THE history of the Gandhian idea, its dreams of non-violence, the attempts to articulate satyagraha, swadeshi and swaraj have gone through three stages. The first was the Gandhian experiment as symbolized by the Dandi March but elaborated further through all his experiments with Truth in various ashrams. For Gandhi, ashrams were laboratories of the future where a few dreamt while the world slept. The Gandhian experiment met its major stumbling block during Partition and satyagraha was seen as an incomplete experiment forced to be reinvented time and again.

Post Indian Independence, following Gandhi’s assassination, the nation state put him in mothballs, museumizing his struggle. The Gandhian narrative soon appeared stale, in part because the Gandhian idea became essentially hagiographic rather than perceived as a set of playful explorations, deeply respectful of the ‘other’. True that movements like the anti-Narmada dam movement, the forest struggles in Chipko, the fishing struggle against large trawlers in Kerala – to name a few – all invoked his name, but Gandhi was only one of the metaphors that inspired these struggles; equally important was everything from human rights battles to liberation theology.

Ironically, the best of Gandhian ideas moved abroad, influencing the French struggles in Algeria,¹ the battles against racism in USA, the Velvet Revolution of Vaclav Havel, to list a few. Havel’s essay, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, is a classic satyagrahic tract. The jazz bands of the Nazi era too employed their own form of non-violent dissent. However, none of these struggles, no matter how inspiring, added to the epistemology of the Gandhian movement. They were more variations on a classic theme.

 

By the fifties, another archetypal figure had emerged to challenge the ‘satyagrahi’. This was the ‘guerrilla’, immortalized in epic battles by Mao and Vo Nguyen Giap. The battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and the later struggles between America and the Viet cong were classic cases of guerrilla success.² The western soldier turned out to be a high caloric consumerist hero. The bicycle became a legendary piece of technology challenging the tank in its versatility. In fact, the West invented two myths to challenge the legend of the guerrilla: Ian Fleming’s James Bond and Hollywood’s Rambo, both playing an updated Tarzan to the ascetic guerrilla. Sadly, however, the legend of the guerrilla, his innovations in technology from the sniffer which could trigger ammonia bombs to the use of azotobacters in agriculture, deteriorates. He becomes more a terrorist, an anonymous killer, indiscriminate about the use of violence.

The guerrilla and the satyagrahi thus became competitive and complementary figures in the Vietnam war, the first represented by the Vietcong and the second by Buddhist monks who sought to immolate themselves in the pursuit of peace. The anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa similarly represented the complementarity of the guerrilla and the satyagrahi. Steve Biko, Albert Luthuli, Albie Sachs, Desmond Tutu represented the satyagrahic aspect, while Chris Hani and Mandela were classic soldiers. It was Nelson Mandela’s conversion to peaceful tactics in Robin Island that eventually led to one of the most interesting attempts to create a new Gandhian paradigm, an advance beyond Dandi – the invention of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But if Mandela dreamt it, it was Desmond Tutu who thickened the dream by creating the TRC as an ethical experiment, an attempt to explore how non-violence could ethically repair a society.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission became a great challenge to both the imperialism and enlightenment models of the West. In fact, many a freedom fighter felt that when South Africa internalized the categories of the Truth Commission, imperialism and apartheid died. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was not just a challenge to imperialism, it became a threat to the categories of the enlightenment. It understood the enlightenment, possibly even internalized it, but created a hermeneutic circle outside enlightenment notions of law, rationality and justice. To understand this second quarrel one must go back to the history of the concentration camps.

 

The aftermath of the concentration camps is a complex one. The Israeli Sabra could not forgive the camp victim for conniving at his own death; concentration camp literature was often sold as pornography in Israel. For the Jew as survivor, the question of forgiveness was almost unthinkable. It banalized the very existence, the theological and ethical questions raised by the camps. In fact, to even imagine the possibility of a return to the normal was deemed ethically unacceptable. Many of the great writers who survived the camps to subsequently act as witnesses, soon found themselves irrelevant. Probably the most poignant example of such a series of events centred around Jean Amery, the Belgian philosopher and Primo Levi, the Italian chemist whose Survival in Auschwitz³ speaks for itself.

 

For Amery both forgiveness and forgetting were impossible.⁴ The camp was evil and, therefore, amnesia and erasure were not an acceptable response to evil. To adjust to rebuilding the erstwhile Nazi Germany, indifferent to their past, was unacceptable, in fact unethical. Unsurprisingly, Amery found the situation bleak and committed suicide. Levi, who wrote a long essay arguing that Amery should not have committed suicide, too followed suit sometime later. Theodor Adorno, in his imperious way, had once asked whether philosophy was possible after the camps. Amery and Levi had even gone into the question whether normalcy was possible after the camps. What seemed clear to the few as survivors, that forgiveness itself was unthinkable and unforgivable.

This comes out clearly in a classic anecdote about Simon Weisenthal, the Nazi hunter. Weisenthal talks of a Nazi who had allowed a lot of Jews to die. Now an old and suffering man, he approached Weisenthal and asked him for forgiveness, almost as an act of consolation and absolution. Weisenthal walked away, unable to forgive; later he edited a book asking whether others would have behaved differently.

The question of forgiveness becomes the implacable problem of western ethics after the camps. Hannah Arendt realized the centrality of it, almost hinting that if a new philosophy of forgiveness could be worked out, freedom and philosophy could become active once more. Nevertheless, she had to first undergo a long rite of passage before she worked out a stumbling, reluctant and eventually passionate idea of forgiving after over two decades of philosophical and political encounters. She sensed that forgiveness was not only the central question of western philosophy but central to a civilizational idea of politics. The logic and narrative of the Truth Commission thus becomes a truth experiment, a philosophical challenge to the best of the enlightenment West.

 

Western critics initially tried to subjugate it in terms of western rationality, analytical reason and punitive law. The radical evil of the camps, the West argued, went beyond the current imagination. In fact, it demanded new imaginaries, alongside an exorcism of old concepts. When the act of philosophical and political domestication did not work, the best of the West confronted the truth of the Truth Commission, desperately trying to retain it within the hermeneutic circle of the enlightenment. As Arendt once admitted, forgiveness as an idea was often relegated to theology by the idea of enlightenment. Once forgiveness as theology, as sociology, as the everydayness of a different cosmology began to threaten the West, the philosophers had to respond. This essay covers the responses of Derrida, Mamdani, Arendt, Ricoeur and Kristeva, outlining a new conversation between the satyagrahi and the categories of the Enlightenment. One will begin with Arendt as the theoretical hub of the discussion, where every other writer becomes a spoke radiating out in a different direction.

 

Hannah Arendt had already dismissed Adorno’s question about philosophy by contending that as long as language is alive, philosophy survives. But Arendt, like many others, was worried that evil, rather than creating a demonology, had become bland and sanitized. Listening to the Eichmann trials, what most haunted her was the mediocrity of the man. He was an assemblage of clichés. A cliché destroys emotion, erases intuition. One uses stock phrases to hide the absence of emotion. Guilt is not possible without emotions and the vitality of language. The mediocrity of Eichmann haunted her, goaded her into writing one of her most controversial essays.⁵

There was nothing literary or lively about Eichmann. He was no Iago and no Macbeth, nor was he a villain like Richard III. He lacked the imagination to be one. There were no Shakespearean desires or rhythms in him.⁶ In fact, it was this absence of reflexive thought that awakened Arendt’s interest in Eichmann. He lived in a world of clichés and stock phrases which governed the rhythms of life. Arendt realized that the clichés, stock phrases, adherence to standardized codes of expression and conduct serve to protect us from reality and from guilt. Eichmann lived in the domain of the neutral, the space of the functional which had no signifiers for good or bad. His mentality and his vocabulary made guilt an impossible idea. Guilt had ambiguity, irony, even a drama of denial which Eichmann was incapable of.⁷

Arendt was stumped because Eichmann invoked no classical notion of evil. She realized that he was not a creature of the past. Even more, she was frightened that he was possibly a paradigm for the future where genocide becomes guiltless when trapped between mediocrity and cliché. It was this metaphysical shock that Eichmann’s violence had no precedent, that drove her to coin the idea of ‘the banality of evil’. She could not forgive Eichmann and suggested the death sentence for him.

 

Yet, somewhere in the subconscious, the idea of forgiveness continued to haunt her. Initially she was resistant to even exploring it. She saw it as an example of the Christian idea of brotherly love. Possibly because of this very religious context, she felt that forgiveness as a concept had little to do with the public realm. Yet, by 1952, especially as she wrote The Human Condition,⁸ she was haunted by it. Within ten years forgiveness became the core concept of her work. For her, forgiveness was not just theological; it was a concept that wrecked the social, the political, the public which she saw as a conversation and a contract among equals. She saw forgiveness between equals as a sham event. Forgiveness, she also felt, was an abandoning of the social, a kind of leave taking, while revenge at least allowed one to remain close to the person. Revenge was an extension of the human, while cloying sentimentality and the asymmetry of forgiveness makes it unusable in political theory.

Yet, by 1952, she had unlearned her ideas, disentangled forgiveness from the Christian context and made ‘forgiveness and promise’ the anchors of her theory.⁹ Marie Luise Knott, the journalist and translator, chronicles her rites of passage of forgiveness from an initial dismissal to subsequently being accorded a centrality in her political theory. The creativity of Arendt lay in her ability to unlearn concepts. In unlearning, one reinvents oneself again and again. In doing so, one creates a new link between past and present. The past does not begin to be a burden and the future a closed world. Arendt realized that her closed attitude to forgiveness was in a way the very closure of politics. It made life a cliché, predictable, conventional. Freedom becomes a naiveté without emergence or surprise.

 

Louise Knott notes that Arendt became an American citizen in 1951, moving from the frying pan of the Holocaust to the new trial by fire of an emerging McCarthyism. Arendt was confronting the reinvention of evil. When McCarthy flared like America’s favourite political epidemic, anyone with a communist contact, an affiliation, either real or imagined, was seen as a suspect. Suspicion and paranoia were enough to dismiss a person. Arendt saw how actors, factory workers, writers were summoned before this new inquisition. At these kangaroo courts, the suspects were supposed to confess, renounce previous associations and worse, denounce others.

What horrified Arendt was that many of her friends, intellectuals she had long admired, had joined the bandwagon. There was a hypocrisy, a born again superficiality, that worried her. She smelt a new kind of totalitarianism working in the guise of democracy. The witch-hunts of McCarthyism echoed the slogan ‘once a communist, always a communist.’ It was an argument that one could never leave one’s past behind. The argument became more personal because Arendt’s husband, Heinrich Blucher, was once a Stalinist. The question was, does one moment of Stalinism or any other opinion or ideology condemn one for life?

 

Arendt realized that freedom and political theory demanded that no one could be imprisoned in time. In rethinking the idea of freedom, Arendt had to rework the idea of forgiveness. In rethinking forgiveness, she reworked her political theory. The creation myth of forgiveness, as a concept, allowed one to move beyond the past and unshackle the future. Now suddenly in a moment of serendipity, freedom and forgiveness possessed a new intimacy. What began as a hunch had to be crafted into the very axioms of political theory. The creativity of Arendt lay in the nature of this pilgrimage. It was a new battle against totalitarianism.

It began in the confusion of lost and traumatized friendships. People she admired like Ignazio Silone, author of the classic Bread and Wine,¹⁰ Clement Greenberg, the art critic and friend of Marcel Duchamp, Elliot Cohen – all justified McCarthyism as a lesser evil. The greater demonology of Stalinism allowed one to hollow out freedom. It was as if ideologists seemed incapable of confronting the hollowness of their theories. Yet, when political theory became disappointing, poetry came to the rescue. Poetry was more alive to language and the emerging languages of evil. Marie Louise Knott, in a remarkably dispassionate book, captures the Arendtian transition.

Knott shows that for Arendt when language is alive, politics is alive; and more that poets constitute the early warning systems against totalitarianism. Art and poetry keep concepts alive, revive them, resuscitate them, invent them at the very moment large ideologies and bureaucracies seek to freeze them into cliché. Poetry goes beyond standard glossaries and definitions and seeks the turmoil inherent in metaphor. Arendt’s encounter with Randall Jarrel and W.H. Auden, their conversations on language went a long way in unlocking her dismissal of forgiveness as a key concept in political theory.¹¹

 

Arendt realized that prejudice and platitude go hand in hand. To be open to a life of politics, one has to celebrate the protean nature of concepts, be sensitive to and sensible about their etymology but open to their promise. For her words like pity, promise, forgiveness cannot undo anything. One cannot reverse history, or even one’s responsibility for a deed. Yet, one cannot freeze history into predetermined lines, forcing history to march in directions not inherent to it. An ability to forgive and be reconciled creates future freedom of action. The future does not get hypothecated to the past. Politics, she realized, needed openness and openness comes with redefinitions. She had not yet invented anything new. Her hunch had yet to become thick description.

In 1949, Arendt visited post-war Germany. She went in order to salvage Jewish archives. As she travelled across the German wasteland, she met people, all eagerly rebuilding. Long-time Nazis and long-time victims were collaborating in an almost surreal fashion in rebuilding Germany. Some of these encounters were moving, especially the meeting with her teacher, Karl Jaspers; others were disturbing. She found Germany’s attempt at reconstruction, blind to the past, committed to undoing the unforgivable or at least forgetting it. How does one punish the hundreds of thousands of guilty people and yet somehow go on? The conventional rituals of justice demanded trial, punishment and absolution to allow a community to return to normalcy. Yet, one confronted a genocide which eluded political categories.

 

A silence about the past cannot ignore it, even as one has to develop a new yardstick for personal relations. Arendt had to revamp her old certainties, struggle to exorcise her bias to a Christian idea of forgiveness which she found cloyingly sentimental and proceed to create a new foundation for political theory and politics. Her first steps were cautious and tentative, more concessions to the reality of immediate urgencies. She wanted to distinguish between God and Man who were coupled together in the Christian idea of brotherly love. Tentatively, she suggested that friendship with former Nazis and Fascists should be permissible. All this called for was a return to community for former Nazis who were not responsible for atrocities. Such a friendship had little that was intimate. It was neither Christian nor private. It was a clearing of the air, an idea of political friendship for public spaces. More critically, she located solidarity in friendship and it is friendship that became a prelude to her theory of forgiveness.¹²

Arendt began by examining the logic of the social contract – not the grand myth of the contract but the little promises and contracts we make at every moment of our lives, the million micro-contracts and promissory notes that go to constitute the social. ‘If forgiveness and forgetting did not exist, every act would become irrevocable and the present would be dominated by the past.’¹³ Such a plethora of commitments puts freedom in a straitjacket. It is the transitory nature of these promises that allows us to remain social. The ability to forgive and to promise allows us the chance to construct a future, create the axiomatics of a new theory of freedom. It is not from any grand myth but from the micro-sociology of everyday life, the vulnerability of promise and the fictions of continuity that Arendt renewed her battle against totalitarianism by reconstructing a new model of the social. Forgiveness reinvents, restores, renews the fractures in the social and it is this that Arendt wanted to internalize and secularize. Friendships, rather than brotherly love, were to be the basis of a new political theory. It provided a return to community for former Nazis and Communists who had not committed any crimes. Friendship was a ‘political act, a recognition of plurality and possibility of a change of mind. Friendship as a symbol of human solidarity becomes the philosophical prelude to a theory of forgiveness.’¹⁴

 

A covenant with society is possible only if ‘we do not allow ourselves to be swallowed up by the powers of past and future.’¹⁵ For Arendt, it is the poetics of promising that makes the future forseeable. She argues that the promise freely given is a sign of a free community. The dialectic of promise and forgiveness makes a society possible.

To retrieve the idea of forgiveness, Arendt traces its etymology. She shows that the Greeks had no concept of forgiveness and the Romans, a residual one. For Arendt, it is Jesus who discovers forgiveness. Arendt wishes to restore to forgiveness its primal power. Forgiveness is dialogue between wrong doer and wronged; it releases the offender from the burden of the past granting him the possibility of a new beginning. There is no sentimentality about forgiveness – it is not like remorse, a wish to undo wrongs, but an acceptance of wrongs and yet a wish to go beyond it. Here one does not undo the past; one only wishes to rewrite a future. Forgiveness, as an act of free will, allows for freedom on both sides. Its mutuality goes beyond the one sidedness of brotherly love. Forgiveness no longer partakes in the divine will but is this-worldly.

 

Visualized as an act of two free individuals, the concept can be transferred to the political realm, becoming the condition for the very freedom of a community where only through this constant mutual release, this freeing of each other, can society be possible. Every act of forgiveness is a new possibility of freedom. It is located in a shared humanity, a faith that our solidarity is stronger than what divides us. It goes beyond logic and a decision to forgive goes beyond reason. Arendt was seeking to domesticate a force beyond rationality and calculation, something primal which if domesticated could be the bases of society; a human act that promises a miracle but is rooted in everydayness.

Arendt sensed she was reducing to prose a concept which has something ineffable, which has a touch of poetry, which can be described but not fully articulated. There is a drama here which needs to be grasped. It was Auden who first pointed out that forgiveness cannot be tied to conditions, but has to be unconditional. Arendt, in reply, wanted to articulate a world not based on charity or love, which summons both arrogance and humility. Friendship has a more human quality. It allows for a tinkering of the self and the other. It allows for the interpersonal based as it is on respect for the other. It allowed Arendt to escape from the Christianity implicit in personal forgiveness.

Forgiveness now becomes a political covenant, a heuristic for our shared humanity. Arendt realized it was an outline, an act of exorcism, a statement of homecoming but her struggle to locate political theory on an axiology of forgiveness triggered other exercises which deepened her work. Paul Ricœur, who met Arendt in the seventies at the New School for Social Research, elaborates on them in his epic book on freedom, forgetting and forgiving. What Arendt depicts almost as an act of desperation, Ricœur converts into a monument to memory and hope. What emerges as a scaffolding, an act of searching for one, becomes a quieter act of reflection and reflectiveness or the other. A classic commentary becomes a footnote for a streetfighters battle for clarity and sanity. Ricœur’s work is as much a memorial to Arendt as a commentary on memory and forgiveness. Yet something abstract enters in. It is as if the immediacy of architecture gives away to the abstractness of an architectonic. In Arendt one hears the music of politics. In Ricœur, one confronts the presence of a musical score waiting to be played out.

 

Paul Ricœur calls forgiveness an intruder, a third term placed between the centrality of memory and forgetting.¹⁶ Forgiveness, says Ricœur, constitutes the horizon common to memory, history and forgetting.¹⁷ The word ‘horizon’ provides both the sweep and indistinctness of the problem because a horizon unlike a boundary slips away. Since one never knows when an act is complete, therefore, Ricœur admits that, ‘If forgiveness is difficult to give and to receive, it is just as difficult to conceive of.’ Part of it is a problem of scale, of the disproportion that exists between the poles of fault and forgiveness, between ‘the vertical disparity between the depth of fault and the heights of forgiveness.’¹⁸ It becomes the labour of a philosophical Hercules to bridge, to frame the equation between the avowal of a fault and the hymn of forgiveness, a tension carried to breaking point between the unpardonable nature of moral evil and the impossibility of forgiveness. Yet, as Derrida claimed, it is the impossibility of forgiveness that makes it possible.

 

Ricœur talks of a trajectory of forgiveness, a narrative odyssey which leads forgiveness step by step back from regions most distant from the intimacy of selfhood. It traces a song-line from the most public of institutions (judicial, political and the moral in a social sense) which captures the layers of public accusation to a level where forgiveness cannot be captured by institutions dealing with the inability to accurately define imprescriptibility of crimes. Forgiveness can find its place only at the margins, in gestures which are incapable of capture by institutions. We meet literally the incognito of forgiveness.¹⁹

At the second level, we create a reciprocity, an equation, a fictive balance between the request for forgiveness and the offering of forgiveness. This appeals to primordial possibilities for, as Ricœur says, there is a kinship in many languages between giving and forgiving. One explores the mind-boggling possibility here that the love of one’s enemy can appear as a model for establishing exchange at a non-market level. Forgiveness breathes of excess and demands an economic dream of an idea of exchange. A symmetry, a fiction of equality, is proposed between the request and the offer of forgiveness.

Ricœur’s essay is a meditation on the ineffable quality of forgiveness and the absence of institutions for forgiveness. There is an alchemical quality at the core of forgiveness that one must recognize and testify to.

At the core of the narrative is a sense of accounting and accountability. There must both be an authorship and a responsibility for a crime. Ricœur calls it imputability, the capacity, the attitude by which actions can be held to someone’s account. It is in the region of imputability that guilt is sought. Guilt recognizes a relationship between the what and the who of actions.

 

Yet, evil creates problems beyond rules and regulations. Evil demands an understanding of excess of the non-valid, an excess that goes beyond a yardstick measured by rules, beyond the standard contradictions of valid and invalid. Excess belongs to the world of the unacceptable. What happens when evil goes beyond the standard notions of what is justice and what is pardonable? It is as if forgiveness, in going beyond the boundaries of law, needs a creation myth of a different kind, because forgiveness goes beyond contract and invokes the primordial. The unforgivable needs imaginaries beyond the grid of current categories.

There is a height, a sense of the above about forgiveness. It needs the language of a hymn, as Derrida says, ‘Forgiveness is directed to the unforgiveable or it does not exist.’²⁰ It is unconditional, without exceptions and without restriction. Forgiveness creates imaginaries beyond the standard notions of legal accounting, of crime and punishment. It connects, it implies a cosmic algebra connecting two infinities. It is the torrent one continually faces between the depths of a fault and the height of forgiveness.

 

Derrida also adds that it is no longer Christian. It is being universalized through a Christianization that no longer needs the Christian Church. It is a globalization that empties forgiveness of content, confusing it with pardon and amnesty. What was once a hymn, a ceremony of guilt is now staged, where theatricality often empties forgiveness of authenticity. One faces a vaudeville of forgiveness where the epic primodialism of forgiveness is banalized. It is a forgiveness that becomes instrumental, that stages a performance that bowdlerizes the enigma of forgiveness. As a result, Derrida calls for the universal urgency of memory which challenges the parasitism of such ceremonies now epidemic in many post-dictatorships where pardon becomes an erasure of history and a banalization of guilt. Ricœur warns that, ‘Forgiveness cannot seek to establish a normalcy either through a work of mourning, or a ritual of therapy. Forgiveness is not, and it should not be either normal, normative or normalizing. It should remain exceptional and extraordinary, standing the test of the impossible defying the course of historical temporality.’²¹

In tracing the career of forgiveness through public institutions, Ricœur begins with the juridical. A connection is established between forgiveness and punishment as one can only forgive what can be punished. Forgiveness does not enter at this level because forgiveness does not seek impunity from justice. One has to go beyond the circle of accusation and punishment for forgiveness to enter. In a pluralistic sense, forgiveness does not need the request for forgiveness but at a practical level, a correlation is established between a forgiveness requested and granted. One moves from the unilateral to the domain of exchange. Yet, it would be ‘overhasty to equate or assimilate forgiveness to an exchange defined by reciprocity alone.’ It is when talking of forgive-ness in terms of the economy of the gift that Ricœur acquires classic overtones. There is a verticality to forgiveness that defies any reciprocity of exchange. Forgiveness goes beyond the banality of contract or market.

Marcel Mauss’ classic essay on the gift proclaims that the gift always demands a return.²² Yet, forgiveness moves from exchange to love and love is unilateral. One loves enemies unconditionally. It is this impossibility that matches the stature of forgiveness. Now the absolute measure of the gift is not reciprocity but love of one’s enemies. There is an excess, an extravagance to forgiveness that no economic model can match.

Once an economic model is created, one returns to the intimacy of the self, clear that there is no politics to forgiveness. All that remains is that one separates the agent from the act. The guilty person can then begin again. The enigma of forgiveness remains in its excessiveness, in its plea to claim the person has a potential beyond his acts. Forgiveness is not a sociology but an eschatology going beyond the current horizon of understanding.

 

The theories of forgiveness continuously struggle between theology and psychoanalysis. For Julia Kristeva, forgivingness is a two-fold problem. Both politically and theologically, western political theory does not have the concepts, the tacit requirements that make forgiveness fit within the dominant paradigm of the social contract. The language of secularism and rationality found itself as alien in the costume ball of forgiveness. It was as if its performative requirements made the conceptual frames of western philosophy and law sound procrustean. Forgiveness was eventually delegated to theology. Yet, critiques of Christianity following Nietzsche, saw it as equally problematic because forgiveness, they claimed, added to Christianity’s inauthenticity. It was symptomatic of ‘depredation, moral softening and a refusal of power’, which were all seen as symptoms of a decadent Christianity.²³ Kristeva cites Nietzsche condemning the perversion of Christianity that he denounces in Pascal. Yet, Kristeva sees in Dostoevsky’s the possibility of aesthetic forgiveness.

 

Forgiveness needs a rebirth. The ordinary body of the Christian, whether mean or emboldened by suffering, cannot forgive. Even ‘the dead Christ’ could not forgive. In fact, forgiveness needed Christ to be re-born, to be resurrected. It smacks of a miracle in Christianity, and in Dostoevsky ‘forgiveness is almost madness’.²⁴ It is Prince Myshkin who displays the symptoms of forgiveness along with his convulsive fits. Prince Myshkin, in fact, is seen as a ridiculous figure, an idiot, because he holds no grudges. Insulted, jeered at, humiliated, even threatened with death, Myshkin is ready to forgive. As Kristeva remarks ‘mercy finds in him, a psychological fulfilment.’ Even when his suffering is grotesque, there is an alchemical power to his forgiveness. It is not as if the horror disappears, and yet, he has the power to forgive. A character who begins as a stranger, even an outcaste, displays almost discretely the qualities of spiritual leadership. Dostoevsky illustrates the impossible drama of forgiveness, a rite of passage out of the liminality, by anyone caught between dejection and murder.

 

A reconciliation with the other becomes a prelude to a reconciliation with oneself. The self becomes more lovable. It needs a pilgrimage through the horrors of hell, where a body standing at the threshold of crime and evil, struggling between dejection and murder, sublimates itself in that rare dream of transcendence that we call forgiving.

For Kristeva, forgiveness is a historical severing of links between cause and effect, crime and punishment. It is a loving harmony that is aware of its violence but accommodates it. Given its timelessness, it is understandable that many believe God alone can forgive. Forgiveness is a love that excludes one from history for a while as when Raskolnikov and Sonia enact the scene of forgiveness in the epilogue to Crime and Punishment. For Dostoevsky, there is no beauty outside forgiveness. Eastern Christianity, he argues, was more open to the poesies of forgiveness as a performance. Sadly, the fathers of the Latin Church who were more analytically inclined, logicized the trinity creating a rational essence. As a result, the western Church gained in autonomy and rationality while it lost at the level of identification. Difference and identity, rather than autonomy and equality build up the Eastern trinity; which became a source of ecstasy and mysticism.²⁵

Kristeva makes a fascinating point that the spoken word, evoking affect, is needed for forgiveness. Writing, she feels, creates the logic of effect rather than affect, destroying performance. One wishes that Kristeva had explored the theological roots of forgiveness in South Africa. Instead, she creates a parallel narrative by looking at forgiveness as a part of psychoanalytical act, contending that confession and the dialogue of signs that forgiveness needs is available only in the space of privacy. Her categories are clear. The private allows for the intimacy of forgiveness; in contrast, the space of the public is the space of the social contract, of rationality, of the logic of punishment. In fact, forgiveness as an effect has to be confined to the private.

 

The theological distinctions she draws between eastern and western Churches creates a fascinating space for forgiveness. Had her studies of theology extended to Ubuntu, it would have given her new insights, not only into the Truth and Reconciliation Commission but the role of Desmond Tutu as the Prince Myshkin of the post-apartheid regime. As idiot, trickster, as a master of the oral space, Tutu created the world of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission showing that forgiveness opens new worlds. Rather than respond to history as a text of effects, Ubuntu opens up to the orality of affect creating new possibilities, allowing South Africa, like a collective Dostoyevsky, to find in forgiveness the space between decadence and murder.

It is almost as if in their desperation to retain the secular and the analytical, western theorists stumble over the theological. Jacques Derrida, from whom one might have expected the masterpiece of Truth and Reconciliation Commission, produces at one level what can only be called a cliché. He stumbles over what might be called the banality of forgiveness found in the public act of amnesty and pardon. Amnesty and pardon come from the world of effect, of writing, of text. They are side shows of the dominant logic of punitive law which the Tokyo and Nuremberg trials expressed.

 

Forgiveness as an aural/oral performance, where one creates history by denying history, needed an Ubuntu like script enacted by Tutu. Forgiveness cannot be subjected to the logic of cost-benefit analysis. The cathartic and the confessional enacted in the rituals of public space open out a new space, not the transcendental aesthetic of forgiveness but the everyday ethic of love and ethical repair. A South Africa which remained paranoid could never forgive. The logic of social contract, in terms of the predictable logic of punishment, profit and loss, as a mode of accountability shifts to a rite of passage which creates rituals of emergence and surprise where it is not the rationality of law that works but the power of love and community.

Love and logic need a performativity which only a Tutu and the community could create. By playing chorus, clown, commentator, mentor, guide, friend, victim, translator, by insisting that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was scripted to go far beyond its contractual or impoverished South American variants, Tutu enacted a ritual process, an epistemic drama which entered daily into South Africa homes, not just in English but in seven tribal language, triggering a subconscious which the English language alone could not have. In fact, as Antjie Krog shows, the idioms Tutu and the black African Xhosa use is very different from the language that Alex Borraine and other members of Truth and Reconciliation Commission oriented to analytical Anglo-Saxon law, employ. Borraine interprets in secular terms a cosmic act taking place in intuitive indigenous idioms, a ritual drama to which the ordinary South African responded to without prompting.

Kristeva as a linguist, a psychoanalyst, attempts to tell the forgiveness story twice, first, as someone exploring how religion and theology react to suffering and forgiveness and second, as a psychoanalyst looking at language and ontology of forgiveness today. If the first meditation on Doestoyevsky is profound, the second on psychoanalysis is grammatical.²⁶ Kristeva is categorical that forgiveness belongs to the intimacy of the private sphere of human interaction. This statement has many layers and implications. For Kristeva, the psychoanalytical act expresses a continuity with the religious function.

 

Second, the distinction between private and public is immaculate. The public is the space of the social, the domain of law and punishment. The social contact would collapse if the public were not the domain of punishment. The public discourse has to be the domain of condemnation, of a settling of accounts. The social sphere is the domain of Arendtian judgment, where a community maintains itself by creating laws that are impossible to transgress. Forgiveness. like analytical cure, has to be individual and private. Thus forgiveness is based on the intimacy of confession and the individual. There is a provincialism here that one finds difficult to accept. Story telling by victims is a public act. But what Kristeva sees in storytelling is not reconciliation; rather, that speaking about trauma is crucial to forgiveness. Yet she is poignantly correct in seeking forgiveness as ‘more than a single occurrence.’ It is a way of perceiving the world that demands continuous renewal.

 

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s idea of forgiveness is often dismissed as an alchemical world akin to some idea of spontaneous combustion. Rather, it is a many layered concept involving layers of adept craftsmanship. It involves building new ideas of the social but most particularly an idea of moral or ethical repair. Oddly, it is not to philosophy or social science that one turns to for such concepts but to literature. Margaret Urban Walker points out the power of the idea of moral repair that underlies Toni Morrison’s novel, Jazz.²⁷

Jazz is an unsentimental tale of a murder and its aftermath. Joe Trace, fifty and finished, hunts down his eighteen-year-old girlfriend Dorcas and shoots her. The murder takes place in Harlem in the 1920s. Joe’s wife Violet invades Dorcas’ funeral and slashes her rivals’ face. Yet, she cannot forget Dorcas and eventually puts a picture of the murdered girl on her mantel, mourning her. Joe joins her by the window both creating night time vigils over the young face.

Violet obtained the picture of Dorcas from Alice, Dorcas’ aunt who brought the girl up. She used to visit the aunt and stand forlornly at the door. At some stage the aunt lets her in and slowly ‘something opens up’. Little strands of conversation punctuate the silence. Quietly Alice, who is a seamstress, begins to mend Violets’ ragged clothes. One day she puts her iron down and burns a hole through the shirtwaist. Suddenly they both rock with a laughter ‘more complicated, more serious than tears.’

Slowly Joe, Violet and Alice take to each other. It is more than a companionship of mourning. One day they start to dance with each other, listening to the music floating through the window. In spring, Joe takes another job and life resumes. In fact, the opening paragraphs of the story begin with Violet letting her pet birds out of their cages to freeze. In the final pages, she nurtures a sick bird. At the end of the novel, the narrator admitted that she waited for these people to kill each other. Violence and a repetition of violence seemed inevitable.

‘That the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack and no power on earth could stop, lift the arm that held the needle… Busy, they were busy being original, complicated, changeable and human; I guess you’d say while I was the unpredictable one. It never occurred to me that they were thinking other thoughts, feeling other feelings, putting their lives together in ways I never dreamed of.’²⁸

Morrison does not downplay the violence. In fact, the novel unfolds the full history of violence, slavery, the loss that enfolds all of them. Many of them were abandoned children; many witnessed and felt the trauma of race riots. Morrison in fact asks how does one label one a victim and the other a perpetrator.

 

Moral repair is about rebuilding decency, trust and hope after massacres and genocides, knitting together a sense of responsibility, and community after violence has eroded us, dulled us and left us disconnected. It is an act of coping and it is also an act of inventiveness by rebuilding value while understanding its vulnerability. Gardener admits that for far too long philosophical decisions of wrong doing have been absorbed in the rituals of blame and punishment, of seeking a proportion between the two and calling that justice. Yet, such an act somehow leaves morality incomplete. It is as if a contract is complete but an act of healing needs something more. Moral repair fixes responsibility but also goes beyond to replenish trust and hope.

 

For Gardener, Toni Morrison’s novel captures in a miniature the epic narratives of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She adds that critiques of Truth and Reconciliation Commission move between a sense of retributive justice and the suspicion of amnesty. Justice as retributive justice is a ritual of returning good for good and evil for evil. Amnesty is an evasion of punishment, an attempt to create a culture of impunity. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s idea moves beyond amnesty and retribution to an idea of restoration and reparative justice, a retrieval of dignity through acts of storytelling. It creates a sense of participatory justice, providing victims a chance to tell their story, creating a space for vindication rather than vindictiveness. If justice is an act of balance, of harmony, forgiveness produces the balm of excess, the exuberance of healing. If justice is the inner core of recovery, one realizes mere justice is not enough. Repair, healing, trust, a belief in decency have to be added for society to recover and this only comes with the alchemy of forgiveness and an invention of concepts and categories that heal. Morrison’s novel sets the right stage, the moment for a more direct reading of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The history of colonialism and its aftermath is often read within the geometry of the centre-periphery model. The Centre is often read as the source of classics, canonical texts and paradigms, while the periphery is a consumer, a secondary source of ideas and often the object of the experiment. Such a model, while it overthrows the oppressor, does not liberate one from the framework of ideas. Pre-occupied with power and hegemony, the centre-periphery model lacks a sense of playfulness, of plurality. It is caught in the puritarianism of power and hegemony.

 

Indian writers like A.K. Ramanujan and U.R. Ananthamurthy, have instead suggested the idea of frontyard and backyard as a model for creativity.²⁹ The frontyard is official, male, patriarchal, hegemonic, while the backyard is intimate, feminine, the domain of storytelling. Nehru and Jinnah are often seen as frontyard intellectuals; Tagore and Gandhi as backyard forces. Ananthamurthy argued that the second model domesticated hegemony and indigenized external forces in a more creative way. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is all too often read within the logic of the centre-periphery model. Any movement becomes an evaluation of our sense of western ideas or a test of western logic. This essay suggests that it is more fruitful to read it the Indian way, as an act of cultural confidence shrugging off the imperialism of categories. It is this epic drama and the western reading of it that this essay explores. How does one read an event like the Truth Commission?

There are concepts of the head which need to be concepts of heart. An intellectual or analytical interpretation will not do, nor will cost-benefit analysis. What we needed are swadeshi (local, indigenous, vernacular concepts, worldviews) which are swarajist (global) in context. These are concepts which take a term and idea and embed and embody it so that it becomes part of the tacit Constitution of a society. They are not verbal wrappers with which we project a society, a tourist word association list. If they act as mnemonics, they are primordial enough to seed the unconscious. Extended to new domains of law and politics, they create new possibilities.

To understand this emic world, etic concepts will not do. In fact, the western Anglo-Saxon model becomes provincial, even dismissive of such a world and its worldview. As Antjie Krog said: ‘We are a society of persons and not ideas.’ Here, relations and community become important. The concepts come alive not in the analytical world of the social contract but as ideas of community. Yet these are not parochial worlds or words. They have a cosmopolitan sensitivity. In fact, they seem more cosmopolitan, more open ended than the West studying South Africa. They have the confidence to be vulnerable rather than exclusive or hegemonic.

 

South Africa does not deny its modernity, nor that its law is hybrid, a mix of tribal and western systems. What it insists on is that different cosmologies talk to one another. One cannot begin by saying that western philosophy from Aristotle to Kant is sacrosanct and that the rest is ‘ethno-philosophy’. There is a sense of contempt, of hierarchy in the word ‘ethno’. It stresses the informal, the local, ‘the lesser than’. There might be equivalence but there is no equality. Pluralism is that search for epistemic equivalence while recognizing differences in identity and ideas. As one traverses different languages and different worlds, one needs a new concept of epistemic brokerage. The reader is now translator; he mediates between different worlds, looking for equivalence between forms while sensitive to their integrity and identity. It is often a search for a word and a world that becomes an open sesame to a different world, seeks a holism where Babel existed before Ubuntu was one such world. It implies interconnectedness and whole-ness, a sense of the individual as being incomplete without the other. Or better put, it implies that the individual is atomistic while the person is a ganglion of connections and possibilities.

 

The western records of the Truth Commission reduce it to a local Esperanto, an indigenous idiom. In fact, they do not give it the status of a worldview. The parochialism the West displays is seen in the tardy equivalences offered, where Ubuntu implies pardon or amnesty. One critic in fact described it as a chocolate wrapper, a sugar coating to make unpalatable concepts swallowable. The straightjackets of interpretation were self-imposed. Instead of affably condemning it as a local pidgin, one should have sensed the interpretative power of the concept, its many layered creativity.

Ubuntu goes beyond the standard idea of a social contract. In fact, the idea of the social contract sounds formal, inhibited, even impoverished before the sense of the primordial, the dream of connectedness that brought a different understanding to the rules and rituals of the Commission. The pluralistic power of the Truth Commission lay in the simultaneity of its multiple readings. It was a ritual conducted in English and seven other African languages, where a word might have triggered different worlds of meaning.

Antjie Krog, probably the greatest storyteller of the Truth Commission testifies to its ubiquitousness, the pervasiveness of the word, its ability to clarify and connect what looked like desperate or confusing positions. As she put it in the abstract to one of her papers, ‘The pervasiveness of this world view… is noticeable and shows how often the critique of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission fails to take its dominant role into account and recognize how many, seemingly contradictory or confusing positions become coherent when regarded within this world view.’³⁰

Ubuntu, a habit of the heart is also a heuristics of the mind. Desmond Tutu took the concept and gave it a new polysemic force. By being simultaneously an interpreter, trickster, priest, inventor, he created a new life force around Ubuntu. Ubuntu cannot be limited to an abstract ethno-philosophy. It comes alive through exemplars at many levels who embody and enact the lived power of the concept. If Tutu was its best exemplar, the South African poet/journalist, Antjie Krog became its best anthropologist by making herself vulnerable to the power and inventiveness of the concept. She is one of the best of its storytellers, literally the Scheherazade of the Truth Commission, playing both Kafka and Alice as the Commission moved across the country creating a web of memory and storytelling.

 

The power of Krog’s effort lay not only in the sincerity of storytelling. She is simultaneously listener and interpreter, analyst and case study, producing an ethical and philosophical engagement that deserves to be honoured. Her very vulnerability as a listener opens up a whole narrative of healing. Critics have often been dismissive of the style of the book presenting it as a collage, a pastiche, a quilt patch of ideas, anecdotes and reflections. Yet, they miss the fact that the book is, in a Gandhian sense, a truth experiment, where each story is tested on the reflexivity of the journalist self.

At about the same time the Russian journalist, Svetlana Alexivich, studied the last years of Communist Russia in similar terms. She became the first journalist to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Krog’s efforts on behalf of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission are equally epic and equally heroic. If Tutu plays the Dostoevskian idiot as hero of the Commission, Krog plays the equivalent idiot, becoming storyteller to the travails of the commission. Both create an ethics of responsibility and inventiveness around a word which defines both a cosmos and a community, Ubuntu.

 

One must add two further points to understand the Truth Commission and how it thickens the idea of cognitive justice. The first is that many of the most acute philosophers of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and of the idea of forgiveness have been women. They created a sense of craftsmanship and vulnerability to the subject which linked body and body politic in versatile ways. This holds true whether one thinks of Arendt, Krog, Kristeva or Toni Morrison. The second observation centres around the polysemy of the narrative. The storyteller is both lens, mirror and kaleidoscope. She brings a certain dispassionate objectivity to the narrative, even keeps a distance as she focuses the power of a lens creating clarity, a lucidity in what one sees. The objectivity of the lens also needs the self-reflectivity of the mirror where a critique of the other becomes a contouring of the self. Third, the narrative becomes a kaleidoscope of possibilities, and hypothesis, a Russian novel of concepts, anecdotes and contestations, a fable but also an epic exercise. In fact, the effort, when genuine, is so strenuous, that apart from the witness, it is the listener who breaks down. Krog mentions that all the key participants and journalists suffered some form of breakdown requiring an act of counselling. The suffering of the witness is reciprocated in the pain, the intensity of listening.

 

An anthropologist surveying the classic literature on forgiveness in western philosophy cannot but be awed by the great shamans of philosophy. Reading Arendt, Derrida, Ricœur or Kristeva, one realizes that they go beyond the faded oppositions of left and right, national and global. They recognize the West as their ambit and their responsibility. Yet, in a deep way, they are content within the West, almost indifferent to innovations beyond. They emphasize the classical and are happy with its music. If they sense discordance, they go back to origins to the Greeks or to the Bible to fine-tune an argument. For them, the West is two parallel circles, secular and theological, and they become the gatekeepers and the grammarians of these hermeneutic circles. Their attempt is to save the Enlightenment is heroic.

The history of the concentration camps raised two sets of paradigmatic problems beyond Adorno’s almost rhetorical question, ‘Is philosophy possible? At a more concrete level, between the camps and the bombing of Hiroshima, philosophers had to ask whether these events were scientific experiments and part of the normalcy of science. Calling it bad science attempts to save the phenomena, but is not quite convincing. It is only with the works of Robert J. Lifton, Zygmunt Bauman and Robert Jungk that the West finally took a more epistemological look at the relation between science and evil.

Yet, even there, one witnesses a desperation to save the integrity of the Enlightenment circle. No national border excites the passionate intellectual commitment that this bunch of guardians exerts to save the logic of the enlightenment. These great philosophers behave like priests guarding a great legacy, the sanctum sanctorum of the enlightenment. Yet, as one sees Derrida treats forgiveness as an epidemic or Arendt draws epicycles around friendship to make sure the Enlightenment retains its secular integrity, or Kristeva confine forgiveness to the private or psychoanalytical space, one wonders about the fate of the dialogic self that the dreams of plurality and cognitive justice require. Is the western writing on the Truth Commission basically an act of boundary maintenance, a conceptual policing that doesn’t not allow for translation, that insists along with Derrida that forgiveness is Abrahamic? Such a lens reduces the biculturalism of Desmond Tutu to a mimic phenomenon. Tutu is presented as secondary, a country idiot, naïve in articulation, courageous, but quiet cognitively illiterate. Yet, what if Tutu is not a village idiot but a Dostoevskian one; what if that naiveté is the gateway to an alternative paradigm?

 

Indeed, the Truth Commission was a thought experiment conducted with passion and daring. Does the Truth and Reconciliation Commission die a quick death because the standard cost-benefit analysis of crime and punishment do not fit it well? Or is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission a reminder that the western experiments in ethical space have been tame, almost apologetic in lived space and public realms? Can the West sleep comfortably claiming that Truth Commissions in the West, in Bosnia, even Latin America, did not work and that Justice is still embodied in the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials? Does writing off the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as an act of ethno-philosophy save western law with its sense of punitive justice? Can the invention of the idea of ethical repair, confession as public healing, the prospect of an alternative cosmology be pushed away as an act of exoticism, not quite relevant for the everyday rationality of the West?

 

Oddly the first answers to many of these exciting and intriguing questions come from a journalist, a Boer poet whose double identity as Boer and as someone at home in western thought makes it even more significant. The work of Antjie Krog deserves a more serious reading. For its honesty, its vulnerability, for its Scheherazade-like approach to Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Country of my Skull became one of the seminal books of the era.³¹ In her modest way, Krog plays both storyteller and philosopher and succeeds almost unpretentiously. Krog may not be an Arendt, but her dialogic openness, her ethical sense of cognitive brokerage between different thought systems creates a work, a discourse the Arendts and Kristevas have to contend with.

Krog’s work has to be read twice, first as an act of storytelling and then, as a reflective commentary on her own attempt to tell the truth while realizing one lives in a world of multiple truths. Krog’s work reminds one of Max Weber’s claims in looking at the contradictions of history, claiming he wanted to see how much tension he could stand. The confusion of living in multiple worlds and multiple histories creates vulnerability and risk and yet to a dialogical self, open to rival epistemes and philosophical insights, it can equally be a moment of a new illumination. Krog in that sense is not just a reporter. Her reportage is thick description for an act of epistemic brokerage encompassing dialogue and translation. It breaks through the provincialism of western reporting embracing pluralist possibilities for a South African society.

 

Probably the best way to enter Krog’s work is to begin with her own reflections about her book. Krog’s essays are acts of clarification, anecdotes and about learning. She suggests quietly that the South African Truth Commission was different from other commissions, not just for its legal innovations but for the idiom in which it was conceptualized. What she really wishes to emphasize is that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission took place in a different cultural idiom. The idea of labyrinth is central to it. Krog hints that the great tragedy of the Truth Commission was that it was misread as a secondary document or a derivative document. It was read as a Christian manifestation, a mimicry of western Anglo-Saxon law, and as critics added, both were wrapped in a coating of Ubuntu to make them more digestible. Ubuntu was seen as a folklore concept, a piece of ‘ethno-philosophy’, a secondary or even tertiary framework of understanding. What was central to the South African imagination, a core concept embedded deep within its cultural unconscious, was shrugged off as a Pollyanna-like term, to be treated contemptuously and dismissed as incidental. A concept which was kernel was abandoned as husk, chaff to be dumped and forgotten.

Richard Wilson’s oft quoted remark is cited here. He notes that Ubuntu was ‘a wrapping used to sell a reconciliatory version of human rights talk back to South Africa.’³² The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was projected as a softer idea of rights wrapped up in a local idiom. Commentators read it as a babel of concepts, a bedlam of confusion, a holdall selling an assorted bundle of palatability to competing groups in South Africa and the world. Krog points out that few understood the polysemic power of the concept, demanding its own thesaurus of meanings. The idea of Ubuntu was dismissed as a reductive piece of populist pan-Africanism, a sugar-coated version of South Africa which could have a little to please everyone. It was seen as crude, philistine, instrumentalist but few saw it for it was, a weltanschaung, a gestalt sustaining a plural world view with multiple meanings, a ganglion of ideas which linked up human rights, restorative justice, reconciliation healing and new vision of post-Apartheid South Africa. A slapstick theory of misreading creates a moment of conceptual loss. Krog points out that unless one begins with Ubuntu as the gestalt which embeds the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, one will never grasp the logic of its drama. A failure of her-meneutics, a rasping ethnocentric affability almost destroys the perception of a great ethical and conceptual experiment.

 

Once one accepts the underlying term called Ubuntu, the terms of discourse change. The pervasiveness of Ubuntu clarifies several confusions as it becomes text, context and pretext for a new set of readings. Ubuntu reflects a process, a perpetual ritual of a need for interconnectedness moving towards wholeness. It knits the self as being, realizing that a true process of becoming only becomes possible by relating to the other as person and as environment. It is a conceptual world which includes ancestors as well as the present. Second, the words forgiveness and reconciliation are intrinsic parts of the same process, two sides of a coin. Forgiveness presents a change in the harmed party, while reconciliation implies a change in both parties.

Krog quotes researchers to show that forgiveness and reconciliation are intimately connected. If forgiveness abandons the desire for revenge, recon-ciliation reflects the mutual acceptance of formerly hostile groups to each other. Krog adds that the Xhosa word for reconciliation reflects the mutual acceptance of formerly hostile groups to each other. Read thus, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, rather than being an alien piece of transfer of technology, an implant injected onto a reluctant people, is actually a local world view, an emic invention demanding its own rules of reading.

 

This does not make the West alien or untrue but, in a true spirit of hospitality and cosmopolitanism, it becomes a subset of a different world. It is no longer a universal truth, but one option in a plural world of possibilities. Instead of the ethnocentric contempt and dismissal of the western narratives, what we have is an indigenous notion of hospitality open not just to the West, but to the vast world of the vernaculars, each adding the richness of its idiom to the oceanic idea of Ubuntu. It is not the language of experts one has to refer to using citation and footnote but the language of everydayness, intuitively articulating its understanding of complex concepts. It is they who make the Truth and Reconciliation Commission come alive to the cosmos and community of Ubuntu.

Krog cites an example from the second week of the hearings. One of the Black perpetrators involved in the killing of seven people (an askari) asked for a meeting with the mothers of the seven in order to ask for forgiveness. Krog cites from a translation broadcast over SAB radio.³³

‘This thing called reconciliation… if I am understanding it correctly… if it means this perpetrator, this man who has killed Christopher Peet (her son), if it means he becomes human again, this man, so that I, so that all of us, get our humanity back. Then I agree, then I support it all.’³⁴

In a few simple sentences, the mother spells out what interconnected towards-wholeness-means and the role of reconciliation in it.

 

There is no denial of murder. In fact, one begins by confronting the fact. The mother understood that the man facing her had killed her child and killed him because he had lost his humanity. The askari was no longer human. Yet, she also understood that she had to forgive him so that the possibility for him to regain his humanity could open up again. Third, she understood that the loss of her son affected her own humanity. Fourth and most important, she understood the importance that if the perpetrator felt driven by her forgiveness to regain his humanity, then it would open up for her the possibility of becoming human again.

For Krog, what is remarkable is the fluency of understanding, the intuitive grasp of concepts, the ability to recognize evil and yet create a sense of empathy for the perpetrator. Ubuntu, is the rubric, for this phenomenology of understanding. It is an everydayness of understanding that goes beyond Christian theology.

Krog differentiates a Christian concept of forgiveness from an Ubuntu’s sense of the world. This is critical because it is Ubuntu rather than Christianity that provides the tacit knowledges, the tonality, the texture, the colour and eventually the grammar within which to understand the hearings.

A Christian forgiveness follows the image of God. God forgives me, so I forgive you. The reward is in heaven. Christian forgiveness separates forgiveness and reconciliation. For Ubuntu, forgiveness is here on earth. It is ritual of healing, the possibility of achieving personhood on earth. Christianity allows one to reconcile without forgiving and forgiveness without reconciling. Krog quotes the Boer General Groneveld who refused to appear before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, contending that, ‘This is between God and myself. I have nothing to say to Tutu.’ Tutu’s response to Groenveld embodies interconnectedness. ‘If you beat your wife, you can’t simply say this is between me and God. You also have to go to your wife and say "I am sorry".’

 

The multilingual nature of the testimony shows that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission cuts across cultures, languages, tribes, cosmologies. Traversing them, Krog observes how difficult it is for philosophical concepts to survive this passage. She hints at what survives and reveals a transformative robustness is the concepts embedded deep in culture and the unconscious, tacit knowledges will create a tacit constitution around law categories one internalizes with mothers’ milk. It colours the language and depth of relations.

This is not to reduce everything to Ubuntu but to show the imaginaries it creates, and colours understandings. Krog quotes Pumla Gobodo – Madi Kazila, the psychologist, who noted that the implacability of unforgiveness the Holocaust creates cannot be extended constructively across cultures. The latter adds that philosophical questions cannot be purely intellectual. They should give way and be subsumed under human questions, for in the end ‘we are a society if people and not of ideas, a fragile web of inter-dependent humans, not of stances.’ Yet, Krog notes, Ubuntu, the sense of interconnectedness, often falls ‘on deaf western scholarly ears when it comes to using it in analysis and assessment.’ Not once in any of the Xhosa or Tswana testimonies was Christ mentioned in terms of forgiveness. This could indicate that the reason to forgive (Derrida miracle) was not located in Christ but found elsewhere.’³⁵

 

Certain theoretical and politically strategic questions follow and Krog argues that a sense of community and communitarianism in diverse dialects haunts Africa. Citing Ifeanyi Merkiti, Krog first suggests that so far as Africans are concerned, community defines the individual. She adds that personhood is not bestowed on an individual at birth but acquired through initiation. Interestingly, the African philosopher Gyeke adds that the concept of human dignity derives not from a theism but from reflections on human nature. Probing for a key concept that animates religious and other behaviour, Geyike suggests that it would be caring or compassion or generosity rather than justice which assumes a different metric. Justice leads to an idea of rights, care to a more encompassing sense of dignity. It is this matrix, this cosmic soup, this culture of care and dignity that textures and interconnects with western ideas of forgiveness, reconciliation, justice. By embedding and embodying them within a communitarian spirituality, the truth commission makes local sense, vernacular sense and therefore becomes eligible for a cosmopolitan sense.

Krog argues that once one grasps this, the critiques of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission smell differently. Consider two in particular, both of which are cited as devastating indictments of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – the first by Mahmud Mamdani³⁶ and the second by Jacques Derrida.

 

Mahmud Mamdani is a formidable figure in the African academe. For him, the whole process of reconciliation had become an embrace with evil. He felt South Africa apartheid was not just a relation between perpetrator and victim – the third person in this triangle was the silent citizen, who was also a beneficiary of the system. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a system which encouraged both the embrace of and a denial of evil. Evil and crime needed punishment, even reparation, for the political economy of law to work. He saw the Truth Commission as an incomplete process, a statement of overt impotence because it offered reconciliation without justice.

Krog observes that the categories Mamdani employs follow their own logic, where evil is seen as alien and as needing punitive punishment. It is a left-liberal logic of human rights popular within the post-War milieu. She argues that a communitarian view sees things differently. In embracing evil, one may be embracing one’s neighbour and initiating a process of reparation. It offers the possibility of ethical repair beyond reparation and land reform. Krog admits that it did not happen but the failure, she argues, was because of the intransigence and hegemony of the dominant system of law clashing with an indigenous system based on a different set of categories. It was a cognitive battle where justice and truth were seen through Anglo-Saxon lenses. Many indigenous people see the encounter with evil as the beginning of a humanizing process. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, at one level, became a failure of incommensurability and translation, an unsuccessful encounter between two different cosmologies and the cultures they build.

The second kind of critique, equally devastating, and coming from a different but equally impeccable source, was Derrida’s reading of Desmond Tutu. Tutu was no Myshkin with a redeeming idiocy. To Derrida, he seemed more like a country pastor confusing the judicial logic of amnesty with the non-penal and non-reparative logic of forgiveness. It was for Derrida a confusion of categories and levels. Krog notes that Tutu was not just linking human rights and amnesty to religion but using the foundation of interconnectedness to allow people to get back their humanity through processes such as forgiveness.

 

Derrida’s reading of Tutu’s mistake as a layman’s confusion is more an error of western understanding. In fact, the word amnesty is read differently. It is Christianity that sees it as a lack of repentance. Amnesty in Ubuntu culture fits in with the victims’ desire to build a caring community. It was as if two notions of the cultural unconscious were at work – one seeking amnesty as an evasion of truth and justice and the other seeing it as a facilitation of ethical repair and the beginning of a more caring community. It was Christianity that failed to recognize such a possibility. One must emphasize that the Truth Commission did not suffer from such a dual consciousness but instead saw concepts like amnesty and forgiveness within a different matrix.

Krog ponders over the nature of this blindness to interconnectedness that leads to this tragic dualism. Thinking reflexively, she realizes that she too suffers from it. As a white South African, she often misses these connections because, as she realizes, she thinks too often as an individual, an isolated, individualistic unattached being. She links it in part to the introduction of Christianity.

She cites a prominent Xhosa, Tiyo Soya, who lamented the loss of wholeness; a sense of the community which disappeared with Christianity. The philosopher A.C. Jordan went further and claimed that connectedness and hospitality went together. Ubuntu was external and internal. It was both connectedness within a community and externally to a stranger. Jordan in fact argued that the figure of the stranger should be constantly reinvented and renewed because responsibility to the stranger was constitutive of the collectivity itself. It was a world that operated with a different moral compass.

 

Comparing Ubuntu to Arendt’s notion of the Socratic self, Krog observed that in an Arendtian world, the self keeps talking to itself. It is the self, one keeps contending with. It is this debate of morality that constitutes the western self. But in Ubuntu, the conversation that creates the self is not the unity within but the unity of the self and other, of the self and community, including the stranger accommodating community. The magic of the one in the many is not known to a western self which engages with itself. The very fact of oppression allowed the South African to take concepts such as forgiveness and amnesty trapped in the amber of Christianity and rights and relive them differently.

In the West, a theory of difference was always a theory of a hierarchy of differences, while in South Africa, difference triggered tensions to which the society responded creatively. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission thus created a view where Christianity and the human rights culture obscured the radical power of the indigenous view emphasizing a different way of becoming and being. A playfulness of difference, a sense of translation between the two moral compasses which Krog feels gives one a different sense of the African imagination. A man like Tutu represented such a view.

 

Archishop Desmond Tutu exemplifies the craft of cognitive justice. He is a listener, not an interrogator or an inquisitor. He is not the Grand Interrogator of Dostoevsky but the Grand Listener of folklore and storytelling, full of empathy. He listens to the word, to silences, to the environment, absorbed in suffering and memory as a sensorium. To see in him an Anglican Bishop articulating a predictable Christianity misses the power of his performance. He does not follow a script; he invents, he impresses, cracks jokes, laughs in a way an entire neighbourhood joins in solidarity and understanding. He fine-tuned the African unconscious into going beyond the law.

Yet, Tutu accepts the logic of law. The presence of Alex Borraine and other lawyers in Truth and Reconciliation Commission shows that the officialdom of law is required for the Tutu to spin his tacit constitution with its own categories of understanding, empathy and community. Even as he recognizes law as a cognitive system, he shows that it is a different ontology, a different cosmology. The power of orality, the craft of listening, the need to use silence to fine-tune the comforts and discomforts of witness creates a different ontology of understanding. The little anecdotes that dot Krog’s work reveal a different hermeneutics where the indigenous and the intuitive create a different hummock of understanding.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission embodies, as an exercise and as an experiment, three sets of concepts that studies of knowledge and democracy have been advocating. The first is the idea of ‘cognitive justice’. Basically, it is a playful theory of plurality which believes in the right of different forms of knowledge to co-exist and co-evolve without being hegemonized. Cognitive justice is not a passive theory, but believes in the creativity of difference and the fertile cross-pollination of differences through dialogue. A dialogue of differences seeks to be interdisciplinary, multicultural and shows that fraternity, solidarity and difference go together. The old colonial model which reduced the other to a lesser ontology yields to a more active phase, where knowledges which would have been once museumised or labelled as ethno-philosophies now seek a direct encounter, a synergistic relationship.

 

Cognitive justice is thus not just a mechanical search for equality and equivalence. In seeking a dialogue of differences, it seeks new heuristics for knowledge. In that sense, it is a form of cognitive entrepreneurship, a style of knowledge mediation or epistemic brokerage where translation, mediation, dialogue become critical parts of a cognitive drama between different systems. The encounter between Ubuntu as a gestalt emphasizing inter-connectedness and wholeness and Christianity and human rights allows for error and confusion but also permits a syncretic encounter, a layering of cosmologies and ontologies. Ubuntu, in that sense, becomes a cosmic soup which adds a different taste and smell to forgiveness, rights or even amnesty. This many layered representation allows an import of concepts which become naturalized or indigenized over time.

Two things are prominent, the playful nature of the dialogue and the experimental nature of the exercise. Play in that sense allows for emergence and surprise, for a tactical mix of concepts which allows for a more innovative view of reality. It is difficult to articulate a paradigm for cognitive justice without sounding like a list of proscriptions and prescriptions but it is easy to follow an exemplar like Tutu whose very performativity has paradigmatic consequences. Tutu plays clown, patriarch, trickster, neighbour, listener creating a dialogic imagination which is constructive. He literally becomes the touchstone for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, setting the right tenor of ethics and aesthetics.

 

As a listener who empathizes with pain and silence, he is immaculate. Yet, he also has has a deep sense of wonder, empathy and irony, a sense of a slapstick depreciation of himself, coming across as a commonsensical man with an uncommon turn of mind, a sense of humour. As he said, ‘I was Anglican until I put tu and tu together.’³⁷ It is his jugalbandi of concepts and theologies playing Ubuntu, Anglican Bishop, country pastor at the same time that allows him to create a polysemy of meaning. He turns listening into a form of hospitality to the word. His body language communicates his empathy for pain, his sense that pain adds a quality of understanding to crisis which is unrivalled. There is a sense of drama to him.

Pippa Green, the journalist, describes the transformations of the man as he goes into action.³⁸ He is a mumbling bundle engrossed in prayer till he steps out of the car, an energy and power beaming from him. He survives on contempt as people call him, ‘the fool, the clown, the ultimate cover up artist.’ Tutu is the compass of the Truth Commission, a man whose sense of language is apt. It is not correctness but more an intuitive sense of rhythm, a songline which allow you to scramble home to the truth. He has a wonderful sense of nonsense and its healing power in a time of crisis. Nonsense only provides a prelude, a new sense of the impossible and the unthinkable.

 

Krog recites a brilliant story. She was stumbling around groping with the narrative of violence that she was confronting. She and her colleague bump into a young philosophy professor and Krog pleads with him to make sense of what is happening. He offers her quote from Paul Russel, ‘If truth is the main casualty of war, ambiguity is another.’ She asks him to explain. He elaborates that in the past one had no choice but to live by simple black and white guidelines, but today we must make space for ambiguity. Krog’s colleague asks her who the young professor was. She explains that he was the grandson of Dr Verwoerd.³⁹ The colleague stops and gasps, stunned that the grandson of the leader of Boer racists works for the Truth Commission. Then shrieking with pleasure, he goes into a mad dance at the wonderful irony, the surprise of the situation, wiping the tears from his eyes.

But there are deeper ambiguities we have to look at. One has to realize that the act of nation building belongs as much to Tutu as the Anglo Saxon modernizers. Tutu and Commissioner Alex Borraine oozing Weberian rationality were like different octaves of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a psychological exercise probing into forgiveness is not a simple opposition of self and other, black and racists, indigenous and western, traditional and modernist. Every major struggle has two sets of oppositions to face. One is the other is outsider as an external force, the other is the double which haunts the self. The logic of engaging the other is clearer, but the double as part of the self, as fellow traveller within the same unconscious is both more fragile and brutal. In the first, one confronts the stranger as opponent. In the second, one faces the one time friend, the fellow pilgrim, as enemy. Tutu’s double in the strange labyrinth called the Truth Commission is Nelson Mandela’s ex-wife, a legend in her own right, a presence that haunts the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Winnie Mandela.

 

This was a battle of a different kind as Winnie Mandela taps into the same unconscious, the same repertoire of bodily memories, the same myths and tacit languages. The encounter is of a different order. It is not a White hegemony as torture or terror one is confronting, but what happens when Black activists internalize the logic of violence, when one of you becomes the other.

Winnie-Madi ki Zela-Mandela has been a double twice, first as the spectral double of Nelson Mandela, where she enacts her own emergence as a parallel legend, as the icon of the streets, a semiotic figure, fist pumped high leading the self defence units in the townships. Her violence becomes lethal and legendary as she employs terror to combat terror. She represents the marginal even within the apartheid struggle, a margin which feels alien and abandoned as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission seems to speak a more middle class language. Her violence becomes literally a parody of Tutu’s struggle.

Her core story centres around the activity of a group with a fascinating name, the Mandela United Football Club which becomes a gang of political criminals unleashing an epidemic of abduction, torture, rape on the community. The epic question is: how does Tutu confront Winnie Mandela. What is the language of the encounter, what are the idioms each can command? Winnie Mandela did not ask for amnesty. She remained as immobile as Verwoerd and her very presence confounds the oppositions of the Truth Commission. She is the double, that intimate part of the self which has internalized the logic of the other.

 

Dirk Klopper in Poetics Today talks of the eerie resemblances between the ethos of the liberation struggle as practiced by the football club and the ethos of the apartheid regime as practiced, for example, by the Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB), a notorious hit squad housed at Vlakplass. Klopper explains that it is a commonality of shared pathology that Tutu has to break.⁴⁰ He argues that by refusing the discourse of truth and reconciliation, Mrs. Mandela ‘clings to an imaginary characterized by the conflation of tribal and the revolutionary.’ Mandela occupies an archaic fantasy, a return to an idealized tribal past, the idea different from the openness of Ubuntu. As Krog adds, ‘Winnie is the monarch of the people for whom the new system does not work. If she admits to wrongdoing, she dishonours them all’. Tutu tells her, ‘You are a great person and you will enhance your greatness, if you say, I am sorry’. But Winnie Mandela stands an intransigent as her Boer doubles. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission thus becomes a double exorcism to create a common history, a common beginning, a common integrity on which a new South Africa can be anchored. It is in fact the new creation myth which marks the end of Apartheid and the end of an imperialism of categories that haunted South Africa. Tutu is the Hermes of that effort.

 

One often feels that when western law looks at the Truth Commission, it emphasizes truth and justice as something one can legislate. Each writer looks at the cases like a Moses scrutinizing his tablets. But Africa and African Christianity and tribalism are different. Their concerns centre around truth and justice but emphasis is on reconciliation. Reconciliation is modest, therapeutic. It is the way of the herb. It takes time. It is an act of repair. The scars show but the body heals. To reconcile is patchwork and joining pieces together is a pragmatic act of love. The drama is piecemeal. Truth and justice are sonorous; reconciliation is full of noise. It is messy. You get soiled.

Reconciliation is the recognition that both perpetrator and victim have to move on. It is also the understanding of context of victim and perpetrator as substitutive roles, of the perpetrator himself being victim in a bigger context. One thinks of the child soldier. Reconciliation involves prayer, it involves dialogue. Forgiveness comes later. There are no facades, no hypocrisy, no attempts to paper over history or signal normalcy when normalcy is elusive.

Repairing a society is often more complex than the original act of building it. There is no science to it, no theology. You expose your vulnerability knowing you may never heal. Yet, it is only the modesty of healing, the courage to admit mistakes that can confront the enormity of violence. Violence is epic; reconciliation often prosaic. The plumbing comes first, the poetry might follow much later, yet, it is with reconciliation that new frames of citizenship begin. Till then, it is anomaly. The western critiques of Truth and Reconciliation Commission treat it like a social engineering problem gone wrong. They refuse to see its transformative elements like Gandhi and when he advised, ‘You have to be the change you want to see.’

The West needs hard indicators. In fact, reconciliation is non-Promethean like work. We are not building the Sistine Chapel, just mending one side of a house. Reconciliation does not look for paradigmatic transformations, just mending life worlds where many of the contradictions stay. It is not a social contract but a make do, a hunch, a heuristic which helps a society return to the everydayness of peace. One should not emphasize the spectacle, but the pragmatism of the backstage. The West saw it as taproot system. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission behaved like a rhizome, a logic that surprises even us. So, while the Truth and Reconciliation Commission belongs to the human rights archives, reconciliation continues quietly.

 

There is no positivist certainty that many critics demand, just an act of faith. To believe is to begin and to continue is to understand the life-giving power of ambiguity where two contrarian ideas co-exist. It is not so easy to reduce the perpetrator as enemy to a neighbour and citizen. One cannot be prisoners of the past, yet the greater danger is to cage the future. ‘Therapy’, as Martha Minow put it, ‘is a slow process of reinterpretation and of repair and re-incorporation. The witch doctor works together with the psychiatrist to create recipes for normalcy.’

Let us take an index of the fight of mothers across the world, from the women of Argentina to the mothers of Manipur protesting about violence and asking, not so much for justice in grand terms but a space for everydayness and normalcy. Their point is complex and everyday. They are saying that a return to everydayness of work, life, farming and craft is the beginning of justice and ethical repair seeks to restore that. An everydayness that begins with reconciliation gives justice a futuristic chance. A continuing presence of war is the greatest injustice one can inflict on a society.

 

Second, they sense that injustice can be a part of some sense of justice for where does the narrative begin or end for a jury to decide a child soldier is guilty. So, if justice is like engineering, reconciliation is craft constructed in quilt patches. Repair and healing are critical activities. Both seek to restore, patch up, or even reinvent society so that social life becomes possible. Reconciliation assumes that truth and justice will come but not like the ten commandments. Such a view demands that we recognize the women’s search for work and normalcy as a part of any just society. If truth and justice are grand social science, reconciliation moves with the wisdom of folklore. Storytelling joins truth telling as a part of healing. The state is still crucial but unlike in the past, community and civil society also play crucial roles.

Martha Minow in her Facing History captures this gap in a negative sense as she talks of a cartoon in a South African newspaper which depicts Archbishop Tutu standing on land labelled as ‘truth’ at the edge or before an-other land labelled as reconciliation.⁴¹ Tutu scans the map and says, ‘Oops’. Minow adds that the commission’s work itself is more a theatrical display of what therapy aims to accomplish much more slowly through intense, personal connections and occasions for not only the telling but the repetition of individual stories of trauma and devastation. A society uses its own idioms and formal professional services to create moral repair and a therapeutic understanding of itself. It is an attempt to build or rebuild a nation based on a culture of human rights wider than the West, with a profound understanding that in a peaceful process of a transition to citizenship, justice often becomes revenge. It does not answer the question of how one lives with those who have committed violence? What are the rituals of remembrance and forgetting that heal?

 

This is the ethical experiment the new project is trying to unravel. It has none of the spectacular claims of the older Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Forgiveness, forgetting, and reconciliation are a cottage industry of terms spoken in dialects of a tribal community and a reinvented Christianity far beyond anything the West has imagined. As observers often mentioned, in South Africa the victims do not seem vengeful. All they want is a community and a neighbourhood that goes beyond violence. It is a search for dignity more than reparations or compensation where the materiality or commodification of justice overwhelms the symbolic search for a new society. Here in this project, memory is reinvented old stories. Healing is more than compensation. Symbolic reparations such as memorials, peace parks, schools named after individuals murdered during atrocities creates a new symbolic geography, a sense of place, an ecology of dignity that goes beyond the balancing of reparations.

Albie Sachs made two points which the project attempts to take further in its everydayness. One, that the relationship between perpetrator and victim needs to be humanized, where new rites of passage are recreated around apology, and shame. As he said in a seminar, ‘The only fabric I have is human relations and the only fabric we need is human relations. We need to work on the way we relate to each other. Maybe Africa can do through song, dance, the body, the sensorium, a new sense of communities that makes the neighborhood livable.’ Also, Africa has words, an unconscious, a cosmic space where justice goes beyond foot rules, compensation and equations of party. As Dullah Omar argued: ‘It is the best to have the acceptability of reparations in the hands of the victimized’. And as Sachs adds: ‘The real reparations we want is with the constitution, to vote with dignity, land, jobs and education.’

 

As healing reworks the idea of reparation, the idea of ethical repair becomes central to reconciliation. This rebuilding of a society is more than any Utopian or Comtean dream. South Africa is not only dreaming new notions of knowledge that are life giving but new ideas of the social that heal. A lot of it is tacit knowledge, folklore, women’s lore, and herbal metaphors that contain human possibilities, initiation sites which go beyond for the legislative or the rationality of a social science project is an attempt to heal the past in a way realizing the sheer vulnerability of the project and yet sensing that in the openness of this move lies one of the few sources of hope. It is a search for therapeutics, for the past in language. In the unconscious, in the tacit wisdom of communities. The state becomes a facilitator to this effort. The past is the humus for a rethinking, a recomposing of society. Each individual’s language of pain becomes an asset creating a lens, a mirror, a kaleidoscope to the varieties of pain in a society. It is as if pain becomes the raw material out of which a new sense of social is created. The storyteller talks of the way of this process.

Years ago, Leo Tolstoy once asked, ‘Why cannot the Sermon on the Mount have the same cognitive status as the Pythagorean theorem?’ Tolstoy sensed the tentative science behind the Sermon. Gandhi too felt similarly. He always claimed he was a scientist. Today one senses in the ethical act the experimental power of science. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is the beginning of that Copernican world of ethics.

 

The South African Truth Commission was a unique exercise. While many of the first such exercises in Latin America were wary of listening to testimony in public for fear of retaliation, the South African commission was a public exercise, a pedagogic act, whose rituals told the public that the apartheid era was over. The Commission did not seek to produce only a report, an expert’s summary, but was a continuous enactment where the society participatively and incrementally grasped the violence it had gone through. It was an experiment in critiquing one form of the social and reconstructing a new one. It was pointing out that if a society has to slough its old skin it has to understand itself better.

Its confrontation with evil was more direct. Based on a political compromise that the African National Congress made, Tutu was clear that the Truth Commission could not be a moral compromise. In fact, its very vulnerability made it an ethical invention and a moral achievement of a unique kind. While celebrating the Truth Commission as an event, critics were hard on what they condemned as the confusion of ideas, the chaos around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

There was a failure of reading and the misreading lay in the fact that people did not see a clash of two paradigms – a western, Anglo-Saxon paradigm that was preoccupied with rationality, clarity, punitive justice and declared any other system as incommensurable and a South African perspective which was located in a different cosmology but which felt it could absorb and translate the English idea of law and justice into one subset of a different cosmos. The South African Truth Commission was much more cosmopolitan, in fact biculturally confident unlike the western critique desperate to keep its sense of enlightenment intact. One was an act of conceptual policing, one was a celebration of translation.

 

Two points must be made here. The critics see themselves as coming from a more developed cognitive framework than Tutu lacked. They attribute to him a cognitive secondariness which is difficult to understand. He is represented as Christianity confronting Weberian rationality, the heart confronting an enlightened head, common sense confronting expertise. Few recognized Tutu’s ability at epistemic brokerage, translating and helping the mediation of different world views. Third, Tutu shows an anthropologist’s understanding of tacit knowledges, the categories, and the unconscious that underlies a formal system of knowledge. Tutu was wise enough to recognize that western law would only work if embedded in a local cosmology which could digest and domesticate it and indigenize it. Ubuntu existed as a tacit constitution which made western law a feasible and working proposition. Many critics saw it as a wrapper ensuring or manufacturing consent while what it was trying to do was to create a new sense of the social.

Once one senses the cognitive power of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a new paradigm, one has to understand its public enactment as a rite of passage. Like all rites of passage, its process of transition is tripartite involving stages of separation, linearity and incorporation. It is a transition from one classificatory system to another containing within it the drama of confusion. The chaos and ambiguity was a recognition of plurality of an act of truth telling that sought to nudge Africa into a new sense of society. As a process, it involved a whole variety of public rituals – participatory, restorative, retributive, reparative, therapeutic, creating a multiverse of change which would make a new South Africa possible. It was a battle to create new categories. Few people recognize the Copernican power of Tutu over the Ptolemaic forces of western political theory.

 

The West imperiously dubbed these experiments as efforts by transitional societies seeking transitional justice. There is a blatant pomposity which sees the West as the hallmark of the rule of law. A great part of this essay tracks the western encounter with forgiveness. Even the greatest of philosophers have difficulty crossing the hermeneutical circle of law and enlightenment, of seeing in Tutu’s ideas a different cultural confidence. Not only is Truth and Reconciliation Commission the making of a new cognitive paradigm, it is a site for great ethical experiments of the public nature of witness, the power of storytelling, an attempt to weave participative, restorative, therapeutic and retributive justice.

If western law often becomes monochromatic, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is a rainbow of possibilities. It pushes the idea of non-violence to new levels of creativity and becomes as a result a new chapter in satyagrahic thought.

India has been silent on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission even if it celebrated the end of apartheid. It has failed to respond to the satyagrahic innovations of Tutu in creating a different potency around forgiveness. The Indian nation state faces major problems of violence and brutality in North East and Kashmir where violence seems to have become a way of life for over six decades. The framework of governance would expectedly establish a bureaucratic Commission of Inquiry which would restore truth to subserve power. What one needs instead is a Truth Commission that reveals that power of Truth. Democracy in India, as an imagination, as a response to the ethics of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has to answer two questions. Is the Armed Forces Special Power’s Act justified? Can the army kill with impunity and immunity? Second, what kind of a peace are we thinking of? Can we adapt a Truth and Reconciliation Commission like process to sustain democracy? In answering this, India as a society and civilization might revive the dormancy of its current Gandhian imagination.

 

* This essay is a part of the explorations by the Centre for the Study of Knowledge Systems’ on the possibility of reconciliation. It is dedicated to the late Ramchandra Gandhi. I also want to thank Catherine Hoopers, SAARCHI chair at UNISA, South Africa, for all her encouragement.

Footnotes:

1. Lanza del Vasto, Return to the Source. Pocket Books, New York, 1974.

2. Michael Elliott-Bateman, Defeat in the East: The Mark of Mao Tse-tung on War. Oxford University Press, London, 1967.

3. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (translation from the Italian by S.J. Woolf). A Touchstone Book, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1996.

4. Jean Amery, At the Mind’s Limits. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1980.

5. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin Books, New York, NY, 2006.

6. Marie Luise Knott, Unlearning with Hannah Arendt (translated by Nanne Mayer). Other Press, New York, 2015, p. 4.

7. H. Arendt, 2006, op. cit.

8. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2012.

9. Marie Luise Knott, Unlearning with Hannah Arendt, Other Press, New York, 2011, p. 66.

10. Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine (a new version). New American Library, New York, 1963. (1936)

11. M.L. Knott, op. cit., fn. 9, pp. 70-71.

12. M.L. Knott, op. cit., fn. 9, p. 79.

13. M.L. Knott, op. cit., fn. 9, p. 76.

14. M.L. Knott, op. cit., fn. 9, p. 79.

15. M.L. Knott, op. cit., fn. 9, p. 75.

16. Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting (translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer). University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid., p. 457.

19. Ibid., p. 458.

20. Ibid., p. 68.

21. Ibid., p. 457.

22. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (translated by W.D. Halls). W.W. Norton, London, New York, 1990. (1925)

23. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (translated by Leon S. Roudiez). Columbia University Press, New York, 1989, p. 190.

24. Ibid., p. 190.

25. Ibid., p. 210.

26. Julia Kristeva and Alison Rice, ‘Forgiveness: An Interview’, PMLA 117(2), 2002, pp. 278-95. Accessed 8 March 2017. doi:10.1632/003081202x62006.

27. Toni Morrison, Jazz. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1993.

28. Margaret Urban Walker, ‘Moral Repair and its Limits’, in K. Womack and T.F. Davis (eds.), Mapping the Ethical Turn. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville and London, 2001, pp. 110-27.

29. U.R. Ananthamurthy, U.R. Ananthamurthy Omnibus (edited by N. Manu Chakravarthy). Arvind Kumar Publishers, Gurgaon, 2008.

30. Antjie Krog, ‘"This Things Called Reconciliation..." Forgiveness as Part of an Interconnectedness-Towards-Wholeness’, South African Journal of Philosophy 27(4), 1 January 2008, pp. 353-66. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/sajpem.v27i4.31524

31. Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull. Random House Struik, Cape Town, 1998.

32. A. Krog, op. cit., 2008, p. 354.

33. A. Krog, op. cit., 2008, p. 356.

34. A. Krog, op. cit., 1998, p. 190.

36. Margaret Urban Walker, op. cit., 2001, p. 120.

37. A. Krog, op. cit., 1998, p. 156.

38. A. Krog, op. cit., 1998, p. 156.

39. A. Krog, op. cit., 1998, p. 100.

40. Drik Klopper and Rand Afrikaans, ‘Narrative Time and the Space of the Image: The Truth of the Lie in Winnie Madikizela_ Mandela’s Testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, in Poetics Today: South Africa in the Global Imaginary, 2nd ed., Vol. 22. Duke University Press, Druham, Carolina, 2001, pp. 453-74.

41. Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence. Beacon Press, Boston, 1998.

 

References:

Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1989.

Jacques Derrida, ‘On Forgiveness’ (translated by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes), in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Routledge, London, 2010, pp. 25-60.

Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless. Routledge, London, First Printing edition 1985.

Robert Jungk, Children of the Ashes: the Story of a Rebirth. Paladin, London, 1985.

Robert J.Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medicine Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. Macmillan, London, 1986.

Desmond Tutu, ‘The Struggle for Social Justice in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, Peace Research 37(1), May 2005, pp. 109-12. Accessed 8 February 2017. http://www.jstor. org/stable/24469689