the war. They want to confront their shame and guilt, embrace it, and transcend it. Dialogue about forgiveness and/or reconciliation may be the vehicle to reach that transcendence.
Unlike Germans, we South Africans had an opportunity, through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process, for public dialogue about our own past that created victims and perpetrators, beneficiaries and bystanders. In spite of the TRC process of public dialogue, however, and hardly a decade since the TRC concluded its work, we seem to be avoiding any reference to South Africa’s horrific past and its wide-ranging consequences. We have become skilled at attacking one another – black and white – in private and in public. Whites accuse blacks of benefiting from post-apartheid privilege; blacks accuse whites of attitudes that serve to perpetuate the racism of the past. What is starkly missing is dialogue that could help us to understand the forces of the past.
South Africans can learn from the introspection of the generation of Germans who are courageously facing their country’s history 60 years after Nazi atrocities in which they did not participate, and which they did not witness. The past, as the German writer Christa Wolf informs us, is not dead; it has not even passed.
We must talk about our difficult past, and how it continues to define our relationships in subtle ways. Through the dialogue about our past, we must also find a way of celebrating humanity. The heart of forgiveness does not necessarily lie in loving those around us (it definitely does not lie in hating them either). The spirit of forgiveness lies in the search – not for the things that separate us – but for something common among us as fellow human beings, the compassion and empathy that binds our human identity.
9. A wounded nation
Mail & Guardian, 23 December 2009
Listening to the comments of parishioners of St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town on a Reconciliation Day pilgrimage, I was struck by how seldom South Africans have an opportunity to express their frustrations with our adolescent democracy. I wrote this reflection 15 years after the birth of our democracy, yet the need for continued dialogue is even more pronounced today.
ON 16 DECEMBER 2009, Reconciliation Day, while many Capetonians were driving towards the beaches, the dean of St George’s Cathedral, Rowan Smith, was welcoming a group of people who had gathered for a two-hour pilgrimage. As a site of resistance against apartheid, St George’s Cathedral has long been an important symbol of peace and unity. Here, religious leaders of different faith groups joined hands with tens of thousands of South Africans during apartheid to campaign for peace. Thus the pilgrimage included stops at the Great Synagogue near the Cape Town Gardens and the Palm Tree Mosque in Long Street.
The fact that the crowd of people who joined the pilgrimage did not match the massive numbers witnessed at the Cathedral’s peace marches during the apartheid years suggests that the pilgrimage does not carry as much urgency as campaigns in the past. Yet, listening to the conversations, and watching the determination on the faces of the racially diverse crowd walking towards the Great Synagogue along the tree-lined Government Avenue in the Company Gardens, one was reminded of the hunger for dialogue among many South Africans from different racial groups.
‘We need more of these kinds of events that bring us together,’ says a middle-aged white woman as she tries to catch up with me. Her companion, a younger woman, agrees. She attended a public dialogue about reconciliation at the University of Cape Town the previous week, which addressed the challenges South Africans face in a post-apartheid society. ‘There is so much anger and negative stuff we hear and read about,’ she says, ‘but there is also a lot of hope. This is why I try to attend these events – to keep alive the hope I have for my country.’ As we leave the Great Synagogue and head towards the Palm Tree Mosque, two women, French and Italian, join me. They lament the small number of black people participating in the pilgrimage, especially those ‘from the townships’. These observations, of anger and ‘negative stuff’, and of the apparent absence of black people ‘from the townships’ in reconciliation events, capture the story of South Africa 15 years after our democracy.
While there are a multitude of ways in which one could attempt to characterise the ‘national psyche’ of South Africans in the first decade of our democracy, I would like to offer two central, related themes. On the one hand, there is a great deal of anger and frustration among black and white South Africans for reasons that are different for each group. On the other, the spirit of reconciliation and sense of hope that reverberated throughout the country during the years of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which inspired a transformed conception of politics and society, have dissipated.
Behind the anger and frustration are enduringly painful emotional experiences that could be described as collective trauma. Many white South Africans, especially those whose votes sustained the apartheid government’s oppressive rule, find it difficult to acknowledge that the social, educational and economic privileges under apartheid gave them a better life, and also created the possibility of a better future for them in the post-apartheid era.
Part of the collective denial of this status of beneficiaries has to do with the following: acknowledging that they have benefited from a system that oppressed fellow human beings, and even committed atrocities, threatens white people’s sense of humanity. They need the psychological protection that denial provides to shield them from guilt and from recognising the justifications they need to avoid confronting the fact of the injustice of apartheid. Thus many will say: ‘It is because of hard work and not privileges handed down to us by an oppressive system.’ What is missing from this assertion is that black people worked hard. Their hard work, however, was not rewarded, and did not open doors in the same way as it did for whites, for example, in the ability to invest in property. Another complicating factor is that although apartheid was understood as a system that oppressed blacks (in all their diversity), the details of the repressive system of the apartheid state were not always in plain sight. Moreover, even if they were, fear and being in a comfort zone made it difficult for many whites to question apartheid, and actually take a stand against it.
There are other reasons for the collective denial by many white South Africans that they benefited from apartheid. The racial superiority and life of privilege bestowed on many white people a kind of certainty about their future and the future of their children. There was a time when white families knew which university their children would attend, what programmes they would register for, and what company they would join afterwards. These certainties have been shattered, and for some whites the loss of these privileges has led to real emotional pain. At a group level, these emotions may be experienced as a kind of collective trauma, and may lead to feelings of victimhood.
What I am saying is that most of the anger we have witnessed among whites stems from a real sense of loss – a loss of privilege, and a feeling of powerlessness in a society that seems to privilege blacks. For the majority of black people, however, the scales of privilege are tilted towards the very few: the beneficiaries of black economic empowerment, and those with ministerial power to allocate material privileges to themselves.
So, while President Jacob Zuma says we have a constitution that guarantees human rights for all, the experience on the ground is that very little has changed, or is changing. Some schools for black learners around the country are in an appalling physical state. Some learners who pass matric from these schools have never seen a microscope, yet, when they enrol at a university, they are expected to compete with their peers as if they have had the same educational experience.
In their 1989 book Uprooting Poverty – The South African Challenge,7 Francis Wilson and Mamphela Ramphele characterised the deep economic divisions in our society as the distinction between ‘grinding poverty and massive wealth’. Twenty years later, this situation still prevails, and some may say it has become worse. The difference is that some of the massive wealth is now in the hands of a minority of blacks who are beneficiaries of the privileges of black economic empowerment.
