No project for reconciliation can succeed unless the federal and provincial governments roll back their power and create space for Indigenous control over their own self-determining futures.
Inquests into atrocities committed under apartheid are important because many South Africans are beginning to question whether justice was done under the country’s truth and reconciliation process.
Will the Timol case create the necessary political will to open dozens more inquests into apartheid deaths? Maybe, but government machinery has proven to be rusty and extremely slow.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu is first and foremost, a spiritual leader, a man of deep prayer. This motivated his participation in supporting South Africa’s liberation struggle.
Archbishop Bishop Desmond Tutu is well known for having invoked an ubuntu ethic to evaluate South African society, and he can take substantial credit for having made the term familiar.
Raising the status of the African languages to that of official languages in South Africa post-1994 led to an explosion of translation and interpreting work in local and foreign languages.
Monuments to the Confederacy in New Orleans and many other cities are problematic. But a mere erasure will not address the issues around racism and racial inequality.
The road to reconciliation doesn’t begin and end with truth commissions or trials. Change must occur at a systemic level, and communities must commit to rebuilding relationships.
Next year South Africa’s Stellenbosch University will celebrate its centenary. A recent conference to discuss the anniversary has reminded everyone present that knowledge is a fickle mistress.
The impact that the system of conscription had on the roughly 600,000 white men who became both pawns and agents of the apartheid state has seldom been publicly acknowledged.
Can Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Dylann Roof be forgiven — and should they? Forgiveness is not an isolated, one-time act but a longer commitment to acceptance back into a community.