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Thank you. Thank you very, very much to the Oxford Transitional Press Relations Network for hosting.

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I was with Phil Clarke so as on Friday evening. So his spirit is no, no doubt we'll sit here and do this to an ox piece.

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Thank you very, very much. Also for your contribution and and for yours fatality at some drugs college for me tonight at school

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there'll be a I want to also acknowledge all of you that's giving up your lunch hour to be here.

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But most importantly, Katie Regan, who's a real hero of mine for many years, her work in the constitutional court is one thing.

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And then subsequent to that, her work in civil society in South Africa.

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One of the more important things that I think Kate was involved in was the police

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commission or the informal civil society investigation into policing in Khayelitsha,

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which is a huge township outside Cape Town. And Kate presided over almost it.

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It wasn't a truth reconciliation style event,

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but it had the reminiscence of that where people could come and tell how the police is treating them or not treat them.

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And this became a very hefty report that went that went to government.

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But I don't think really it was correct that there's anybody better placed.

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And I'm very honoured to have you. Thank you for coming today, Kate.

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And then I want to acknowledge my friend source who came.

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I'm not going to acknowledge little by name, except perhaps to say that when I was a postgraduate student here in 1991 to 3 did my PhD,

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there were many contributions that that nursed me across the line to make sure I get this degree.

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But two of them were indispensable. The one was my supervisor pulled kids from Regent's Park College who was incredibly word specific.

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I remember I had a green held pen in which she questioned every word and why this word and not the other, which greatly aided my progress.

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And then David Young in the back there, David is the former director and founding director of Oxford Analytica and a great friend.

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And I just remember one night him dropping me off at Keble College,

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sitting in his little Morris Minor and him saying to me, I asked his advice to how do I proceed now?

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Because I also played rugby and did a bit of studying on the side at the time.

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And he said to me, I've only got one piece of advice for you with a PhD, he finally get it written,

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not right, get it on a piece of paper, and then we can later on make sure it's right.

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And if it wasn't for that, his advice, I think I'd still be learning the corridors of Oxford today.

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So it's wonderful to see you.

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This project started in 2012 when I was in sabbatical at Notre Dame University at the Kroc Institute.

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And simply all I did was I read every political theory of reconciliation I could find to lay my hands on.

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And because if you come from the so-called field and you go into the the quiet of academia,

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it can be overwhelming, deafening silence, and it's difficult to concentrate.

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So I just didn't try and write anything. I just read. And as I read, they were patterns beginning to emerge of these kinds of theories.

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And I built that paper around that three kinds of theories on reconciliation, which I'll say a little bit more about.

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And that became the heart of the book. But a book always starts with, first of all, a feeling in your gut.

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And there are two feelings I remember. The one is reading these international theories.

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Almost everybody quoted South Africa as a foundational case, and in my view,

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almost everybody was incorrectly based on accumulation of myths and the fact that if you repeat something often enough, it becomes the truth.

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And so there's truisms in our field associated to us which identity me, that this is historically simply incorrect.

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For those of us who were there, who lived through parts of it, this is not how it happened.

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That was the one feeling I had increasingly. But domestically in South Africa, there was another feeling,

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increasingly a feeling of fear about the forgetfulness of South Africans on their

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own story of reconciliation and how the real history of reconciliation is being.

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Replaced by caricatures.

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That is politically expedient for the so-called left and the so-called right, because there's a genuine left and there's a genuine right.

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There's also so-called left in the so-called right. And increasingly in South Africa,

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it felt to me it was almost like a dirty dance between the left and the right that needed one another to confirm each other's worst fears.

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So when Afriforum runs to Fox News to say there's a white genocide,

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but of course it's going to be land reform in South Africa, there's a white genocide of farmers.

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And President Trump tweets about this. Then Black First Land First, who is a sponsored, illegitimate left wing organisation, says, I tell you so.

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Look, there are a lot of unreconstructed racists that are occupying the land, whereas Afriforum does not speak for the average farmer in South Africa.

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And then you have every time Black First, Land First or bell bottom, for that matter, based in London, stokes some racial tension in South Africa.

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Then the right wing side we told you said this is a racial vendetta.

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Now, just I can't resist to say Oxford Analytica and Cambridge Analytica have nothing zero to with this

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because this is the original and that is a fantastic organisation that you should all know about.

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Cambridge Analytica is similar to bell bottoms to spread some fake news.

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But but just to make that point, David, I think you so you know so this middle ground that and then going back to history there really was a period

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not enough in our country's history where ordinary South Africans could say this in a way and reason.

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The reason that pervaded and it's during the transitional period and I bought the case for that in the first part of the book,

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I read read histories that have been published. I did not try and reproduce a history in the book because there's excellent histories on this already.

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I read some of the original archives and I also interviewed some of the key players and and and got some confirmations or,

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you know, debunked summits as a result of these interviews.

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But one of the myths that I that I look at, that I point out in in the first section of the book,

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things like that, Mandela forgave the Klan and that that is why they could move on this political episodes.

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De Klerk never asked for forgiveness. It was never on the table.

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He, he say, came out of the trees. He said, My hands are clean.

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So why would Mandela forgive somebody if he didn't even ask for it?

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It was not the operational term. It was not what defined their relationship.

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They never really got on with each other, but they were two politicians who got the job done despite their differences.

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And they were very different individuals that that Mandela and the ANC leaders were somehow sell-outs to global capital.

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I find this particularly offensive.

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In fact, as in South Africa, when this argument is made to me, as if there's no urgency in the liberation movement,

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no agency in black leadership in South Africa, and that they simply stooges of sinister white capitalistic mode.

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I find that very, very offensive.

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But it's a strong myth at the moment.

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And but there's also no historical evidence for that, that no progress has been made in reconciliation and that the country is a failed state.

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It's not true.

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You know, we we've been tracking ordinary South Africans views on reconciliation since 1994 at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation.

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And it's clear that the majority of South Africans, the vast majority still today, want reconciliation.

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And I think not enough is being done on it.

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So clearly, it's not as if the country is racially polarised completely, as the popular picture says.

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Also, I try to debunk the myth of the DRC as a one stop shop for reconciliation that was meant

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to solve our reconciliation issues and all our other issues in one commission's lifetime,

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18 months, which is often the critique level that the DRC.

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Why did you not address poverty as well in structural.

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Injustice. Well, there's only so much one commission can do.

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And people forget that when the when the DRC was announced in the same speech that Mandela announced the DRC in parliament, he announced the ODP.

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So the ODP, the reconstruction development plan, the restructuring of the economy and all that was supposed to run parallel to this DRC,

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that the Mbeki government then stopped that economic program in its tracks because of fiscal

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pressure and wanting to grow and and really leaving the redistribution argument aside for a while.

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That is, you know, that that is not the DRC fault. So and then also I do try and say make the case that the DRC was not the same,

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but what they did through the amnesty program was not the same as impunity.

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Conditional amnesty the way South Africa did it is not the same as impunity.

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And if you want to know how I make the case, then you must read the book.

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Unfortunately, because there is no time for me to go to more detail in that.

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But then equally, in terms of the international commentary on South Africa, in the middle section of the book,

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I turn to this three theoretical framework that reconciliation is often presented in the forgiving embrace.

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I call the one which is basically based on the notion that a perpetrator say, I'm sorry,

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a victim forgives the perpetrator and the perpetrator by redress pays some reparation.

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That is a very classic, Christian infused notion of forgiveness.

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My question that I pose in the book is How applicable is that?

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And the political as a political program?

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And I point out what I think are two very important difficulties with that approach within a within a political program.

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The first is often the societies must wait for perpetrators to be genuinely remorseful.

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They're going to wait a long time. And then the moral failure of the perpetrator to hold us hostage again the second time,

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because they simply unable to say sorry properly and this was a real experience in South Africa.

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You would you would can feel that anticipation and it's just not there, that model depth.

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It's not there. And so what does the process then jump off at that point?

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What happens? And the second is a more theological point, I suppose, which is forgiveness really is about the unforgivable, is it?

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Forgiveness is about anything less than the unforgivable then it's not about then it's not forgiveness.

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It's about that which is really horrific. Otherwise it's cheap and unforgivable.

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And that sort of forgiveness is not something I think one can program into massive scale political programs.

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And as if we can turn this theological gift, this divine gift, as it were, on and off with a tap, we all hope for forgiveness.

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We all pray for forgiveness. But that it will happen is not the result of a political program.

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It is something that happens on the timetable of the victim when the victim is ready to do so and nobody else.

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So to make that formally part of a political program as difficult is the second

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framework for reconciliation that I look at is there is the liberal peace agenda,

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which basically says you reconcile as long as you end up like like a liberal democracy in the West, you fine.

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Now, my critique there is simply to say, no, I'm not against human rights, as I am also not against forgiveness.

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These are good things. I'm not against liberalism as such or democracy.

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But in South Africa, I don't think that was the dynamic that drove the process right the way through.

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It was not really this commitment to human rights.

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There was something else at play. There were times. I mean, I don't think the National Party, for one, came to the table,

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somehow converted to human rights immediately while the death squads were still operating.

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I don't think they even had an idea that they wanted to end up with a one man, one vote democracy at all.

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These were things that happened as an outcome of a process that had some other driving force behind it, which I will come back to.

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Thirdly, there's there's a lot of theoretical work done.

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The third area of reconciliation is agonism, which is basically saying we replace bullets with.

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We begin to be advocates of of non-violent confrontation without trying to dissolve difference.

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So no unity, no harmony, just robust debate.

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And we also are not promising outcomes. We just promising ongoing engagement now and there.

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I have to admit, you know, I'm there have been my my argument in the book is that victims often I mean, often violent conflict.

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The first thing one senses when you walk into a place like, let's say,

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actually land in northern Uganda or in my case now Iraq, Mosul, the old city of Mosul, is this silence.

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It's not a vigorous debate. It's that words have been have been stunted, muted.

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The Shia violence of war often robbed people of their words.

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And it's very it's very harsh and difficult for victims to be thrust into debating positions as if they're

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part of the hurly burly of political life when they have been struggling to find words for a long time.

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So, so. So I also think ecumenism has merits, but I don't think that really describes what happens from that first moment all the way through.

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What I do think drives reconciliation, if you look at the South African case,

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is the promise of justice delivered incrementally in ever more inclusive and fair institutions and social and economic arrangements.

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It's there for two things. It's radical. It's not for the faint hearted.

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Reconciliation. It's a radical agenda.

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Often it's reconciliation is juxtaposed with revolution to say evolution is a radical thing and reconciliation is some other compromise.

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Reconciliation is a promise of justice. And therefore, it's actually very radical to be taken seriously.

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But secondly, it's not revolutionary. It's evolutionary.

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It's it understands. It has the patience that everything cannot be delivered immediately.

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Because then, as somebody said that I quote, also the insistence on absolute justice often leads to absolute injustice.

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So but the key that unpacks this for me since at the inception of reconciliation, where for me,

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reconciliation starts with the acknowledgement of interdependence between fighting groups.

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And this is simply a fact check, fact check that we are in this together.

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If I look back at what Mandela wrote, but de Klerk set about explaining his motives.

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Look at the negotiation process, the National Peace Accord on which this Carmichaels is working, and we're all hoping for that book to come out soon.

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The CODESA Multiparty Negotiating Forum. What took people back to the table was not the forgiveness of one another.

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It was not their commitment to human rights. It was the sense we're in this together, something that apartheid systematically denied.

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And for four years it somehow one group can flourish while another group can be deprived.

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And it's a very, very it's a startlingly simple idea, but it is absolutely I think, in South Africa's case, was a driving motivation.

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And why have we gone wrong recently? Because we have forgotten that we're in it together, especially with the poor.

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And so Khayelitsha can go on as it goes on. And now we have a much more integrated upper class, middle class.

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So things look, of course, may take you well at that level,

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but there is an underbelly to society that is as violent as it's ever been and really rough.

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And and but we have we have we are not systematically engaged in a sense of with the same urgency that says we're in this together.

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We are no longer in this together. We no longer acknowledging that we are in this together.

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So for me and this is where the this is the point where I think the South African experience is translatable to other contexts, for example,

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Palestine, Israel and so on, is that you cannot flourish your group if you don't acknowledge the fact that you're in it with another group.

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And as long as they are systematically deprived, your group will not will not flourish fully.

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Mandela once phoned up a general Afrikaner general.

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And with this I will conclude the general's name was general constant failure and general constant failure.

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He was the former head of the apartheid army and at that point retired.

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And he had command of what he claimed to be tens of thousands of young white and

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the Shia militias who were sitting at home with their guns ready to be deployed.

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His plan was because he had thought that the that the politicians had sold them out.

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They formed something called the Committee of Generals.

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And the idea was to pull back in a certain part of South Africa, perhaps Mpumalanga, and defend that directly as an in Kano state.

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That was the plan B for. And at some point I think the Plan A for General Flynn,

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he was a seasoned soldier who had been in the apartheid machinery since 1960 and and was head of the defence was,

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as I said so at one point during our transition when everything was running in

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all directions that we were not sure of the centre of the country would hold.

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There was an uprising in one of the black bantustans,

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one of the stooge republics that the apartheid government maintained to have a veneer of respectability.

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And the stooge president Mongabay, phoned Fillion without contact, protecting anybody else and said, Please come help me.

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I need your help. So Fillion deployed 2000 men to to his capital there in the western part of South Africa.

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And it was a fiasco, a complete military fiasco,

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because on the coattails of his is properly trained men came the the the loony right where they're hunting rifles and they pick up trucks,

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shooting, getting shot all on national television.

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It was mayhem. The next morning, when the dust somewhat settled, Mandela phoned for them.

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And I actually phoned up General Flynn myself and I had a couple of interviews with him.

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He's now over 80 years old. He's still farming, selling his motorbike, herding the cows, he said.

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He said to me, this actually happened like this. This is what changed my mind.

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He said, and Mandela fundamentally said to him, General, I need to admit to you, if what you said,

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half of what you say is true, then the ANC cannot beat humanitarians by general.

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You cannot kill and oppress all black people in South Africa.

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Which logically leads me to think we will have to reconcile.

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Why don't we do it now before we have a civil war? Because we are still have a bigger cake to divide.

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Then after when the cake will be smaller and and someone says that argument was one he could take to the right wing.

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He took his fatigues off, put his suit on.

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And it was that argument that made it possible for the right wing to become a political movement and not a military movement.

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And so it's this sense we're in this together, just face the facts don't sound too often.

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We talk about reconciliation as a moral commitment as for the idealists, as for the dreamers.

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Whereas the real people are the hawks, I think it's the other way around.

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Actually, I think reconciliation is for the realists,

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the people who see the interconnectedness and the interdependence of the world as it in fact is and reacts to that.

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And I think it's a message that also threatens to be somewhat lost in the time we're

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living in right now in some of the political movements we see internationally.

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If I can leave you with one final image, it's perhaps the image of a roaring boat in the middle of the ocean.

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Two people stuck in it, two enemies saying, we don't trust each other, but we're not going to sink the boat.

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We'd rather go on a road together for the shore. And as we wrote, we may talk and we may get to know each other.

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We may even reach a point of closure some day.

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But in the meantime, we will at least be progressing towards the shore instead of swimming there in a boat.

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That is the reconciliation option as opposed to the military option or other options that we have.

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So I think even with that, I will conclude. And Kate, thank you.

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Oh, thanks, Tony. That was very interesting and I very much enjoyed reading the book.

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And my comments are really going to be grouped into sort of three separate points.

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The first is to finish on or to start with the way you finish, which is this question of reconciliation is interdependence.

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And then I'm going to make a few points about the history and a few points about the present.

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And so just starting with the reconciliation is indeed interdependence.

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It seems to me that it is self-evidently right as a matter of historical fact,

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that really what brought about the negotiations between the liberation movements and the National Party

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apartheid government was a recognition of that fact and your story about what you and I think absolutely right.

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And I think even if one looks upon the liberation movements perspective, despite, you know,

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arguably nearly 30 years of a of an armed struggle and the prospects of overthrowing the apartheid state were pretty minimal.

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It was a very powerful military establishment of the the suffering of the ten years of what

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was really a long standing civil uprising in the period following 1976 and through the 1980s,

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where so many young people died, some young people went into exile.

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It was really also a message of stalemate to both sides.

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No side was actually strong enough to overthrow the other side,

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but it was also impossible to create a stable, functioning society in the midst of that.

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So is it? I think you're absolutely right. I'm not entirely sure where it takes you to beyond.

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It creates a moment and if you've got rational people engaged in it,

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because I think that's another point is that both sides were sensible and reason enough to realise that's where they were at.

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There was that kind of common assessment of the situation and that meant that the whole conversation that

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they had happened was a conversation between about based on reason and people didn't like one another.

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I think that's absolutely right. But it was based on reason with it.

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It can become, as it were, a theory of reconciliation.

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I'm not entirely sure, but I do. I did like your point, which you made now perhaps more strongly than you did in the book,

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which is and we'll talk in a moment about where we are at the moment,

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that perhaps one of our real problems at the moment is we've forgotten this principle

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that we're in it together and that that needs to be an inclusive principle.

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And that's that's no longer so much of a racial issue as a serious class and poverty issue.

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And I accept that, too.

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But it seems to be a slightly different point to the point that people came together because they both on both sides recognised that,

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in fact, there was going nowhere and there was no possible outcome which was either side was going to be victorious.

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And my own sense of that as a mediator is that that's absolutely true.

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If you can find when you're in the middle of a mediation,

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if you can find the common ground between parties that recognise that they can't get their own way,

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they can't get what they want, but there is some kind of common ground for them which they can both.

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Then you normally you mediation is going to work, you just got to get them to you got to find whether there is such common ground.

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And that's the same kind of phenomenon you're talking about. So that's the first thing I turn into the history.

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I absolutely agree with you that one of the problems South Africa faces right now is we have a completely

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inaccurate reflection of what happened in the 1980s and nineties and probably even before that.

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But it's at the key moment of our transition, and that's why it is very useful in that, you know, books like this are being written.

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And I also the silly things you're, you know, your account of the Mandela de Klerk relationship, I'm sure is absolutely correct.

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You only had to look at the body language between the two of them. They were not friends.

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They did not feel that they had both a relationship of trust that was not the case, but they both realised that they were leaders,

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that they had something to do that was in the interest of the community who they purported to represent.

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I think Mandela always saw himself as the leadership leader of all of South Africa.

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I'm not sure that de Klerk ever had that vision and I'm pretty sure he didn't.

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But as leaders they felt they had something to do here and it wasn't about their personal relationship.

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And I think that a lot of the debate about Mandela at the moment, particularly among the younger generation of to in a minute,

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is probably a complete misunderstanding of who Mandela really was actually at the end of the day.

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And I also agree with you that the process was so much more than the TRC.

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So this is here and she's going to write about the National Peace Accord and I think you very rightly locate the National Peace Accord, any,

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you know, crucially important initiative which was happening at the time and that the political negotiations were on again, off again, on again.

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And it was, you know, the National Peace Accord, which started building a habit of conversation, a habit of problem solving.

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And in many ways, that's actually what happened.

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So maybe it's not only interdependence, but it's a habit of problem solving, which became extraordinary.

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And I mean, you know, every single local government in South Africa, which there are around between 304 hundred,

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had to do a local negotiation on find out the solution to that, how that local government was going to be governed going forward.

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You know, this this was a really extraordinary initiative.

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And and so that that we can find solutions.

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We've got a habit of problem solving. We know the problems seem really big, but if we all sit down, we open it.

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So those processes, which we got into a habit of, I think were very, very constructive in that period.

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And I think they came out of the 1980s. I mean, maybe as a trade union lawyer, I think they came out of trade unions,

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but I think they didn't because we'd had ten or 15 years of black trade unions representing workers

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against both government and in the public sector and the private sector and the capacity for negotiation.

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And with people you really know, you know, we really do think of as the enemy of the people you disliked was rooted in that practice.

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So I think, you know, Cyril Ramaphosa was, not surprisingly,

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a key negotiator because he had managed to organise mineworkers and they managed negotiate with the mining houses.

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That was a very important habit that got established and all of that history I think is in danger of being lost.

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You don't need to tip over. I think an equally important area is land claims.

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Legislation is one of the areas I worked a lot in and it was clearly a part of the process of acknowledging the evil

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of the costs and try to find a way forward with people who had had land taken away from them because of racist land.

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Those were to get it back. And that was just one of, you know, one of the many processes you mentioned into being another.

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And and, of course, one of the big failures was the land reform programme, which was made to accompany the land claims legislation.

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And again, when a big hit banded RTP, we also banned land in large measure.

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An interesting political moment, I think. And so I think we need to rethink our history and understanding what happened,

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I think was is very important is it's also important because it makes one realise

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where I do fundamentally agree with you is that South Africa is not a failed state.

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It's a messy, difficult democracy with deep levels of inequality.

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But I think it most manifestly is not. And and that it could well become.

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So we shouldn't underestimate what we have achieved.

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I think particularly we just spent time in Iraq, you know, just feeling that it's possible for a functioning state to become failed state.

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So, yes, yes, I think we are about to be grateful to be then to think about the and the present.

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And and I'm not I'm not saying much I but largely agree with your analysis of these characteristics of forgiveness, the rule of law and agonism,

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although perhaps because I am a lawyer, I think the rule of law is one of the key parts of any process at the end of the day,

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and that is that people need to live in a society in which they think that people who break laws will be held accountable for them,

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that they will be protected if they do not break the laws, and that there are places to go to get disputes resolved and even handed way seems to

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me to be a very fundamental part of any transitional process towards reconciliation.

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I don't think it's all of it. And to the extent that rule of lawyers and liberal lawyers might say that's all of it, that's clearly not so.

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And that really brings us firmly to the present, because although we do have problems with our rule of law,

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certainly on any kind of global scale of rule of law systems, I think South Africa would would do reasonably well.

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We do have problems with the fact that the promise of reconciliation has been failed,

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and it's been failed because we have not managed to bring most South Africans into the function economy.

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The levels of inequality are enormous and there's a host of urban and rural problems that are,

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in my view, largely a problem of the failure of government.

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And it was a very difficult time. You know, this is people often say South Africa could have had the 1960s,

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we could have had the transition of the 1950s and the 1960s could have been the time for change.

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It would have been, from an economic point of view, a much better time.

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Which time of huge global growth, global growth in South African economy, much easier to deal with, instead of which,

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although South Africa made some progress in the nineties and one has to remember that the apartheid government in South Africa utterly bankrupt.

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So the first thing the African National Congress had to do was to try and stabilise America's economy,

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which it did manage to do, but it really hasn't managed to grow it in any significant way.

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Failures in the education system have meant that a school is fuelled by a group of people to enter into the economy.

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Is is just not there. And.

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That has meant that in South Africa remains in some very real ways an apartheid society with poor black South Africans at the bottom.

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And and that's an enormous failure.

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And that's understandable in that people look back to what happened in the 19 early 1990s, to blame to blame that on it.

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And my own view is that neither the Constitution, which tends to give some of the same challenges that the reconciliation process does,

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nor the reconciliation process of the roots of the current problem.

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I think they were very deep problems and I think it was always going to be enormously ambitious to address them within a generation.

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But that we've done so little is deeply disappointing.

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And you talk about the problems of corruption, and I think we've had effectively a waste of ten years out of the 25 years.

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Yes. And those have been extremely harmful time to have had that failure by government.

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So on balance, I think that the my last point is really that one of the things you don't do is

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the whole problem of transgenerational justice in the context of reconciliation,

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because it is different to today's generation to be thinking about reconciliation to the generation of the 1990s,

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the generation that are the excluded part of South Africa. Young black South Africans, by and large.

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And they, you know, they still feel excluded.

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And then they're not, you know, looking around to decide who to blame for it, for the middle class.

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What I think is and I agree that biologics, not a non-racial group, it's very difficult for them to know how to deal with this as well.

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But we are turning this debate into a failure of either the Constitution or reconciliation or the whole democratic project.

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And my own view is that's very dangerous and very worrying, because I don't actually think that that's really where the fault lies.

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I think the fault lies much more squarely with was this kind of what's happened since, what government has failed to do since.

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And not saying that what government should have done is was, you know, obvious or easy.

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But I think that it's it's to challenge our independent institutions,

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to challenge the project that was set in the mid 1990s is probably to identify the wrong place for putting pressure to bear.

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And so that, you know, I'll share your concerns, but otherwise nothing was really interesting.

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And thank you very much for spending so much time to think about this one generation.

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And I think that's really a valuable thing to have done. Thank.

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Yes. The response immediately. Or should we avoid just one question?

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The one thing I would like to say, which is I did not say anything on the third section of the book,

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which is actually where the theoretical framework is expounded.

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And I mean, what I'm trying to say there simply is that this core idea of interdependence needs to then be embodied institutionally and socially.

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Those two movements and and the two markers one needs to look out for whether this is in fact happening is inclusivity and fairness.

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So not not not enormously burdensome justice, which is maybe too high, but incrementally,

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every arrangement needs to be fairer and more inclusive, fairer and more inclusive.

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And during our golden period, I would say that was the case.

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We managed every time to have a new institution that was more manifestly more inclusive and fairer to the people involved.

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And the litmus test for whether something is fair is to ask the participants not to stand from a very large distance and shout about it,

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but ask the people inside it whether they think it's fair or not.

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And and I think this fairness and inclusivity, if you take those as your as your guiding principles for interdependence,

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then clearly corruption compromises fairness and inequality compromises inclusion.

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And these are the two big things that where we felt and therefore we have we have

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left the interdependence route as opposed to the the earlier times when we,

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I think, subscribe to this because I'm going to switch up the recorder now and turn to the audience for four questions.