Barry Streek
A new body to help South Africans come to terms with their past and develop the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to promote “nation- building”, is to be officially launched in Cape Town next week.
“The post-1994 years were marked by a sense of goodwill and optimism regarding reconciliation. We are now facing the hard issues that threaten to undermine peaceful coexistence,” says the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation’s first executive director, Charles Villa-Vicencio, who resigned his professorship at the University of Cape Town to take up the position.
“A more sophisticated notion of reconciliation is needed,” he says. “This will make for tougher negotiations and encounters. The good news is that it carries within the promise of real and lasting peace.”
Backed by grants from the Norwegian and Danish governments for its core funding, the institute, with Desmond Tutu as its patron and Professor Jakes Gerwel as its chair, will be launched by Constitutional Court Judge Pius Langa on May 10 with a keynote address on “Transcending a Century of Injustice”.
This will be followed the next day by a one-day workshop on the same theme, opening with a presentation, entitled “Ways of Remembering”, by the Rand Afrikaans University’s Johan Snyman, that will discuss the “similarities” between Michaelangelo’s Pieta, the woman and child statue in Bloemfontein and the 1976 Hector Petersen photograph.
Some controversy developed when the concept of the institute was first discussed, but Villa-Vicencio says he has been involved in extensive discussions with various NGOs and there appeared to be widespread support for the concept.
“We need to face the fact that we now living in a post-TRC period where a number of issues need to be addressed in civic, security, government and academic circles.
“The TRC helped place the issues of justice and reconciliation on the national agenda in an irrevocable manner. It did not resolve them. It would be nave to think it could do this in two- and-a-half years.
“But no one can deny it has helped document a past that needs to be redressed – while at the same time leaving numerous questions hanging. These questions and concerns are now the responsibility of the nation as a whole to address.”
Victims are continuing to hurt and the nation needs to redress this as well. “We would be foolish to think that failure of victims and survivors to demand restitution at the time of transition does not mean people’s expectations are not seething below the surface – waiting to erupt if not redressed. The tough issues that undermine reconciliation need to be grappled with and future scenarios facing this nation anticipated with honesty and courage.”
Villa-Vicencio says the “Transcending a Century of Injustice” theme for the launch conference, which is being funded by the Finnish Embassy and some South African businesses, is seeking to give expression to the realisation that black and white, as well as English- and Afrikaans-speaking South Africans, live with different memories of estrangement and hope.
“We will be comparing the aftermath of the South African Anglo-Boer War with the transition to democracy at the close of the century. The question is: What do we learn from these catastrophic events of the century?”
He also says the issue of a memorial and memory needs to be addressed “in an extremely sensitive way – and to allow those who suffered to decide what they see as a suitable memorial”.
The institute’s communications manager, Saviwa Minyi, says the insitute will be undertaking an extensive programme of publishing and broadcasting “human, ordinary stories about the past in accessible language”.
ENDS