17%

10%

6%

23%
12%

80%

15%
10%
55%

70%
10%
21%

60%

34%

28%

Very bad thing

Bad thing

50%

Neither / don't know

20%
9%

Good thing

40%
17%
27%

30%
51%
20%

Very good thing

22%
13%

37%

10%

17%

18%

12%
3%

0%
All

African

Coloured

Indian

White

Data: HSRC, Perceptions, November 1998, File No. E.1698 (Pretoria: Human Science Research Council, 1998)

In more recent data (Exhibit 4), published in 2006, eight years following the official
close of TRC operations, the work of the TRC seems to have contributed to a growing
perception, even among whites, that apartheid was indeed a crime against humanity. A
significant majority of 87.2 percent of South Africans concur with that statement while
76.3 percent of whites agree.48 Further, a growing number of whites are willing to
acknowledge that in the past the state committed horrific atrocities against those
struggling against apartheid (Exhibit 5).49 While these last two conclusions might seem
obvious to those who suffered under apartheid or to outside observers, it is a view that
has come slowly to the white community in South Africa thus reinforcing the power and
durability of group narratives.

48

Hofmeyr, J.H., Report of the Sixth Round of the SA Reconciliation Barometer Survey, (Wynberg:
Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, 2006), 67.
49
Ibid., 45.

29

Exhibit 4. Perception of Apartheid

Apartheid was a crime against humanity
(Percentage agreement by race) i
100
90
80

93.4

93.4
90
89.6
86.5

88.1
84.8
81

70

94.3
89.8
86.8
85.1

88.6
85.9

76.3

68.6

66.7

69.3

93.8
91
89.4
87.7

89.8
89.5

60
54.3

50
40
30
20

10
0
Apr-03

Apr-04
All SA

Dec-04
Black

White

Apr-05
Coloured

Apr-06
Indian

This question was not asked in the Nov ember 2003 round of the SA Reconciliation
Barometer survey.
i

Exhibit 5. Atrocities Committed by the Apartheid Regime

In the past the state committed horrific atrocities against those struggling against apartheid.
(Percentage agreement by race) ii
100
90

93

89.8
84.1

80

77.7

80.5
77.3

74.8
74.7

70

91.6

90.8

90.3

81

79.8
79.1
77.2

86.8

78.7
77.3

70.5
62.8

60
50

81.6
80.4

56.7

56

55.8

40
30
20

10
0
Apr-03

Apr-04
All SA

Dec-04
Black

White

Apr-05
Coloured

Apr-06

Indian

This question was not asked in the Nov ember 2003 round of the SA Reconciliation
Barometer survey.

ii

30

The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually

That all of South Africas social and ethnic groups are increasingly aware of the
evil of apartheid signals progress along the road to reconciliation. For many, including
perhaps some of the commissioners themselves, a successful outcome for the TRC was
often in doubt. In the foreword to the concluding TRC Report, Tutu writes of a Dutch
visitor to the TRC who averred the TRC would fail because its task was too demanding.
Yet, he writes, she also argued, even as it fails, it has already succeeded beyond any
rational expectations. She went on to quote Emily Dickinson: the truth must dazzle
graduallyor every man be blind.50 Perhaps what looked like imminent failure during
much of the commissions life has turned out better than many expected as the light of
truth breaks into the darker narratives and a new shared narrative begins to emerge. That
is the hope of Desmond Tutu.
All of us South Africans must know that reconciliation is a long haul and
depends not on a commission for its achievement but on all of us making
our contribution. It is a national project after all is said and done.51
Long festering political conflicts seldom produce instant outcomes and the TRC is
no different. Oppression of native Africans by Europeans claims an origin much older
than 1948 and the apartheid laws. Racial discrimination and domination by white
Europeans of the indigenous African peoples was the outcome of nearly three centuries
of Dutch and British colonial presence. Through the 20th century white South Africans
consistently and successfully exploited black labor to develop a thriving economy.52
Considering this provenance of racial discord and division in South Africa, the real fruit
of this unique social and political phenomenon known as the TRC may not even be fully
50

TRC Report, Vol. 1, 4. Extracted from Dickinsons poem, Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.
TRC Report, Vol. 6, Foreword.
52
Johnston, 177.
51

31

assessed in the lifetime of some of the commissioners, victims, and perpetrators.

Reconciliation is indeed, in the words of Tutu, a long haul.

32

CHAPTER TWO
The TRCs Formulation and Application of Forgiveness Combined
Christian and African Frames of Forgiving and Communion

While truth-telling was the foundation of the TRCs pursuit of national

reconciliation, the new narrative being generated by thousands of human rights victims
was further framed by their offers of personal forgiveness and desires for interpersonal
reconciliation. A significant number of victims forgave their former tormentors, typically
without any awareness or expectation of contrition on the part of the offender or any
knowledge that the perpetrator would receive any retributive justice. Indeed, the acts of
forgiveness witnessed in the TRC sessions were most costly offers of forgiveness,
moving TRC chairman Tutu to remark solemnly on one such occasion: Please let us
keep quiet because we are in the presence of something holy.53 These kenotic acts
grasped the worlds attention and elevated the TRC to a symbol of hope for hopeless
conflicts that no other truth commission before, or since, has been able to generate.
Further, nearly all of these moves to forgiveness were expressed in terms of
Christian narratives and teachings about forgiveness. Accordingly, this chapter will
examine more closely the multiple parts that comprise what I am describing as
forgiveness theology while the following chapter will reveal how this quality and
theology of forgiveness was inculcated into the proceedings.
The theology of forgiveness that this paper asserts was a key component in the
TRCs work toward reconciliation was not the outcome of a systematic process; it
represented, in fact, a fusion of Western Christian theological teachings on forgiveness
53

Tutu, Desmond M., Foreword, in Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Religion, Public Policy, & Conflict
Transformation, eds., Raymond G. Helmick, S.J., and Rodney L. Petersen, (Philadelphia & London:
Templeton Foundation Press, 2001), xii.

33

and pastoral counseling with indigenous African cultural mores about community and
fellowship, collectively discussed here as ubuntu. Because the TRCs forgiveness
theology was a religious and cultural hybrid, arising out of praxis more than theory, it has
a notional character that defies easy explication. Nonetheless, this interesting merger of
religious and cultural conceptions, sometimes at odds which each other in theory,
complemented each other in this particular venue. As is the case with many hybrid
formulations, their union may represent a new, stronger, and more durable understanding
of reconciliation and restoration than either alone.

A Theology of Forgiveness
Forgiveness is not only the crown of Christian ethics, Christian theologian and
intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr maintained, but it is also the most difficult of moral
achievements.54 Most Christians would likely agree. The Christian act of forgiveness
not only postulates an acceptance or reacceptance into fellowship of the offender but also
the recognition of sin in ourselves. Indeed, it is the recognition of the mutuality of sin
and divine forgiveness of that sin that undergirds the Christian perspective of forgiveness.
Niebuhr reflects this understanding in the same text:
Forgiving love is a possibility only for those who know that they are not
good, who feel themselves in need of divine mercy, who live in a
dimension deeper and higher than that of moral idealism, feel themselves
as well as their fellow men convicted of sin by a holy God, and know that
the differences between the good man and the bad man are insignificant in
his sight.55
For Christians, a new law and a new prescription for forgiveness emerged through
the narrative of the cross where Jesus death and resurrection is seen as embodying divine
54
55

Niebuhr, Reinhold, Interpretation of Christian Ethics, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935), 223.
Ibid., 226.

34

love and universal atonement for human sins. His life and final sacrifice created a new
paradigm of unqualified grace, a model which Christians are urged to follow by offering
unlimited and unconditional forgiveness to wrongdoers. It is this narrative of the cross,
observes Miroslav Volf, that reveals the character of God.
On the cross, God is manifest as the God who, though in no way
indifferent toward the distinction between good and evil, nonetheless
lets the sun shine on both the good and the evil (cf. Matt. 5:45); as the
God of indiscriminate love who died for the ungodly to bring them
into divine communion (cf. Rom. 5:8); as the God who offers grace
not cheap grace, but grace nonetheless to the vilest evildoer.56
This sense or understanding of the relationship between God and humankind, as
well as in human relations, represents a radical and historical change. Hannah Arendt,
the political theorist and intellectual, recognized this axial turn in human history when
she credits Jesus of Nazareth as being the discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the
realm of human affairs. It was Jesus radical assertion of His power to forgive, even
more than His miracles, says Arendt, that generated responses ranging from intrigue to
cries of blasphemy. Importantly, she observes, Jesus maintained that the power to
forgive was not exclusive to God or even that this power derives from God, as though
God, not men, would forgive through the medium of human beings.57
For Christians, it is the gospel accounts of Peter, who consistently steps forward
as the unwitting foil for Jesus teachings on forgiveness, that well illustrates the role of
forgiveness in Christianity. In the Gospel of Matthew, Peter sets the stage for Jesus
parable of the unforgiving servant by asking how often he should be expected to forgive
when someone sins against him. As many as seven times? (Mt. 18:21) he offers,

56

Volf, 41.
Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1958),
238-239.
57

35

apparently regarding even this figure as wildly inflated. Jesus even greater number in
response is meant to illustrate the unlimited nature of forgivenss: I say to you, not seven
times but seventy times seven.(Mt. 18:22). Throughout the gospels Peters impetuosity,
his arrogance, his self-centeredness, his lack of understanding, and most notably his
eventual betrayal of Jesus, times three, renders Peter a difficult disciple and an unlikely
candidate for forgiveness and restoration to friendship. Nonetheless, writes Christian
ethicist Samuel Wells, Jesus encounter with Peter by the lakeshore is a commissioning
based not on Peters sinless nature or his fine qualities as a man, but on Gods grace. The
point of Jesus limitless offering of forgiveness to Peter is not just an abstract forgiveness
but a tangible reconciliation, restoring Peter to this fellowship and communion.58
As Hannah Arendt suggested earlier, the Christian narratives of the cross and
resurrection represent a new understanding of the meaning of power in history.
Forgiveness begins, as well as embodies, the power of reconciliation and restoration. For
Wells, forgiveness is ultimately grounded not in the logic of the second chance, but in
the logic of Jesus death and resurrection, and this, Wells maintains, is directly applicable
to political reconciliation.
If Peter can find a place once again in Jesus heart, we all can The most
powerful force in human experience, the heart of politics, is not, it seems,
the might of Rome and the merciless will of the governor; it is Jesus cross
and resurrection and the friendship and forgiveness they make possible.59
This Christian understanding of cross and resurrection narratives as the
theological foundation for forgiveness is reflected in the TRC hearings and in the

58

Wells, Samuel, A friend like Peter: the logic of forgiveness: forgiveness is ultimately grounded not in
the logic of the second chance, but in the logic of resurrection, The Christian Century, February 6, 2007,
Vol. 124, Issue 3, 30.
59
Ibid., 30.

36

comments of Tutu, especially when he addresses the question of whether repentance must
precede forgiveness.
Does the victim depend on the culprits contrition and confession as the
precondition for being able to forgive? There is no question that, of
course, such a confession is a very great help to the one who wants to
forgive, but it is not absolutely indispensable. Jesus did not wait until
those who were nailing him to the cross had asked for forgiveness. He
was ready, as they drove in the nails, to pray to his Father to forgive them
and he even provided an excuse for what they were doing. If the victim
could forgive only when the culprit confessed, then the victim would be
locked into the culprits whim, locked into victimhood, whatever her own
attitude or intention. That would be palpably unjust.60

The Influence of Pastoral Theology

Forgiveness was allied to truth-telling as a part of the TRCs overall strategy for
national reconciliation. I do not, however, find in this projects research that this strategy
was the result of pre-hearings calculation. This leads me to submit that the inclusion of
forgiveness into the strategic mix for reconciliation emerged during the commissions
operation and, indeed, arose from the commissioners personal confrontations with the
deeply wounded memories of its witnesses. It became increasingly apparent to the TRC,
I suggest, that truth-telling and forgiveness represented opportunities for personal healing
and this, in turn, evoked from those with clerical backgrounds moves to pastoral
counseling that included forgiveness as therapeutic. Tutu concedes as much in these
remarks.
We have been humbled by what people did seem to find when they
exposed their vulnerability in public. I certainly should not claim that
I had been expecting that those who approached the commission
would often find healing and a closure in the process of recounting
their often devastating stories. I am not a trained psychologist, though
as a pastor I am supposed to know a little about how the human spirit
60

Tutu, 272.

37

and soul operate. It was a wonderful privilege to be there when people

opened their hearts and in that telling came to a new wholeness.61

After a particularly stunning account of human suffering and trauma, one that
often left the victim in tears or exhausted by mentally revisiting that terrifying place, Tutu
might invoke a prayer or ask for a hymn to be sung.62 Also, in the silence that ensued
immediately following one of these wounded memories, Tutu would move to fill that
space with propositions regarding the power of forgiveness or the need to forgive. These
moves were not, it seems to me, the outcome of calculation as much as it was a pastoral
response to the suffering palpably before him. For example, consider how Tutu responds
to Musawenkosi Mshengu following her testimony that her husband, son, and grandson
were murdered in their home.

Mama, I do not know what to say. This is a shocking situation. When

you're listening to this you think - when you're listening to this you
realise how terrible the situation in the past [has been] on all sides.
There was evil. It's like we were embraced by this evil, all of us. We'll
ask God to be with you. We ask God to soften your hearts that are
painful, and help you to come through and give you strength. We hope
through this Commission perhaps God will make use of this
Commission to heal all the evils that was all over in our country.63
To Yazir Henry, who was tortured, starved, and deprived of sleep for
long stretches of time, Tutu remarked:
Yazir thank you very much there is not much that one can say we all
of us, are deeply moved by your own readiness to expose yourself in
the manner in which you have done We hope that having spoken
61

Tutu, 166-167.
Boraine, 265-268.
63
TRC Hearings, 8 May 1996, Durban, accessed online at www.doj.gov.za/trc/hrtrans/ct_victim. An
overworked battery of transcribers, taking down testimony that was often translated from among South
Africas many languages and dialects, produced an exceptional record of the TRC hearings. In a few cases,
however, I did some minor editing of this record to enhance the readability and understanding of the
testimony. Otherwise the testimony stands as transcribed, including all the fractured syntax and phrasing
we find in everyday speech.
62

38

and told your story as you have told it, that there will be a lifting of
your spirit and the public sort of acknowledgment which is a gift of the
spirit, is a grace to be ready to have spoken as you have spoken. That
somehow will have the effect of some healing for you, that there will
be a little lightening of the burden that you carry and that maybe some
of the nightmares might reduce.64
The testimony of apartheids victims was emotionally overwhelming, even to
those who thought they already grasped the ability of apartheid to devastate lives. Even
the commissioners, who thought they had anticipated the truth, were still awed by the full
and awful narrative of apartheid. To better understand the cathartic and
psychotherapeutic nature of TRC testimony, it is doubtful that anyone listening to the
testimony of Nomonde Calata, the widow of Fort Calata, who had been brutally
murdered in 1984, could not have been affected. Consider the recounting of her
testimony from two observers, first Alex Boraine, followed by an account from Antjie
Krog.
In the middle of her evidence she broke down and the primeval and
spontaneous wail from the depths of her soul was carried live on radio and
television, not only throughout South Africa but to many other parts of the
world. It was that cry from the soul that transformed the hearings from a
litany of suffering and pain to an even deeper level. It caught up in a
single howl all the darkness and horror of the apartheid years. It was as if
she enshrined in the throwing back of her body and letting out the cry the
collective horror of the thousands of people who had been trapped in
racism and oppression for so long.65
For me, this crying is the beginning of the Truth Commission the
signature tune, the definitive moment, the ultimate sound of what the
process is about. She was wearing this vivid orange-red dress and she
threw herself backwards and that sound that sound it will haunt me
for ever and ever.66

64

TRC Hearings, 6 August 1996, Durban.

Boraine, 102.
66
Krog, 42.
65

39

It was in this charged environment where the evil of apartheid was exposed in all
its radicality that forgiveness emerged initially as an undertaking of pastoral care but
evolved into a theological framework for the victims testimony formulated around
Christian narratives and teachings.

Reconciliation Begins with Forgiveness

For Tutu, truth-telling must be alloyed with forgiveness because forgiveness
invites wrongdoers to self-knowledge and release. In doing so, forgiveness grounds itself
as the constitutive starting point and medium for the long march to reconciliation. This
invitation, if accepted, has the potential of leading the perpetrator to an admission of guilt
and, hopefully, repentance, and thereby more fully completing the circle, healing both
victims and offenders.
In the act of forgiveness we are declaring our faith in the future of a
relationship and in the capacity of the wrongdoer to make a new beginning
on a course that will be different from the one that caused us the wrong.
We are saying here is a chance to make a new beginning. It is an act of
faith that the wrongdoer can change. According to Jesus, we should be
ready to do this not just once, not just seven times, but seventy times
seven, without limit, provided it seems Jesus says, your brother or sister
who has wronged you is ready to come and confess the wrong they have
committed yet again.67
The Christian understanding of forgiveness, as seen by Tutu, is the essential new
beginning required for the kind of political and social conflicts that have endured over
long periods of political and social conflict, those that seem intractable or written off as
hopeless. Given time, these prolonged disputes set deep roots which are difficult to
dislodge because they are based on convenient narratives of self-justification. Without
forgiveness as a catalyst or change-agent, each side can too easily fall into old patterns of
67

Tutu, 272-273.

40

behavior that continues or intensifies the strife. In this view, forgiveness evokes a unique
power force that leads to repentance and repentance, in turn, potentially spurs attention to
the reparation or rehabilitation of the victim, thus completing the cycle that produces a
final reconciliation. Confession, forgiveness, and reparation, wherever feasible, writes
Tutu, form part of a continuum. While many might debate whether this prescription
has produced reconciliation in South Africa, it was the theology of forgiveness that
characterized the TRCs approach. Tutu argues that the formation of his continuum of
confession, forgiveness, and reparation will take time but that forgiveness not only
launches the process but is the medium through which it arrives at its conclusion:
reconciliation.

Ubuntu and the Africanization of the TRCs Forgiveness Theology

While Tutus theological presentation of forgiveness is substantively based on
Christian principles, it is more concrete than it is systematic; it is a formulation produced
in the arena of practical politics where the narratives of Western Christianity jostled with
liberation theology, political and social realities, and indigenous African worldviews.
While investigating South Africas history under apartheid was central to the TRCs
mandate, its objective was to promote racial reconciliation. In order to successfully
present its restorative prescription for reconciliation, the TRC appropriated an idea from
African society and custom, one pre-dating Christianity and one that analysts consistently
allude to as having played a significant role in advancing forgiveness as a platform for
reconciliation in South Africa. This worldview is expressed as ubuntu and it became an
ingredient in the final application of the TRCs theology of forgiveness. Indeed, Tutus

41

appropriation of forgiveness often moved back and forth between appeals to a

Westernized Christian theology and the sense of communal reconciliation so important to
black South Africans. In this sense, then, it is fair to say that Tutus theology of
forgiveness was Africanized in idiom and content. Antjie Krog, a South African
reporter and author of an account of the TRC, captures her view of this fusion of ideals
when she writes:
The Church says: You must forgive, because God has forgiven you for
killing His Son. Tutu says: You can only be human in a human society.
If you live with hatred and revenge in your heart, you dehumanize not
only yourself, but your community.68
Ubuntu might best be described as a way of viewing human relations and society
in which the primary emphasis is on community and the interconnectedness of
individuals. Ubuntu is the term that names this connectivity. Where apartheid
emphasized competition and the differences between peoples, ubuntu highlights their
interdependence and mutuality. Like many idiomatic words, Africans typically preface
its interpretation with the caveat that it may not translate perfectly into English. Tutu is
from the Xhosa people, writes Michael Battle in his book profiling Tutu and his
appropriation of ubuntu into his theology, and his sense of ubuntu derives from the
proverbial Xhosa expression ubuntu ungamntu ngabanye abantu which, translated
roughly, means each individuals humanity is ideally expressed in relationship to others
or a person depends on other people to be a person.69 Tutu himself explains it this
way: My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours.70

68

Krog, Antjie, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and The Limits of Forgiveness in the New South
Africa, (New York: Times Books, div. of Random House, 1998), 143.
69
Battle, Michael, Reconciliation: The Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu, (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim
Press, 1997), 39.
70
Tutu, 31.

42

Ubuntu is more than a romantic ideal from the African past. In South Africa, it
has legal standing which is found woven into the nations judicial system in three
principles. Alex Boraine, deputy chairperson of the TRC, summarizes these principles:
First, communitarianism and its emphasis on group solidarity enjoy
primacy over individualistic tendencies in the progress towards national
unity. Second, the adjudication process must be conciliatory in order to
restore peace, as opposed to an adversarial approach, which emphasises
retribution. Third, the law promotes the individuals duty to a larger
group, rather than individual rights, demands, or entitlement.71
The influence of ubuntu within the daily activities of the TRC, however, was not
as much about jurisprudence or a concrete principle as it was an animating force, a
consciousness that provided a cornerstone for the restoring of personal relationships
within a larger communion, one that did not recognize racial, economic, or social
borders. Tutu links ubuntu and restorative justice in these remarks.
We contend that there is another kind of justice, restorative justice, which
was characteristic of traditional African jurisprudence. Here the central
concern is not retribution or punishment. In the spirit of ubuntu, the
central concern is the healing of breaches, the redressing of imbalances,
the restoration of broken relationships, a seeking to rehabilitate both the
victim and the perpetrator, who should be given the opportunity to be
reintegrated into the community he has injured by his offense.72
Throughout the TRC hearings, the spirit or philosophy of ubuntu was appealed to
in an effort to establish the interconnection of everyone who had experienced the racial
divide of apartheid. Ubuntu would recognize that everyone, black and white alike, had
suffered under apartheid because the community itself was splintered and set against one
another. The idea is to restore the oppressors humanity by enabling the oppressed to see
their oppressors as their peers. This included not only reconnecting victims and
perpetrators but also victims with one another in order that they understood they were not
71
72

Boraine, 425.
Tutu, 54-55.

43

alone in their pain and grief. Tutu, for example, relates the story of Nyami Goniwe,
whose brother-in-law, Matthew Goniwe, one of the Cradock Four, had disappeared in
1985 and whose mutilated body was discovered a week later.73
In the way of ubuntu, her story was his story vicariously too, because
ubuntu said they belonged together, all of them who made up the Goniwe
family. They were interconnected in this network of interdependence and
togetherness, so that what happened to one, in a very real sense happened
to them all.74
In her testimony, Nyami Goniwe, related how disappointed she and the family
were in the ten years following Matthews death by the lack of action on her brother-inlaws case by the South African justice system. Accordingly, she did not expect much to
be accomplished by telling their story to the TRC either. She learned, however, that she
was not alone in her suffering.
The reluctance [about coming to the TRC] was not over not knowing
what it is thats going to happen here. I had little information. But now
that I am here Im humbled by the experiences of others. Im happy to
say, Im happy that I came.75
The TRC sought to establish, through the hearings, a sense, a spirit of communion
and interrelationship. Indeed, ubuntu was explicitly mentioned in the nations Interim
Constitution: There is need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for
reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimization.76 If this
communal, other-focused worldview is that of many or most black South Africans,
especially those appearing before the TRC, it is easier to understand why its
incorporation into TRC language, philosophy, and theology would have facilitated both
73

Ibid., 130-131. The Cradock Four was a term given to four young activists, including Matthew Goniwe,
who disappeared while traveling from Port Elizabeth to Cradock in June, 1985. Their bodies were found a
week later, horribly mutilated. The full story of the four men did not emerge until the TRC hearings.
74
Ibid., 165-166.
75
Ibid.
76
Postamble to the Interim Constitution (Act no 200 of 1993), after section 251, in TRC Final Report,
Vol. 1, Ch. 5, 103.

44

comprehension of and support for the forgiveness of others. Inclusion of the ubuntu
perspective into the TRC explains why so many black South Africans publicly forgave
those who had abused them. It is within this mindset that many in the black community
approached the commissions work and thus equated the forgiveness of others, even
oppressors, with the restoration healing and restoration of society. If the spirit of ubuntu
already frames the thinking of the victims, it provides a sympathetic climate for a
commission promoting a goal of reconciliation.

Theoretical Problems with Forgiveness Theology and Ubuntu

While the fusion of Christian forgiveness with the communitarian model of
ubuntu seemed to resonate well within the TRCs activities, there is, interestingly, much
about these two worldviews that are antithetical. In the Western humanist tradition, truth
stems from a persons capacity for reason and self-determination while ubuntu seems to
privilege the communitys role in establishing what is true. From a theoretical
perspective, ubuntu could be seen as subordinating the individual and defining them
based on their relations with other persons.77
Considering this, and in the context of freely forgiving others, the question
emerges as to whether this connectedness to the community may also produce a certain
pressure to forgive. This is an especially important caveat when conflict resolution
agencies, seeking to incorporate forgiveness into their work, deal with other
communitarian models around the world. This and other issues surrounding ubuntu and
its relationship to modern societies, such as the possibility of rejecting ideas not arising
from the group, is addressed by Tutu in this fashion.
77

Battle, 52.

45

The truly democratic state would let people celebrate their rich diversity.
We are becoming increasingly pluralistic, and there is a danger, of course,
that we become so diverse that we might find we share little in common.
But we must beware of a dull uniformity. Homogeneity should not be the
enemy of heterogeneity. We must cultivate tolerance which is the
hallmark of the mature, of the secure or the self-confident, who are not
threatened by the autonomy of others and who do not have to assert
themselves by an aggressive abrasiveness.78
Tutu seems, in this statement at least, to want to have it both ways, saying that
although highly connected and relational, ubuntu can also be as open to individual
expression and diversity, or as closed as the community applies it. This, however, does
not necessarily address whether victims expressing forgiveness felt communal pressure to
do so or not. In the end there is no way to deconstruct their motivations or thought
processes. Some charged, for example, that the sometimes elaborate offerings of
forgiveness amounted to a preening in public. What should be clear from the above
remark, however, is that as chairperson of the TRC, Tutu did not believe that ubuntu
should be applied in the sense of extracting a reluctant offer of forgiveness.

Connecting Ubuntu with Forgiveness Theology

This paper has asserted that the application of Tutus Christian theology of
forgiveness to the work of TRC was received in the spirit of ubuntu, the African sense of
community and equal standing. Indeed, together it can be argued that the two
perspectives amounted to the creation of a hybrid composition, a new creation or
approach to reconciling deeply estranged peoples. But where and how is this connection
made between the two? I see two linkages.

78

Ibid, 52.

46

One connection point can be found in the Book of Genesis account of Gods
creation of humans, in which human identity is defined as imago Dei, that we are all
peers, all a community under God. Created by God, but equally distorted by sin, humans
are nonetheless destined for reconciliation, for a final communion with God through
Gods plan for redemption and salvation. It is on this foundation that Tutu claims
apartheid makes no theological sense [because] it denies that human beings are created
in the image of God.79 Apartheid, then, was antithetical not only in a theological way
but also because its use of racist policies to separate rather than unite the common human
community was antithetical to African culture. For Tutu, imago Dei theology correlates
with ubuntu in the sense that both believe in a quest for wholeness and connection, one
with God, the other with community. That all humans have an inherent value
independent of their function or place in society has been foundational for many involved
in the struggle for human rights, none more so than Martin Luther King.
all men have something within them that God injected. Not that they
have substantial unity with God, but that every man has a capacity to have
fellowship with God. And this gives him a uniqueness, it gives him worth,
it gives him dignity. And we must never forget this as a nation: there are
no gradations in the image of God.80
Another connection point with ubuntu is found in the Christian understanding of
the communitarian nature of humanity which is reflected in the church. For Christians,
says Karl Rahner, acceptance of Gods self-communication is freely and individually
made; this acceptance will not thrive in a solitary or individual climate because Gods
self-communication concerns the whole of human existence. As such, an acceptance of

79

Ibid.
King, Martin, Luther, American Dream, from sermon delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta,
Georgia, 4 July 1965, Martin Luther King. Accessed at
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/sermons/650704_The_American_Dream.html.

80

47

God is mediated in a social way, through what we call the church which is itself a
community of people connected by an acceptance of Gods self-communication.
Fundamentally, then, Christianity is an ecclesial, communitarian religion.81
When connected with forgiveness it can be said, as Rodney Petersen does, that
forgiveness either drives us toward community in reconciliation or, left unresolved,
leaves us increasingly autonomous and isolated. Petersen says, Forgiveness is the
boundary between exclusion and embrace.82
What makes the admixture of the TRCs merger of Christian understandings of
forgiveness, pastoral counseling and care with African social anthropology worthy of
study, especially in the context of conflict resolution and reconciliation, is that while
Western attitudes tend to privatize religious ideals like forgiveness, ubuntu seeks to
incorporate forgiveness and reconciliation directly into the communitys political and
social structure. In this context, ubuntu complements the underpinnings of Christian
forgiveness and may provide a useful template for other intractable conflicts. Ubuntu,
then, complemented the TRCs move toward reconciliation and, in this sense,
complements and extends the scope of Christian understandings of forgiveness.

81
82

Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1978), 323.
Petersen, 20.

48

CHAPTER THREE
Amid Expressions of Forgiveness, Ambivalence about Justice

This chapter examines two criticisms of the TRC related to its application of a
theology of forgiveness within the hearings. The first charge is that witnesses in the
victim hearings may have felt compelled by the TRCs emphasis on forgiveness to extend
offers of absolution when they did not genuinely wish to do so. It has been suggested
that some of the unconditional expressions of forgiveness were more attributable to the
highly public stage the victims had been thrust upon, the communal influence of ubuntu,
the tendentious questioning by committee members, or the charismatic presence and
international celebrity of Archbishop Tutu, chairperson of both the TRC and the
Committee on Human Rights Violations. The implication is that if forgiveness is
contrived or the result of subtle coercion then it is delegitimized as a component for
reconciliation. One of the more pointed critics of the TRC on this matter is social
scientist and religious ethicist Audrey Chapman who, along with a number of secular
critics, charges there were significant disparities in atmosphere and approach between the
hearings for victims and the counterpart sessions for amnesty applications.
While the TRC Commissions presiding over the victim hearings often
coaxed or pressured former victims to state that they forgave perpetrators,
the judges who presided over the amnesty hearings did not make similar
efforts to actively solicit acknowledgements of wrongdoing and contrition
from perpetrators.83
This chapter will also lay the foundation for addressing another criticism of the
TRC itself: That it did not make sufficient room for a more secular form of justice. A
fuller examination of this question will be developed in Chapter Five.
83

Chapman, 289.

49

It is impossible to fully understand what motivated many expressions of

forgiveness during the TRC. Any analysis of the TRC record and the abundance of
literature devoted to its analysis must concede that Tutu exuded a strong charismatic hold
over any venue, especially when he presides as chairperson. His language is florid and
spiritual. He has the ability to imbue even the most mundane of situations with a quality
that transcends that space. It is not hard to imagine, then, how he might impact an event
as poignant as the TRC where, it could be said, an entire nations future was at stake.
Tutus centrality to the TRC is captured in this assessment by Antjie Krog.
The process is unthinkable without Tutu. Impossible. Whatever role
others play, it is Tutu who is the compass. He guides us in several ways,
the most important of which is language. It is he who finds language for
what is happening. And it is not the language of statements, news reports
and submissions. It is the language that shoots up like fire wrought from
a vision of where we must go and from a grip on where we are now. And
it is this language that drags people through the process.84
The observation that some expressions of forgiveness in the TRC hearings were
motivated more by external influences than a sincere desire for reconciliation are worthy
of reflection because the charge is made often enough by highly respected analysts such
as Chapman. At the same time, it is an observation and a charge with little empirical
foundation. It is this researchers view, after combing through a significant amount of
hearing testimony, that while the committee members regularly probed witnesses for their
views on forgiveness, amnesty, and reparations, there seems to be little warrant from the
actual testimonial record to suggest pressure or coercion by the committee itself. Indeed,
to the contrary, committee members seemed to be extraordinarily empathetic and
sensitive to the emotional needs of the people appearing before them. It is true, however,
that this paper also contends that religious language and symbols shaded the hearings in
84

Krog, 201.

50

such as a fashion that, when combined with a preexisting cultural disposition such as
ubuntu, the TRC did create a space and ambiance conductive to forgiveness. This is
acknowledged by the deputy chairperson, Alex Boraine: Forgiveness is not something
that can be demanded from the victims, but conditions can be created whereby
forgiveness becomes at least a possibility.85
The principal observation from this researchers examination of transcript
testimony is that the committee seemed to change its inquiry themes from one block of
hearings to another, sometimes from one victim to another. The commissioners were
often obliged, for example, to probe less articulate victims for important details related to
their victimization. In other cases where some type of extreme hardship persisted for the
victim, the inquiry may have centered on what type of remediation or rehabilitation the
survivor required. In the case of missing persons, questions focused on details and
documents that might help track the location and disposition of the missing person.
To better understand the language and flavor of the interchange between
commissioners and those giving testimony and offering forgiveness, several examples are
presented here.
In the following interchange TRC Commissioner Denzil Ntsebeza is questioning
Marilyn Javens, whose husband, Guy Javens, had been killed. After relating her
experience with her husbands death, she is now commenting upon her view of what
constitutes justice.
Ms. Javens:

85

...but then as Paul [the Apostle] said thats not us that are qualified to work
with that. That is for the people [end of Tape 18, side B, further
comments apparently lost in the tape transfer] that take care of those
things to do. And ultimately judgment to me isnt here, its once you die,
that is when you are judged. So to me whether they [the perpetrators] are

Boraine, 439.

51

caught or not, I knew ultimately they were going to come to judgment day.
Thats what I believe.
Mr. Ntsebeza: As a person, would you be able forgive [intervention by Ms. Javens]
Ms. Javens:

I have forgiven.

Mr. Ntsebeza: Oh! I see.

Ms. Javens:

Because God forgave me my sins and sins arent measured to us humanly.

Yes they are but not where the Lord is concerned.86

While attending a church service Paul Williams was shot during a vicious hand
grenade and machine gun attack that left him paralyzed. In the following interaction, also
on 25 April 1996, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a committee member, probes how Mr.
Williams Christian faith helps him deal with his pain. As his testimony had already
indicated he was injured during an attack on a church and his earlier allusions to God, his
identity as a Christian was already well established.
Ms. Gobodo-Madikizela: I would like to know from you, Paul how, I know you that you
are in pain, I would like to know how has the fact that you are a
Christian assisted you in dealing with your pain?
Mr. Williams:

For me it was important to come to terms with my situation

and the Bible teaches me that I must not only love my
neighbors but I must also love my enemies. The Bible also
teaches me that I must if I want people to show compassion
towards me, I must be able and willing to show compassion
and then I think for me the cherry on the top is what Jesus said
on the cross when he said: Father forgive them for they know
not what they are doing. And I must have a loving spirit, I
must have a forgiving spirit and I think that greatly helped me
and assisted me in coping with my situation.87

As Williams testimony continues, however, a bifurcation seems to emerge

between what he considers his Christian duty to forgive and that some form of justice still
awaits the perpetrators, a justice that he does not deny should take place but one from
86
87

TRC Hearings, 25 April 1995, Cape Town, accessed online at www.doj.gov.za/trc/hrtrans/ct_victim.

Ibid.

52

which he removes himself as either a participant or commentator. This type of

dissonance was not uncommon among victims offering forgiveness. At this point in the
testimony, Commissioner Ntsebeza interjected, reminding him that the perpetrators of his
crime have been apprehended and are awaiting trial. Ntsebeza seems to want to establish
whether, notwithstanding Williams earlier offer of forgiveness, he would also like to see
some form of retribution.
Mr. Williams:

from my level as a human being, my personal level, I feel I have

forgiven them. And why I say forgiven them I bear no grudges
against them. Theres absolutely no bitterness within my heart
towards them. If I come face to face with them Ill be prepared to
hug them out of Godly love.
But I also feel that, on the other hand, I would say that there is also
a justice system in the country and over that I dont have control
and I will leave that in those capable hands.

Mr. Ntsebeza:

And finally I would like to ask a question Ive asked a lot of people
who have been on the receiving end [of apartheid human rights
violations]. If Maqoma [one of those accused of Williams attack]
were to apply for amnesty and it could be found that he deserves
to be granted amnesty and he were to walk the streets as a free
person as a consequence of that process, what would your reaction
be?

Mr. Williams:

Like I said, it is beyond my control that him being granted

amnesty, but should he go free and walk on the streets, my duty as
a committed Christian should be I think to reach out to him. And
that is what I would like to do.88

While Ms. Javens and Mr. Williams seem well out in front of the commissioners
in dispensing forgiveness and compassion for their attackers, one of the longer and more
thoughtful exchanges in the hearings came from an Anglican priest, Fr. Michael Lapsley,
who at the time of being horribly wounded and disfigured by a letter bomb was also a
member of the African National Congress working in the black South African homelands
88

Ibid, 10 June 1996.

53

of Soweto and Lesotho. The exploding letter bomb had blown off both hands, shattered
his eardrums, and blinded him in one eye. His recovery which he describes in
excruciating detail in his testimony is painful to read. Included in his account is this
statement:
Fr. Lapsley:

I thought maybe it would have been better to have died when I realized I
had no hands. Ive never met another human being with no hands. I
didnt know whether life would be life and meaningful since.89

Fr. Lapsley goes on in his testimony without assistance or leading questions to

comment on the matters of forgiveness and restorative justice. Indeed, he seems to have
wrestled with the entire topic of forgiveness and justice for some time and this internal
warfare tumbles out during this testimony. It is one of the more thoughtful and tormented
accounts of the hearings and is the reason so much of it is reproduced in this chapter.
Note that he immediately acknowledges Tutus emphasis on forgiveness.
Fr. Lapsley:

I would say that there is a sense in which, I know the Archbishop [Tutu]
often speaks about the question of forgiveness and in a funny way for me
forgiveness is not yet on the agenda. And the reason I say that Im not
filled with hatred or bitterness or self-pity not that I want revenge. I think,
I think what I believe in is not retribution, I believe in restorative justice,
not retributive justice. And, for example, if F.W. [F.W. de Klerk, former
president of South Africa] was to come to me or the person who made the
bomb was to come to me and said Im sorry for what I did and I want your
forgiveness and this is what Im now doing in the way of reparation not
to me personally but to our country and our people, these are the kind of
things Im doing to heal our land then of course one could say of course
here is forgiveness, there would not be a problem about that.

But I havent heard one word from de Klerk, one word of remorse. I have
not heard one acknowledgement of evil at all and Ive heard very few voices
coming from that community of perpetrators showing any sign of remorse or
sorrow or willingness to make reparation and perhaps what makes perhaps
many survivors quite cynical is that rather we see golden handshakes we
see [indistinct words] benefit coming from what in fact they had been party
to and I think that is particular[ly] galling to many people.
89

Ibid.

54

But if there is somebody who is trapped by what they have done what
theyve been party to, perhaps to me and perhaps to many others, then Id
love to meet them. I think we could have a very interesting conversation
where we could begin to discover each others common humanity and of
course, you know if somebody said I was sorry but I want to ask them
what they do for a living now, if they still make letter bombs. Im not sure
what that would mean but again if that person if they are sorry and living
their life in a new way, Id love to be able to say to them I forgive you in
that context.90
Alex Boraine, deputy chair of the Commission then probed the question of
amnesty with Lapsley. The question generates an outpouring of views that, as the
remarks continue, include both some retributive justice as well as a broader form of
restorative justice which would include structural social justice as well.
Boraine:

Father Lapsley, I would like to take it a little further, your comments about
forgiveness and restorative justice. You will know better than most that
the whole question of amnesty is very controversial How do you see
this, how do you feel about this because [your] feeling level is probably
the strongest. Is that, does that [amnesty] meet with your restorative
justice or is there something beyond that?

Fr. Lapsley:

Well, you see my view has always been that it would be - have been much
more desirable for there to be trials and then amnesty. I mean I was
present when the Bishop of the church in the new South African spoke
about the St. James Massacre and I was fascinated when he said about
how his son went to the prison to say on behalf of the congregation we
forgive you. He was very quick to say - but he didnt say that he should be
released. And that - that fascinated me because in fact that was a concept
of forgiveness linked to justice.91
But my view has been and I have been from the beginning in support of
the Truth Commission. I believe that we are sacrificing a degree of justice
which I think extremely painful to the nation for the sake of the greater

90

Ibid.
Ibid. Here Fr. Lapsley refers to Bishop Retief, in testimony of 25 April 1996, during which Retief
recounts an attack on one of the churches in his diocese resulting in the deaths of 11 people and the injuring
of 55. The Bishop rather effusively relayed the wishes of the congregants to extend forgiveness to their
attackers. Near the end of his testimony, he, at the same time, seemed to expect some form of retributive
justice to take place. Even though we were not in a position to make any judgment about his guilt or
otherwise at that time and nor were were we saying he should be freed but we simply want to express to
him that the act of reconciliation on our part is genuine and real and is to this day simply so because we are
Christians.

91

55

good and the greater good as I saw it was if we hadnt had amnesty we
were going to have civil war that was going to consume us all.
And that is the context in which I think I support my leaders in the
insistence of amnesty but it remains very painful but the Arch Bishop had
been a good teacher and I believe in very old fashion concepts of
forgiveness. And it seems to me that in the Christian context well give
this as a package deal and we often in South Africa make it something
[indistinct] cheap and easy.
It seems to me the Christian understanding of forgiveness - its about
confession, its about amendment of life, its about remorse, its about
reparation. Its a whole whole package, now yes I may get amnesty but
that doesnt deal with the package, thats a legal thing and we know that.
And I think one of the first things that the Archbishop said in the
beginning of this Commission was that [end of Tape 2, side A some
words lost] direct my life in such a way. Id say with Gods help that Im
not consumed by that.
You know, I realised equally soon after I was bombed that if I spend my
life pursuing those who did it to me, they would eat me up. Again that
would consume me and I dont want to [be] consumed, but that there is
unfinished business. That is true of me so I think it is helpful for it to be
linked. But if I can just make one other point that I had forgotten to make
that I wanted to make and that really relates to reparation.92
Fr. Lapsleys remarkable experience and views on forgiveness and justice, which
ran counter to Tutus more universal attitude to forgiveness, evoked a frank but also
tender response from Tutu, parts of which are quoted here.
Michael was a priest in the diocese of Lesotho when I was the Bishop of
Lesotho. He has heard me say this before, he was one of the most
[indistinct], most difficult priests Ive ever had. Well, listening to Michael
was [indistinct] there was probably other sides that I didnt always
know Because the Michael after the bomb outrage has been an
incredible person, he has been an [indistinct] he speaks about forgiveness
in a way that he probably knows his Archbishop who is about to leave
doesnt always agree And I am very deeply humbled but also very
proud that Michael is now a priest in my [indistinct] in Cape Town and a
priest of which of whom I am very deeply proud.
You should see when he celebrates the Eucharist. Ive sometimes stood
next to him and got a little worried whether he was not going to overturn
92

Ibid.

56

the [indistinct] or something. And there is an incredible kind of hush in

almost every service that I have being with you because people somehow
feel they are in touch with goodness. I mean in an awful situation
somehow they they are aware they are in touch with light in darkness but
they are in touch with life in death and somehow they know goodness is
going to triumph over evil. We thank you. I think we should stand.93
This exchange is interesting on many levels. For one, Tutu and Lapsley appear to
be reconciling past differences. Lapsleys crippling wounds extend beyond his hands and
face to his soul as well. Tutu does not argue the point of forgiveness versus justice with
him, he simply acknowledges that Lapsleys struggle with offering forgiveness is one we
all face when encountering evil. By asking the assembly to stand, Tutu acknowledges the
transcending power of Gods forgiveness for us all.
While the TRC has been criticized for pressuring victims to extend forgiveness,
Alex Boraine may have been closer to the mark when he was quoted earlier in this
chapter saying that you cannot force someone to forgive but you can create an
atmosphere in which forgiveness becomes at least a possibility. Forgiveness was
kept front-and-center by the committee in the way it remarked and commented upon
testimony. For example, after the testimony of Bishop Retief whose church had been
attacked, Retief extended forgiveness, on behalf of the congregation, to the perpetrators,
and Tutu offered the following response.
And you have given us another example of of that and somehow we
have to keep telling people that I think we are we are an extraordinary
country that has some extraordinary people. And perhaps despite
ourselves God wants to hold us up as a people, as some kind of example
for the world which is wrecked and torn apart by all sorts of animosities
and hatred. Thank you very much. Thank you for your spirit of
forgiveness which joins the spirit of forgiveness of so many others. And
we pray that you are given comfort and strength as you now and again
relive your nightmare.94
93
94

Ibid.
Ibid, 25 April 1996.

57

Throughout this paper, I have submitted that it is more accurate to portray the
application of forgiveness within the victim hearings of the TRC as framing the
testimony in which, to return to Boraines assessment again, makes forgiveness a viable
option, but not a requirement. The testimony reproduced here, as well as the criticisms of
other observers and commentators of the TRCs theology of forgiveness supports the
earlier comment from Reinhold Niebuhr that forgiveness is the most difficult of moral
achievements. It is also perhaps the most complex of moral questions, especially when
what one is being asked to forgive is egregious, even radical evil. When forgiveness is
offered in the face of radical evil, as Tutu earlier noted, the offerer is standing on holy
ground because its offer represents kenosis on the part of the forgiver, an emptying and
complete giving of self. This comports with both the self-immolation of Jesus as well as
the ubuntu sense of self-subordination in pursuit of communal harmony. No wonder then
that the path to forgiveness is multi-layered, highly contextual, and most difficult.

58

CHAPTER FOUR
Standing On Holy Ground: The Liturgical Character of the TRC

In the previous chapter, it was shown that a theology of forgiveness framed the
testimony of victims appearing before the TRC and that this framing was designed to
produce an atmosphere conducive to forgiveness. Very much allied to this theological
framing of the TRCs activities was what has been called the liturgical character of the
hearings. It is rare to find any first-hand account of the TRC event that does not
comment, sometimes extensively and sometimes critically, upon how the TRC, a secular
apparatus, was nonetheless strikingly imbued with religious language and ritual. While
these qualities were perhaps meant to underscore the solemnity of the occasion they
seemed also to complement the overall strategy of the TRC, especially its chairperson,
Tutu, to provide an environment conducive for forgiveness. That the TRC was to have a
religious orientation is seen from the very first activities of the TRC. Tutu writes of his
earliest efforts to bring the team together and bring their mission into focus.
Despite our diversity, the commissioners agreed to my proposal at the first
meeting that we should go on a retreat, where we sought to enhance our
spiritual resources and sharpen our sensitivities. We sat at the feet of a
spiritual guru, who happened to be my own spiritual counselor, while we
kept silence for a day, seeking to open ourselves to the movement and
guidance of the transcendent Spirit.95
The first hearing, in particular, stamped the process with a religious tone when
Tutu opened the meeting with a prayer and Commissioner Bongani Finca sang a hymn of
African Christian origin, The Forgiveness of Sins Makes a Person Whole. Throughout
the TRC process, observes Lyn Graybill in her account of the hearings, Tutu clearly

95

Tutu, 81.

59

operated as a religious figure, wearing his purple cassock and reverently lighting candles
as if he were officiating at a sacred service. She writes:
Each hearing is opened with a prayer sometimes Christian, sometimes
Muslim, sometimes Jewish and a large, white candle representing truth
is solemnly lit. The audience is then asked to rise out of respect for the
victims and their families while they file in The commissioners in
attendance then came down from their white linen-clad tables to welcome
the victims by shaking hands, embracing, kissing. Many of the victims
were already sobbing, overcome by the mere fact that an official
government representative was showing them respect.96

Standing on Holy Ground

The solemnity and liturgical atmosphere of the TRC assemblies may well have
played a significant role in moving people to extraordinary acts of both repentance and
forgiveness. Tutu relates one especially tense scene in which members of a militia,
accused of a particularly brutal massacre of apartheid demonstrators, stood before a
packed house of victims and relatives of victims. Tutu describes the situation in the
hearing room as combustible until one of the officers, acting as a spokesman, begged
for forgiveness: Please, forgive us. Please accept my colleagues back into the
community.97 Tutu relates what happened next.
And do you know what that audience, that angry audience, did? It broke
out into deafening applause. And afterwards I said, Please let us keep
quiet because we are in the presence of something holy Really, the only
appropriate response is for us to take off our shoes, because we are
standing on holy ground.98
South Africa had never seen one of its secular activities so overtaken by religious
overtones. And, indeed, it proved unnerving for some. As a result of the commissions
96

Gallagher, Susan Van Zanten, Cry with a Beloved Country: Restoring Dignity to the Victims of
Apartheid, Christianity Today, February 9, 1998, 1, at (http://ctilibrary.com).
97
Tutu, in Helmick and Petersen, xii.
98
Ibid.

60

religious and often lachrymose atmosphere, the TRC was derided by some secular critics
as the Kleenex Commission.99 It earned Tutu considerable criticism from those who
attacked the emphasis not only on individual reconciliation but also on what they viewed
as an excessively religious atmosphere and discourse. The criticism was not isolated to
strictly secular voices; it came from religious figures in the TRC as well. One of the
commissioners, Piet Meiring, an ordained minister in the Dutch Reformed Church
(DRC), theologian, and university professor in church history, noted the complaints of
certain commissioners and staff.
The previous hearing, in East London, as well as numerous TRC
ceremonies of the previous weeks were far too religious for (the
Commissioners) taste. The many prayers, the hymn singing before and
during the hearings and the religious wrappings of the process were out of
place. The TRC process was a legal process and should be conducted in a
juridical style.100
Indeed Tutu, as an internationally recognized and charismatic personality, was the
human face of the TRC and, in this role, he often spoke in florid, religious prose.
Bishop Peter Storey, a retired Methodist bishop and member of the TRC has said of Tutu:
He has wept with the victims and marked every moment of repentance and forgiveness
with awe. Where a jurist would have been logical, he has not hesitated to be theological.
He has sensed when to lead an audience in a hymn to help a victim recover composure,
and when to call them all to prayer.101 There can be little question that it was this
uniquely compassionate and open vulnerability that also drew the attention (and cameras)
99

Graybill, 27.
Phelps, Teresa Godwin Phelps, Shattered Voices: Language, Violence, and the Work of Truth
Commissions, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 158. Indeed, Lyn Graybill writes
how Tutu, responding to complaints of too zealous a religiosity in the hearings, promised to comport
himself in a fashion more appropriate of a secular setting and substituting moments of silence for prayers.
However, when soon confronted with a particularly harrowing victims story, he lost his resolve, saying:
No, this wont work! We really cannot start like this. People, close your eyes so that we can pray!
(Graybill, 28).
101
Ibid., 27.
100

61

of the worlds media to Cape Town. While Tutu may not have intended the TRC to be
theatre, it often had that shading which, in turn, attracted both praise and scorn.
Wherever one stood on the emotional atmosphere surrounding the TRC, there was no
debating it brought attention to South Africas TRC that no international truth
commission before or after has been able to generate.
Tutu, for his part, was either unaware of the criticism or chose to ignore it as
he remained sanguine as well as pragmatic about his approach. Very few people
objected to the heavy spiritual and indeed Christian emphasis of the commission.
When I was challenged on it by journalists I told them I was a religious leader and
had been chosen as who I was. I could not pretend I was someone else It meant
that theological and religious insights and perspectives would inform much of what
we did and how we did it.102
Tutus open religiosity struck some as inappropriate at best for the TRCs
proceedings and perhaps bizarre for others. On the other hand, when reading the
transcripts of the TRC hearings it becomes clear that an affinity for religious language
and scriptural references was not driven by overzealous commissioners. A religious
idiom seemed to flow easily and voluntarily from many of those giving testimony.
Indeed, eighty-seven percent of South Africans indicated in a 2002/2003 survey103 that
they have some form of religious affiliation while seventy percent of respondents to a
2001 survey claimed to attend a religious service at least once a month.104 Considering,
then, the pervasive influence of religion in South Africa, it would seem that

102

Tutu, 82.
South Africa Survey 2002/2003, (Johannesburg: South African Institute for Race Relations, 2003).
104
Public Attitudes in Contemporary South Africa: Insights from an HRSC Survey, (Cape Town: HSRC
Press, 2002), 89.
103

62

communicating in religious terms and values would be not only a suitable strategy but an
effective one as well. In fact, across the South African religious spectrum Christian,
Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Bahai the idea of linking reconciliation with forgiveness
would seem to provide an ecumenical common ground. Where tension often arose,
however, was when demands for social and economic justice were added to the mix.105
Typically, for example, the Christian community tended to categorize
reconciliation in terms of Christian language and symbology where reconciliation is
linked to Gods reconciling of humanity and the creation to Gods self. On the other
hand, writes Audrey Chapman, among the African independent churches, the theological
model hews more to Old Testament themes where the idea of reconciliation is attached to
Gods justice on earth. All of the faiths, Chapman says, seemed to agree that a final state
of reconciliation represented a synthesis of acknowledgement (of wrongdoing),
confession, remorse, forgiveness, and restitution.106 For the TRC too, the synthesis of
these elements represents reconciliation as well. The TRC, however, privileges
forgiveness as both the beginning of the synthesis and the propelling force or medium
through which reconciliation is attained.

105
106

Chapman, 284.
Ibid.

63

CHAPTER FIVE
Issues Surrounding TRC Formulations of Reconciliation,
Forgiveness, Repentance, and Justice

Of all the issues that vexed the TRC internally, none was perhaps as intractable as
its failure to arrive at a clear and shared definition of reconciliation. Reconciliation,
however, came to be articulated and framed in a religious narrative largely because the
chairman and co-chairman (Tutu and Boraine), as well as others on the TRC, successfully
filled that space with religious content and ideals.
Piet Meiring, a Dutch Reformed Church minister, theologian, and a TRC
commissioner, tells of a meeting that took place about halfway through the life of the
TRC in Johannesburg. He recounts that the commissioners realized they were doing a
reasonable job of producing a new narrative of apartheids history but had not necessarily
agreed upon the nature and measure of final reconciliation. The real point, he says, is
that, there was a huge discrepancy in the definition that people had for
reconciliation.107 Some, he says, saw reconciliation in a political context in which a
discontinuation of violence and restoration of political stability were sufficient. Some
thought its final outcome should come in the courts. Others talked about reconciliation in
terms of restitution. Tutu and especially those with ecclesial backgrounds and other
committed Christians saw the term and result in a religious perspective. Tutu often
said, relates Meiring, that true reconciliation has everything to do with 2 Corinthians 5.
Once you are reconciled to Christ, that gift from God to reconcile us with him, then there
can be proper reconciliation. And Tutu unashamedly used that throughout his work. In

107

Chapman, 124.

64

the end, however, Meiring says a final, unanimously shared definition of reconciliation
never truly existed.108
It is perhaps the nature of human relations, especially in the realm of politics and
religion, that there is never universal agreement; that is why there are elections and
leaders. As noted, Tutu and his allies on the commission came to frame the narrative
emerging from the TRC in a Christian understanding in which reconciliation would
eventually be attained through a medium of forgiveness. Although Meiring did not
always agree with the degree of religious content in the TRC, he concurred with Tutu that
positioning forgiveness and reconciliation in a religious context was not inappropriate.
He [Tutu] said, and I think correctly, that South Africa is a religious
country and this is the wavelength people operate on. If you speak
about justice and reconciliation and truth, these terms are so loaded
that you can only really work with them when you see them as a
religious process.109
This religious framing also connected positively with the African communitarian
perspective of ubuntu, especially the quality of self-subordination.

Forgiveness the Medium for Reconciliation

While universal agreement on the nature of reconciliation may have been lacking,
the TRC increasingly built momentum around the hope that those who were injured,
degraded, and humiliated by apartheid would with a spirit and expression of
forgiveness transcend their victimization and point the way forward to political and
national reconciliation. This formulation of forgiveness was typically expressed in
108

Chapman, 123-124. Meiring is most likely referring to 2 Corinthians 5: 11-21 and perhaps specifically
to vv. 17-18: So whoever is in Christ is a new creation: the old things have passed away; behold, new
things have come. And all this is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and given us
the ministry of reconciliation.
109
Ibid.

65

Christian ideas and moral vocabulary. This approach was not without its critics,
especially those who rejected forgiveness in the absence of repentance or claimed it
sought to become a substitute for secular forms of justice, or in place of economic justice.
This chapter will examine some of these charges while giving a fuller explication and
defense of the TRCs theology of forgiveness and its practical application as a component
for national reconciliation. I will begin with a recapitulation of Tutus theology of
forgiveness and then examine the views of other theologians on the questions of the role
of repentance, justice, and forgiveness.
For Tutu, divine forgiveness is the model for human forgiveness. Forgiveness is
based on the proposition that God is preeminently the God of grace and that both
offenders and victims are created in the image of God.
In this theology, we can never give up on anyone because our God was
one who had a particularly soft spot for sinners. The Good Shepherd in
the parable Jesus told had been quite ready to leave ninety-nine perfectly
well-behaved sheep in the wilderness to look for, not an attractive, fluffy
little lamb fluffy little lambs do not usually stray from their mummies
but for the troublesome, obstreperous old ram And Jesus says there is
greater joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine
needing no repentance.110
To this theological foundation, however, Tutu also appends an ubuntu worldview
in which retribution alone does not promote reconciliation. Retribution may deter
wrongdoing and has its place in human affairs but it cannot on its own build a human
community, restore relationships, or lead to a lasting reconciliation. The best retribution
can achieve is forbearance. Forgiveness, for Tutu on the other hand, is not a weak,
anemic substitute for action; it is a disruptive and powerful force, one that breaks through
and ends cycles of violence by refusing to follow past formulas where the oppressor and
110

Tutu, 84.

66

oppressed merely change places. This is the sense expressed by Hannah Arendt when
she writes that it is only through forgiveness that we find release from what has been
done in the past.
Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely react but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which
provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who
forgives and the one who is forgiven. The freedom contained in Jesus
teachings of forgiveness is the freedom from vengeance, which encloses
both doer and sufferer in the relentless automatism of the action process,
which by itself need never come to an end.111
Christians talk about Jesus shattering expectations, refusing to comport to what
humans expected of a Messiah. Forgiving, as Arendt contends, is also an unexpected,
unconditioned act that enables the creation of something new; it breaks the cycle of
action and reaction. In coming to grips with the wounds of apartheid, the TRC believed
that South Africas citizens must first be released from the corrosive cycle of violence
and vengeance in order to produce a new creation, one where the ubuntu vision of mutual
recognition and reconciliation is a core principle. The citizens, both the forgiving victims
and the repentant perpetrators who appeared in the TRC hearings, shattered the accepted
notions of how people react to oppression and violence. Indeed, it was because this turn
to forgiveness was so unexpected, following so much evil and oppression, that it
captivated the world and, for some, became a symbol and model for dealing with
intractable political and social conflicts.
Because of the structure of the TRC, with one set of hearings for victim
testimony, another for perpetrators seeking amnesty, victims were not typically aware of
whether those who had irrevocably changed their lives, were repentant or not. Based on
TRC testimony, it is clear that in most cases the victims did not know the names of their
111

Arendt, 241. Italics mine.

67

attackers and had not seen them since. Accordingly, the extensions of forgiveness
witnessed in the TRC hearings took place in the absence of contrition and remorse,
reflecting the forgiveness model of Jesus and the Cross. For the TRC, forgiveness was a
creative act, unconditioned by the act that provoked it, as Arendt says. By forgiving,
according to the TRC scheme, the victim sets in motion forces that may transform their
attacker, softening their heart, and reinviting them in ubuntu fashion back into the
community in reconciliation. Thus the motivation to forgive, as Arendt contends, is that
it is the only response that breaks the cycle of violence, vengeance, and retribution.
Whether or not forgiveness is ultimately successful as a catalyst for reconciliation,
writes Martha Minow, a writer on human rights and transitional societies, depends in
large part on how well the forgiving and the forgiven follow their respective scripts.
Ultimate reconciliation depends on someone accepting the forgiveness extended but that,
Minow avers, does not always happen. Pardon does not transform all perpetrators, she
says, while also acknowledging that making contrition a precondition for pardon simply
increases the likelihood that contrition will be feigned.112 Indeed, there is no assurance,
as Minow says, that the process actuated and propelled by forgiveness will produce
reconciliation. Perfect reconciliation, in a political sense, is never possible nor is a
perfect society possible. Peace, as in an absence of violence, is attainable but that peace
may be the outcome of a hegemonic stability. The peace and political reconciliation
sought by Tutu and the TRC is a political and social reconciliation that recognizes and
incorporates the needs and aspirations of both individuals and the community. In that

112

Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass
Violence, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 18-19.

68

sense, it is the pathway toward reconciliation paved by forgiveness that best comports
with the divine plan.

What About Justice?

Many people, Christian and non-Christian alike, can subscribe to the value of
forgiveness as a beneficial quality of daily living. While Christians may view
forgiveness in a theological context, secular humanists may see forgiveness as a
component of healthy living and a healthy society. Forgiveness comes in many forms
and applications. Forgiveness, however, becomes far more problematic when it moves
into more egregious or radical forms of violence, including systematic killing and torture.
In these instances the price paid for forgiveness becomes far more costly and far more
difficult. Forgiveness seems far too weak a response. In these darker woods of human
affairs, forgiveness seems outmatched, too lightweight to deal with the demons. For most
people, including many Christians, these offenses require firm punishment meted out in
proportion to the crime and, indeed, in the everyday world they get it, including South
Africa. The idea, however, behind the TRCs theology of forgiveness was not to entirely
supplant secular justice and punishment; no viable community can or should avoid the
exercise of discipline. On the other hand, this discipline or judicial exercise should not
continue to reinforce disparities in power and position. Tutu makes clear that the TRC
with its foundation of truth-telling, amnesty, and pursuit of reconciliation is not an
alternative to more secular forms of justice.
It is important to note, too, that the amnesty provision is an ad hoc
arrangement meant for this specific purpose. This is not how justice is to

69

be administered in South Africa forever. It is for a limited and definite

period and purpose.113
The matter at hand for the TRC was not that it represented a permanent solution
to justice in South Africa but whether by embodying forgiveness it might represent a
Christian symbol or account of God who lives and gives in self-giving communion. The
idea of embodying forgiveness as having relevance to social issues such as the conflict
resolution is represented in the thinking of theologian L. Gregory Jones, who contends,
while I challenge the assumption that forgiveness does not involve accountability, I
also insist that we can neither make repentance a prerequisite for forgiveness nor separate
forgiveness from our understandings of justice.114 Jones continues in more detail.
I argue that the overarching context of a Christian account of
forgiveness is the God who lives in trinitarian relations of peaceable, selfgiving communion and thereby is willing to bear the cost of forgiveness in
order to restore humanity to that communion in Gods eschatological
Kingdom. That is, in the face of human sin and evil, Gods love moves
toward reconcililation by means of costly forgiveness. In response, human
beings are called to become holy by embodying that forgiveness through
specific habits and practices that seek to remember the past truthfully, to
repair the brokenness, to heal divisions, and to reconcile and renew
relationships.115
For Jones, Gods love moves toward reconciliation by means of a costly
forgiveness and it is hard to imagine a more costly forgiveness than extending it to
someone who has broken your body and seared your memory with trauma. It is in
transcending the response for revenge and embodying forgiveness that humans reconcile
and renew relationships and become holy.116 This sense of a Triune God moving history

113

Tutu, 54.
L. Gregory Jones, Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis, (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B.
Eerdmans Publ. Co., 1995), xi.
115
Ibid., xii.
116
Ibid.
114

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inexorably forward toward a final reconciliation is also the sense that Tutu saw in the
TRCs turn to forgiveness.
There is a movement, not easily discernible, at the heart of things to
reverse the awful centrifugal force of alienation, brokenness, division,
hostility, and disharmony. God has set in motion a centripetal process, a
moving toward the center, toward unity, harmony, goodness, peace, and
justice, a process that removes barriers.117

The Problem With Justice

Jones says that forgiveness does entail accountability, a point on which theologian
Miroslav Volf is in agreement. For Volf, forgiveness does not stand outside justice
because forgiveness does entail censure and accountability. To offer forgiveness is at
the same time to condemn the deed and accuse the doer; to receive forgiveness is at the
same time to submit to the deed and accept the blame.118 In Volfs construction
accusing offenders through a retributive model of justice is to force them into a
framework of self-justification and denial, not only to others but to themselves as well.
By contrast, the offer of forgiveness becomes an invitation to self-knowledge, release,
and reconciliation to the community.119 Further, the offer of forgiveness after justice or
after repentance is not transcending, it becomes a Christian obligation or, turning to
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a cheap grace. Volf explains it this way.
If forgiveness were properly given only after strict justice had been
established, then one would not be going beyond ones duty in offering
forgiveness; one would indeed wrong the original wrongdoer if one did
not offer forgiveness.120

117

Tutu, 265.
Miroslav Volf, Forgiveness, Reconciliation, & Justice, in Helmick, Petersen, eds., 45.
119
Ibid., 46.
120
Ibid., 41.
118

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How much justice is enough justice? This question bedevils every court or
commission founded seeking to produce reconciliation on a platform of retributive
justice, punishment, and enforced reparations. In the arenas where strict justice is
pursued, there is never enough justice, according to Volf, because no strict justice is
possible. He goes on to add, enough justice never gets done because more justice is
always possible than in fact gets done. Even if a strict justice were satisfied, he says, the
best that could be accomplished is a peace only as in an absence of war, but not as the
harmonious order of differences.121 In other words, the best that might be hoped, in his
view, is a forbearance of violence, not reconciliation.
The first step in the process of forgiveness is unconditional. It is not
predicated on repentance or a willingness to redress the wrong. An
unrepentant wrongdoer is an unforgiven wrongdoer
Forgiveness then is an element in the process of reconciliation, a process
in which the search for justice is an integral and yet subordinate element.122
The challenge to a theology of forgiveness gaining greater expression and warrant
in conflict resolution is that it represents a most costly grace. It would seem to work best
where a strong religious and cultural (ubuntu) foundation of communion and community
preexists. It is important, too, that forgiveness theology be understood and framed not as
acquiescence and weakness but as a strength and as a complement to practical politics.
Christian forgiveness should not be seen as a refusal of strength, but ought, instead, to
manifest an alternative power, writes Jones. Forgiveness, then, need not be construed as
either a weakness or a repressed anger but rather of both anger and hatred stared-in-theface, overcome, and transcended.123 Seen, understood, and applied in this context,

121

Ibid., 39.
Ibid., 46-47.
123
Jones, 246.
122

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forgiveness does offer a powerful, symbolic message of reconciliation, one that offers an
alternative and practical channel of conflict resolution. After a visit to Rwanda, as that
nation traumatized by genocide sought to do with reconciling its divisions, Tutu said:
We must break the spiral of reprisal and counter-reprisal I said to them
in Kigali unless you move beyond justice in the form of a tribunal, there
is no hope for Rwanda. Confession, forgiveness, and reconciliation in
the lives of nations are just airy-fairy religious and spiritual things,
nebulous and unrealistic. They are the stuff of practical politics.124

124

TRC Report, Vol. 5, 351.

73

CONCLUSION
Implications of Forgiveness for Social and Political Reconciliation

This paper has presented the proposition that a Christian theological formulation
of forgiveness framed the truth-telling narrative that emerged from South Africas Truth
and Reconciliation Commission. Interpersonal forgiveness, effected by individuals
testifying before the TRC, was regarded by a number of TRC commissioners, especially
its chairperson, as both a medium and model for national reconciliation. In the testimony
of those appearing before the commission as well as responses from those on the
commission, forgiveness was typically understood and expressed in a Christian narrative
and idiom. The central question this project has sought to address is whether this
appropriation and application of forgiveness, when linked to truth-telling, is sufficiently
robust to promote political and social reconciliation and should it be considered by other
truth commissions in the future? In other words, should forgiveness be valued as a
practical component of reconciliation or is forgiveness some airy-fairy thing, as Tutu
says, sadly out of touch in a world roiled by geopolitical power struggles? The answer to
this question is existential for both persons and nations suffering from civil strife. For
Christians, the question also strikes at the core of their discipleship in the world.
The South African TRC was a platform for promoting national reconciliation
erected on two foundational supports: 1) eliciting a new, multivocal narrative that
deconstructed apartheid and revealed both its rationale and its draconian enforcement as a
crime against humanity, and 2) promoting full disclosure of the truth by granting amnesty
to apartheids agents. The South African TRC as well as other truth commissions are
typically characterized by a kind of Hobsons Choice in which victims finally have an

74

opportunity to offer accounts of injustice done them although this consolation is greatly
mitigated by watching former tormentors receive absolution. This moved Tutu to
observe, in a remark quoted earlier, our freedom has been bought at a very great
price. Amnesty made the offer of forgiveness even more costly for the TRC witnesses.
While truth-telling was the common skein running through the fabric of the TRC,
what makes the South African TRC unique among the worlds truth commissions was its
insertion of a new component: forgiveness. This paper has asserted that forgiveness arose
from a move to pastoral counseling on the part of a number of commissioners, especially
those with clerical backgrounds. The full truth of the horrors of apartheid that came
pouring out of the TRCs witnesses surprised even the commissioners who had thought
they had heard it all. It was this profound and palpable human suffering that evoked from
the commissioners a disposition of solemnity, compassion, and consolation which was, in
turn, expressed in a pastoral narrative and language. Originating in a pastoral theology or
narrative, I contend, the TRC began to add broader theological understandings of the
source and power of forgiveness.
The value of forgiveness, however, does not end with its consolation or
therapeutical qualities. In history, Hannah Arendt sees forgiveness exerting a unique
source of power, the kind of power that not only restores but creates anew. Retribution,
as a blunt force, may deter wrongdoing and has its place in human affairs but it cannot
lead to a lasting reconciliation. By contrast, forgiveness is a disruptive, motive force
powerful enough to break through and end intractable cycles of violence. Ren Girard,
the cultural anthropologist, saw in mimetic desire the seat of social conflict. By
continually concentrating its enmity on a scapegoat, Girard speculates, society avoids

75

dealing with the deeper, internal sources of social ills and conflict. Indeed, it is the ritual
surrounding the sacrifice of the scapegoat, he theorizes, that gives birth to religion. Like
Arendt, however, Girard sees in Jesus a new turn in history in which Jesus does not side
with the powerful but with the powerless, the victims of oppression, but He does so in a
new and unexpected way. Jesus declines to feed the spiral of violence and retribution.
Ironically, Jesus breaks the cycle by yielding to it despite his innocence. By embodying
forgiveness, Jesus began the process toward reconciliation.125
The great question that confronts forgiveness in the polis is the question of justice.
Does forgiveness take place outside of or in place of justice? In response to that
question, this paper has turned to a number of theologians who argue that forgiveness is
not a matter of forgive-and-forget, nor should forgiveness be construed as a substitute for
justice, whether that justice is for individuals or political, social, or economic systems.
Miroslav Volf says that any acceptable notion of reconciliation must include justice as a
constitutive part. Forgiveness is not a single act, it is the beginning of a process that
includes the will to rectify the wrongs that have been done, and it includes the will to
reshape relationships to correspond to justice126 Forgiveness, Volf further observes,
presupposes that justice full justice in the strict sense of the term has not been done.
If justice were fully done, forgiveness would not be necessary.127
This thesis argues then that forgiveness is a vital element in an overall, multidimensional process in the search for justice and, eventually, reconciliation. Rodney

125

Petersen, 11.
Volf, 43.
127
Volf, 46.
126

76

Petersen puts it this way: Forgiveness is not merely a juridical absolution from guilt; it is
the medium to lead us to communion and reconciliation.128
The TRCs move to an appropriation of forgiveness began as a response to
pastoral motives, was expressed and formulated in a Christian idiom and narrative, and
was finally construed as having a practical political value as a medium for political
reconciliation. This evolution in recognizing the value and power of forgiveness is not
unprecedented as Donald Shriver reflects in these remarks on his own experience.
Slowly, I have arrived at the belief that the concept of forgiveness, so
customarily relegated to the realms of religion and personal ethics,
belongs to the heart of reflection about how groups of humans can
move to repair the damages they have suffered from their past
conflicts with each other. Precisely because it attends at once to moral
truth, history and the human benefits that flow from the conquest of
enmity, forgiveness is a word for a multi-dimensional process that is
eminently political.129
Forgiveness is both a beginning point and part of a continuum that leads to a
positive change in behavior that can be called communion, fellowship, and reconciliation.
South Africas TRC perceived this beginning point for reconciliation as truth-telling
which was further framed and interpreted by personal forgiveness and interpersonal
reconciliation. The TRC, in effect, transformed itself into a model or template for what it
thought was required of South Africans in search of reconciliation. Truth-telling was the
platform but the meaning of the victims narrative was contextualized by forgiveness
which, in turn, would motivate the continuing search for justice and reconciliation. It is
this understanding of the qualities and the role of forgiveness that underpins this thesis
that truth commissions in the future should seek a place within its activities for a

128

Petersen, 19. Italics mine.

Shriver, Donald W., An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics, (Oxford, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995), ix-x.

129

77

formulation of forgiveness. It is important, however, that commissions properly interpret

the value and significance of forgiveness. Specifically, forgiveness is not a one-time act
of absolution but represents a process which aims at a change of heart and a change of
behavior that we call reconciliation. By embodying forgiveness, South Africas TRC
became a model for what forgiveness and reconciliation look like. Most importantly, the
full fruits of truth commissions take time. Surveys exhibited in Chapter One of this paper
illustrate that the narrative produced by the TRC is increasingly accepted in South Africa:
That apartheid represented a crime against humanity, that innocent people suffered
deplorable injuries and deprivation, and that the nation must reconcile its estranged
peoples. That forgiveness is a constitutive part of reconciliation for each South African
citizen is a concept that continues to gain traction as well. In a survey conducted in
2000, shown here as Exhibit 6, South Africans were given a variety of choices as to what
quality would best produce reconciliation. Among all South Africans, as well as in each
racial demographic, forgiveness was the leading choice.
Exhibit 6. What is Necessary for Reconciliation?
All South
Africans %

Black
%

White
%

Coloured
%

75

77

63

78

60

70

20

48

78

81

64

83

65

66

64

70

71

73

56

75

62

69

29

54

National reconciliation requires South

Africans understand one another better
National reconciliation requires material
compensation for apartheid victims
National reconciliation requires people to
forgive one another
National reconciliation requires forgetting
the past
National reconciliation requires the healing
of memories
National reconciliation requires amnesty as
provided by the TRC

Source: Pilot Reconciliation Survey, 2000. Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, accessed online at
http://www.ijr.org.za/publications/publ/surveys.

78

Tutu told his nation there was no future without forgiveness. Many South
Africans, both black and white, today recognize the power for forgiveness.
Reconciliation is the outcome of a continuum, whose beginning point and medium is
forgiveness. That kind of continuum is represented in the journey experienced by
journalist and Afrikaner Antjie Krog, who wrote her own poem about the alliance of
truth, forgiveness, and reconciliation she found in the commission.
because of you
this country no longer lies
between us but within
it breathes becalmed
after being wounded
in its wondrous throat
in the cradle of my skull
it sings, it ignites
my tongue, my inner ear, the cavity of heart
shudders toward the outline
new in soft intimate clicks and gutturals
of my soul the retina learns to expand
daily because by a thousand stories
I was scorched
a new skin.
I am changed forever. I want to say:
Forgive me
Forgive me
Forgive me
You whom I have wronged, please
take me
with you.130

130

Krog, 364.

79

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