Reconciliation remains an elusive ideal

South Africa’s reconciliation project cannot survive on monuments, rituals and anniversaries alone. 

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s 2025 Reconciliation Day address at Ncome Museum in Nquthu served as a timely reminder that reconciliation remains unfinished business – demanding justice, historical honesty, psychological healing and discernible change in everyday life.

There is no gainsaying the resounding success of the National Reconciliation Day event held at the Ncome Museum on 16 December 2025. Addressing the nation under the theme Reaffirming Reconciliation for Future Generations, the President delivered a message whose historical sensitivity and moral seriousness were unmistakable. 

As is customary during Reconciliation month, South Africans were invited to pause and reflect on the country’s long and uneven journey from a violent, exclusionary past towards a shared future.

Yet beneath the familiar invocations of unity, healing and social cohesion lies a far more demanding and uncomfortable question: to what extent has reconciliation moved beyond symbolism to become a lived and material reality for the majority of citizens? 

Nearly three decades after the democratic transition, reconciliation remains one of South Africa’s most invoked ideals and one of its most elusive achievements.

Across the country, physical markers of reconciliation stand as tangible expressions of national aspiration. Sites such as the Ncome Museum, the Ncome Reconciliation Bridge and Freedom Park, along with the Freedom Park Reconciliation Road, are designed to evoke connection, restoration and forward movement.

These landmarks attempt to inscribe reconciliation into the everyday geography of the nation. Yet they also expose the tension between aspiration and lived reality, particularly when viewed through the lens of critical South African scholarship.

In Knowledge in the Blood, Jonathan Jansen offers an essential entry point into this critique. He argues that apartheid’s legacy persists not only through material inequality, but through inherited narratives transmitted across generations.

These unspoken lessons – absorbed in families, schools and communities – shape how young South Africans understand themselves and others. From this perspective, reconciliation symbols can only fulfil their promise if society confronts the historical and emotional knowledge embedded beneath enduring divisions. Without this work, symbolic gestures risk displacing the harder labour of truth-telling, empathy and transformation.

Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh extends this argument in The New Apartheid, demonstrating how apartheid did not end in 1994 but was reconstituted in new spatial, economic and institutional forms. Segregated geographies, unequal schooling systems and persistent economic exclusion continue to structure opportunity

Viewed through this lens, reconciliation landmarks reveal a profound contradiction: the rhetoric of unity coexists with deeply unequal lived realities. While a bridge may symbolise connection, many South Africans still begin their journeys from vastly unequal social starting points.

This critique is sharpened further by Rekgotsofetse Chikane in Breaking a Rainbow, Building a Nation. Chikane argues that the “rainbow nation” narrative was embraced prematurely, often suppressing unresolved tensions in favour of fragile optimism. This avoidance of discomfort has produced disillusionment, particularly among younger generations who experience democracy largely through unemployment, precarity and exclusion. 

In this context, reconciliation symbols can reflect a nation still invested in aspirational imagery while struggling to confront the hard truths beneath them.

Adding a crucial psychological dimension, Wahbie Long contends in Nation on the Couch that South Africa’s political instability and social fragmentation are rooted in collective emotional trauma – manifesting as fear, anger, humiliation, grief and mistrust. 

From this perspective, reconciliation symbols carry emotional significance, but they also reveal the depth of unresolved national pain. 

Without addressing these psychological fractures, reconciliation efforts remain partial, regardless of their symbolic prominence.

Taken together, these perspectives illuminate a persistent gap between symbolic reconciliation and substantive change. Yet this gap is not only structural or economic; it is also epistemic. One of the least acknowledged obstacles to reconciliation lies in how South Africans perceive one another across racial and cultural lines. 

Too often, individuals are reduced to racial representatives rather than engaged as thinking, morally accountable agents. This failure of discernment – the inability to distinguish between principled thinkers and the lunatic fringes that exist in every community – corrodes social trust and undermines genuine cohesion.

Reductionism thrives where historical pain remains unresolved. Race becomes a container for accumulated grievance, guilt, fear or defensiveness. In this climate, provocative statements from fringe figures are easily mistaken for the authentic voice of entire communities, while serious, good-faith thinkers are ignored or dismissed because of the identity they are assumed to represent. Complexity collapses into caricature and dialogue gives way to mutual suspicion.

Parochialism reinforces this collapse. Despite formal political integration, South African social life remains deeply segmented. Many citizens live, worship, study and socialise within relatively homogeneous worlds. These bounded spaces foster a double standard of interpretation: moral nuance is granted to “us,” while ideological rigidity is projected onto “them.” Extremism within one’s own group is excused as aberration; extremism from an out-group is universalised as essence.

This epistemic failure is not incidental to the reconciliation project; it is central to its stagnation. A society that cannot distinguish between honest argument and reckless provocation cannot deliberate productively about its future.

Nor can it build trust across differences. Reconciliation, in this deeper sense, demands not only justice and redress, but the moral discipline to judge ideas on their merits rather than on the identity of their speakers.

It is against this intellectual and moral backdrop that President Ramaphosa’s Reconciliation Day address at Ncome gains particular significance. Delivered at a site deeply embedded in contested historical memory, the speech framed reconciliation not as a completed achievement but as an ongoing, fragile national project inseparable from material justice and historical honesty.

By centering the Battle of Ncome, the address deliberately challenged the historical dominance of the Afrikaner nationalist narrative traditionally associated with 16 December. 

The explicit acknowledgement of the deaths of more than 3,000 Zulu warriors and the naming of leaders such as uDingane kaSenzangakhona, reasserted African sovereignty and resistance. Importantly, this act of remembrance was framed not as grievance or retribution but as historical truth – an essential foundation for genuine reconciliation.

The invocation of sites of repression and massacre – Sharpeville, Bulhoek, Boipatong, the Trojan Horse Massacre – reinforced a central claim echoed by Jansen, Mpofu-Walsh, Chikane and Long: reconciliation cannot exist where history is sanitised, relativised or selectively remembered. Memory, in this framing, is not an obstacle to unity but its prerequisite.

Crucially, the speech rejected the notion that reconciliation was completed with the democratic transition. The declaration “Sisabuyisana ngo-2025” (“We are still reconciling in 2025”) confronted the myth of closure directly. Persistent poverty, inequality and exclusion – particularly among the black majority – were identified as evidence of unfinished business. 

While economic transformation was affirmed as a moral imperative, the enduring tension between aspiration and material substance remained evident.

Yet the hope articulated was measured rather than triumphalist. It was grounded not in state accomplishment but in lived social realities: multilingual youth cultures, shared spaces and everyday acts of cooperation across historical divides. Reconciliation, the speech suggested, is not achieved through forgetting or denial, but through confronting injustice while refusing hatred – and through learning to see one another as reasoning human beings rather than symbolic threats.

As Reconciliation Month drew to a close, commemorative days and landmarks challenge South Africans to move beyond ceremony towards sustained action. 

Their true significance lies not in the names they bear, but in the work they demand: confronting inequality, engaging contested histories, healing emotional wounds and repairing the epistemic habits that reduce complexity to caricature.

Only when reconciliation becomes a lived, ongoing practice – rooted in justice, honesty, dignity and intellectual seriousness – will these symbolic pathways truly mark a nation that has not merely imagined reconciliation but is actively realising and living it.

Bhekamachunu H. Zwelethu Mchunu is an academic, historian and rural development practitioner with more than 20 years’ experience across various sectors.