Thank you. Thank you very, very much to the Oxford Transitional Press Relations Network for hosting.
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.
Thank you very, very much. Also for your contribution and and for yours fatality at some drugs college for me tonight at school
there'll be a I want to also acknowledge all of you that's giving up your lunch hour to be here.
But most importantly, Katie Regan, who's a real hero of mine for many years, her work in the constitutional court is one thing.
And then subsequent to that, her work in civil society in South Africa.
One of the more important things that I think Kate was involved in was the police
commission or the informal civil society investigation into policing in Khayelitsha,
which is a huge township outside Cape Town. And Kate presided over almost it.
It wasn't a truth reconciliation style event,
but it had the reminiscence of that where people could come and tell how the police is treating them or not treat them.
And this became a very hefty report that went that went to government.
But I don't think really it was correct that there's anybody better placed.
And I'm very honoured to have you. Thank you for coming today, Kate.
And then I want to acknowledge my friend source who came.
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,
there were many contributions that that nursed me across the line to make sure I get this degree.
But two of them were indispensable. The one was my supervisor pulled kids from Regent's Park College who was incredibly word specific.
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.
And then David Young in the back there, David is the former director and founding director of Oxford Analytica and a great friend.
And I just remember one night him dropping me off at Keble College,
sitting in his little Morris Minor and him saying to me, I asked his advice to how do I proceed now?
Because I also played rugby and did a bit of studying on the side at the time.
And he said to me, I've only got one piece of advice for you with a PhD, he finally get it written,
not right, get it on a piece of paper, and then we can later on make sure it's right.
And if it wasn't for that, his advice, I think I'd still be learning the corridors of Oxford today.
So it's wonderful to see you.
This project started in 2012 when I was in sabbatical at Notre Dame University at the Kroc Institute.
And simply all I did was I read every political theory of reconciliation I could find to lay my hands on.
And because if you come from the so-called field and you go into the the quiet of academia,
it can be overwhelming, deafening silence, and it's difficult to concentrate.
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.
And I built that paper around that three kinds of theories on reconciliation, which I'll say a little bit more about.
And that became the heart of the book. But a book always starts with, first of all, a feeling in your gut.
And there are two feelings I remember. The one is reading these international theories.
Almost everybody quoted South Africa as a foundational case, and in my view,
almost everybody was incorrectly based on accumulation of myths and the fact that if you repeat something often enough, it becomes the truth.
And so there's truisms in our field associated to us which identity me, that this is historically simply incorrect.
For those of us who were there, who lived through parts of it, this is not how it happened.
That was the one feeling I had increasingly. But domestically in South Africa, there was another feeling,
increasingly a feeling of fear about the forgetfulness of South Africans on their
own story of reconciliation and how the real history of reconciliation is being.
Replaced by caricatures.
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.
There's also so-called left in the so-called right. And increasingly in South Africa,
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.
So when Afriforum runs to Fox News to say there's a white genocide,
but of course it's going to be land reform in South Africa, there's a white genocide of farmers.
And President Trump tweets about this. Then Black First Land First, who is a sponsored, illegitimate left wing organisation, says, I tell you so.
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.
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.
Then the right wing side we told you said this is a racial vendetta.
Now, just I can't resist to say Oxford Analytica and Cambridge Analytica have nothing zero to with this
because this is the original and that is a fantastic organisation that you should all know about.
Cambridge Analytica is similar to bell bottoms to spread some fake news.
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
not enough in our country's history where ordinary South Africans could say this in a way and reason.
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,
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.
I read some of the original archives and I also interviewed some of the key players and and and got some confirmations or,
you know, debunked summits as a result of these interviews.
But one of the myths that I that I look at, that I point out in in the first section of the book,
things like that, Mandela forgave the Klan and that that is why they could move on this political episodes.
De Klerk never asked for forgiveness. It was never on the table.
He, he say, came out of the trees. He said, My hands are clean.
So why would Mandela forgive somebody if he didn't even ask for it?
It was not the operational term. It was not what defined their relationship.
They never really got on with each other, but they were two politicians who got the job done despite their differences.
And they were very different individuals that that Mandela and the ANC leaders were somehow sell-outs to global capital.
I find this particularly offensive.
In fact, as in South Africa, when this argument is made to me, as if there's no urgency in the liberation movement,
no agency in black leadership in South Africa, and that they simply stooges of sinister white capitalistic mode.
I find that very, very offensive.
But it's a strong myth at the moment.
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.
It's not true.
You know, we we've been tracking ordinary South Africans views on reconciliation since 1994 at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation.
And it's clear that the majority of South Africans, the vast majority still today, want reconciliation.
And I think not enough is being done on it.
So clearly, it's not as if the country is racially polarised completely, as the popular picture says.
Also, I try to debunk the myth of the DRC as a one stop shop for reconciliation that was meant
to solve our reconciliation issues and all our other issues in one commission's lifetime,
18 months, which is often the critique level that the DRC.
Why did you not address poverty as well in structural.
Injustice. Well, there's only so much one commission can do.
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.
So the ODP, the reconstruction development plan, the restructuring of the economy and all that was supposed to run parallel to this DRC,
that the Mbeki government then stopped that economic program in its tracks because of fiscal
pressure and wanting to grow and and really leaving the redistribution argument aside for a while.
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,
but what they did through the amnesty program was not the same as impunity.
Conditional amnesty the way South Africa did it is not the same as impunity.
And if you want to know how I make the case, then you must read the book.
Unfortunately, because there is no time for me to go to more detail in that.
But then equally, in terms of the international commentary on South Africa, in the middle section of the book,
I turn to this three theoretical framework that reconciliation is often presented in the forgiving embrace.
I call the one which is basically based on the notion that a perpetrator say, I'm sorry,
a victim forgives the perpetrator and the perpetrator by redress pays some reparation.
That is a very classic, Christian infused notion of forgiveness.
My question that I pose in the book is How applicable is that?
And the political as a political program?
And I point out what I think are two very important difficulties with that approach within a within a political program.
The first is often the societies must wait for perpetrators to be genuinely remorseful.
They're going to wait a long time. And then the moral failure of the perpetrator to hold us hostage again the second time,
because they simply unable to say sorry properly and this was a real experience in South Africa.
You would you would can feel that anticipation and it's just not there, that model depth.
It's not there. And so what does the process then jump off at that point?
What happens? And the second is a more theological point, I suppose, which is forgiveness really is about the unforgivable, is it?
Forgiveness is about anything less than the unforgivable then it's not about then it's not forgiveness.
It's about that which is really horrific. Otherwise it's cheap and unforgivable.
And that sort of forgiveness is not something I think one can program into massive scale political programs.
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.
We all pray for forgiveness. But that it will happen is not the result of a political program.
It is something that happens on the timetable of the victim when the victim is ready to do so and nobody else.
So to make that formally part of a political program as difficult is the second
framework for reconciliation that I look at is there is the liberal peace agenda,
which basically says you reconcile as long as you end up like like a liberal democracy in the West, you fine.
Now, my critique there is simply to say, no, I'm not against human rights, as I am also not against forgiveness.
These are good things. I'm not against liberalism as such or democracy.
But in South Africa, I don't think that was the dynamic that drove the process right the way through.
It was not really this commitment to human rights.
There was something else at play. There were times. I mean, I don't think the National Party, for one, came to the table,
somehow converted to human rights immediately while the death squads were still operating.
I don't think they even had an idea that they wanted to end up with a one man, one vote democracy at all.
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.
Thirdly, there's there's a lot of theoretical work done.
The third area of reconciliation is agonism, which is basically saying we replace bullets with.
We begin to be advocates of of non-violent confrontation without trying to dissolve difference.
So no unity, no harmony, just robust debate.
And we also are not promising outcomes. We just promising ongoing engagement now and there.
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.
The first thing one senses when you walk into a place like, let's say,
actually land in northern Uganda or in my case now Iraq, Mosul, the old city of Mosul, is this silence.
It's not a vigorous debate. It's that words have been have been stunted, muted.
The Shia violence of war often robbed people of their words.
And it's very it's very harsh and difficult for victims to be thrust into debating positions as if they're
part of the hurly burly of political life when they have been struggling to find words for a long time.
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.
What I do think drives reconciliation, if you look at the South African case,
is the promise of justice delivered incrementally in ever more inclusive and fair institutions and social and economic arrangements.
It's there for two things. It's radical. It's not for the faint hearted.
Reconciliation. It's a radical agenda.
Often it's reconciliation is juxtaposed with revolution to say evolution is a radical thing and reconciliation is some other compromise.
Reconciliation is a promise of justice. And therefore, it's actually very radical to be taken seriously.
But secondly, it's not revolutionary. It's evolutionary.
It's it understands. It has the patience that everything cannot be delivered immediately.
Because then, as somebody said that I quote, also the insistence on absolute justice often leads to absolute injustice.
So but the key that unpacks this for me since at the inception of reconciliation, where for me,
reconciliation starts with the acknowledgement of interdependence between fighting groups.
And this is simply a fact check, fact check that we are in this together.
If I look back at what Mandela wrote, but de Klerk set about explaining his motives.
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.
The CODESA Multiparty Negotiating Forum. What took people back to the table was not the forgiveness of one another.
It was not their commitment to human rights. It was the sense we're in this together, something that apartheid systematically denied.
And for four years it somehow one group can flourish while another group can be deprived.
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.
And why have we gone wrong recently? Because we have forgotten that we're in it together, especially with the poor.
And so Khayelitsha can go on as it goes on. And now we have a much more integrated upper class, middle class.
So things look, of course, may take you well at that level,
but there is an underbelly to society that is as violent as it's ever been and really rough.
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.
We are no longer in this together. We no longer acknowledging that we are in this together.
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,
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.
And as long as they are systematically deprived, your group will not will not flourish fully.
Mandela once phoned up a general Afrikaner general.
And with this I will conclude the general's name was general constant failure and general constant failure.
He was the former head of the apartheid army and at that point retired.
And he had command of what he claimed to be tens of thousands of young white and
the Shia militias who were sitting at home with their guns ready to be deployed.
His plan was because he had thought that the that the politicians had sold them out.
They formed something called the Committee of Generals.
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.
That was the plan B for. And at some point I think the Plan A for General Flynn,
he was a seasoned soldier who had been in the apartheid machinery since 1960 and and was head of the defence was,
as I said so at one point during our transition when everything was running in
all directions that we were not sure of the centre of the country would hold.
There was an uprising in one of the black bantustans,
one of the stooge republics that the apartheid government maintained to have a veneer of respectability.
And the stooge president Mongabay, phoned Fillion without contact, protecting anybody else and said, Please come help me.
I need your help. So Fillion deployed 2000 men to to his capital there in the western part of South Africa.
And it was a fiasco, a complete military fiasco,
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,
shooting, getting shot all on national television.
It was mayhem. The next morning, when the dust somewhat settled, Mandela phoned for them.
And I actually phoned up General Flynn myself and I had a couple of interviews with him.
He's now over 80 years old. He's still farming, selling his motorbike, herding the cows, he said.
He said to me, this actually happened like this. This is what changed my mind.
He said, and Mandela fundamentally said to him, General, I need to admit to you, if what you said,
half of what you say is true, then the ANC cannot beat humanitarians by general.
You cannot kill and oppress all black people in South Africa.
Which logically leads me to think we will have to reconcile.
Why don't we do it now before we have a civil war? Because we are still have a bigger cake to divide.
Then after when the cake will be smaller and and someone says that argument was one he could take to the right wing.
He took his fatigues off, put his suit on.
And it was that argument that made it possible for the right wing to become a political movement and not a military movement.
And so it's this sense we're in this together, just face the facts don't sound too often.
We talk about reconciliation as a moral commitment as for the idealists, as for the dreamers.
Whereas the real people are the hawks, I think it's the other way around.
Actually, I think reconciliation is for the realists,
the people who see the interconnectedness and the interdependence of the world as it in fact is and reacts to that.
And I think it's a message that also threatens to be somewhat lost in the time we're
living in right now in some of the political movements we see internationally.
If I can leave you with one final image, it's perhaps the image of a roaring boat in the middle of the ocean.
Two people stuck in it, two enemies saying, we don't trust each other, but we're not going to sink the boat.
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.
We may even reach a point of closure some day.
But in the meantime, we will at least be progressing towards the shore instead of swimming there in a boat.
That is the reconciliation option as opposed to the military option or other options that we have.
So I think even with that, I will conclude. And Kate, thank you.
Oh, thanks, Tony. That was very interesting and I very much enjoyed reading the book.
And my comments are really going to be grouped into sort of three separate points.
The first is to finish on or to start with the way you finish, which is this question of reconciliation is interdependence.
And then I'm going to make a few points about the history and a few points about the present.
And so just starting with the reconciliation is indeed interdependence.
It seems to me that it is self-evidently right as a matter of historical fact,
that really what brought about the negotiations between the liberation movements and the National Party
apartheid government was a recognition of that fact and your story about what you and I think absolutely right.
And I think even if one looks upon the liberation movements perspective, despite, you know,
arguably nearly 30 years of a of an armed struggle and the prospects of overthrowing the apartheid state were pretty minimal.
It was a very powerful military establishment of the the suffering of the ten years of what
was really a long standing civil uprising in the period following 1976 and through the 1980s,
where so many young people died, some young people went into exile.
It was really also a message of stalemate to both sides.
No side was actually strong enough to overthrow the other side,
but it was also impossible to create a stable, functioning society in the midst of that.
So is it? I think you're absolutely right. I'm not entirely sure where it takes you to beyond.
It creates a moment and if you've got rational people engaged in it,
because I think that's another point is that both sides were sensible and reason enough to realise that's where they were at.
There was that kind of common assessment of the situation and that meant that the whole conversation that
they had happened was a conversation between about based on reason and people didn't like one another.
I think that's absolutely right. But it was based on reason with it.
It can become, as it were, a theory of reconciliation.
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,
which is and we'll talk in a moment about where we are at the moment,
that perhaps one of our real problems at the moment is we've forgotten this principle
that we're in it together and that that needs to be an inclusive principle.
And that's that's no longer so much of a racial issue as a serious class and poverty issue.
And I accept that, too.
But it seems to be a slightly different point to the point that people came together because they both on both sides recognised that,
in fact, there was going nowhere and there was no possible outcome which was either side was going to be victorious.
And my own sense of that as a mediator is that that's absolutely true.
If you can find when you're in the middle of a mediation,
if you can find the common ground between parties that recognise that they can't get their own way,
they can't get what they want, but there is some kind of common ground for them which they can both.
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.
And that's the same kind of phenomenon you're talking about. So that's the first thing I turn into the history.
I absolutely agree with you that one of the problems South Africa faces right now is we have a completely
inaccurate reflection of what happened in the 1980s and nineties and probably even before that.
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.
And I also the silly things you're, you know, your account of the Mandela de Klerk relationship, I'm sure is absolutely correct.
You only had to look at the body language between the two of them. They were not friends.
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,
that they had something to do that was in the interest of the community who they purported to represent.
I think Mandela always saw himself as the leadership leader of all of South Africa.
I'm not sure that de Klerk ever had that vision and I'm pretty sure he didn't.
But as leaders they felt they had something to do here and it wasn't about their personal relationship.
And I think that a lot of the debate about Mandela at the moment, particularly among the younger generation of to in a minute,
is probably a complete misunderstanding of who Mandela really was actually at the end of the day.
And I also agree with you that the process was so much more than the TRC.
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,
you know, crucially important initiative which was happening at the time and that the political negotiations were on again, off again, on again.
And it was, you know, the National Peace Accord, which started building a habit of conversation, a habit of problem solving.
And in many ways, that's actually what happened.
So maybe it's not only interdependence, but it's a habit of problem solving, which became extraordinary.
And I mean, you know, every single local government in South Africa, which there are around between 304 hundred,
had to do a local negotiation on find out the solution to that, how that local government was going to be governed going forward.
You know, this this was a really extraordinary initiative.
And and so that that we can find solutions.
We've got a habit of problem solving. We know the problems seem really big, but if we all sit down, we open it.
So those processes, which we got into a habit of, I think were very, very constructive in that period.
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,
but I think they didn't because we'd had ten or 15 years of black trade unions representing workers
against both government and in the public sector and the private sector and the capacity for negotiation.
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.
So I think, you know, Cyril Ramaphosa was, not surprisingly,
a key negotiator because he had managed to organise mineworkers and they managed negotiate with the mining houses.
That was a very important habit that got established and all of that history I think is in danger of being lost.
You don't need to tip over. I think an equally important area is land claims.
Legislation is one of the areas I worked a lot in and it was clearly a part of the process of acknowledging the evil
of the costs and try to find a way forward with people who had had land taken away from them because of racist land.
Those were to get it back. And that was just one of, you know, one of the many processes you mentioned into being another.
And and, of course, one of the big failures was the land reform programme, which was made to accompany the land claims legislation.
And again, when a big hit banded RTP, we also banned land in large measure.
An interesting political moment, I think. And so I think we need to rethink our history and understanding what happened,
I think was is very important is it's also important because it makes one realise
where I do fundamentally agree with you is that South Africa is not a failed state.
It's a messy, difficult democracy with deep levels of inequality.
But I think it most manifestly is not. And and that it could well become.
So we shouldn't underestimate what we have achieved.
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.
So, yes, yes, I think we are about to be grateful to be then to think about the and the present.
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,
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,
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,
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
me to be a very fundamental part of any transitional process towards reconciliation.
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.
And that really brings us firmly to the present, because although we do have problems with our rule of law,
certainly on any kind of global scale of rule of law systems, I think South Africa would would do reasonably well.
We do have problems with the fact that the promise of reconciliation has been failed,
and it's been failed because we have not managed to bring most South Africans into the function economy.
The levels of inequality are enormous and there's a host of urban and rural problems that are,
in my view, largely a problem of the failure of government.
And it was a very difficult time. You know, this is people often say South Africa could have had the 1960s,
we could have had the transition of the 1950s and the 1960s could have been the time for change.
It would have been, from an economic point of view, a much better time.
Which time of huge global growth, global growth in South African economy, much easier to deal with, instead of which,
although South Africa made some progress in the nineties and one has to remember that the apartheid government in South Africa utterly bankrupt.
So the first thing the African National Congress had to do was to try and stabilise America's economy,
which it did manage to do, but it really hasn't managed to grow it in any significant way.
Failures in the education system have meant that a school is fuelled by a group of people to enter into the economy.
Is is just not there. And.
That has meant that in South Africa remains in some very real ways an apartheid society with poor black South Africans at the bottom.
And and that's an enormous failure.
And that's understandable in that people look back to what happened in the 19 early 1990s, to blame to blame that on it.
And my own view is that neither the Constitution, which tends to give some of the same challenges that the reconciliation process does,
nor the reconciliation process of the roots of the current problem.
I think they were very deep problems and I think it was always going to be enormously ambitious to address them within a generation.
But that we've done so little is deeply disappointing.
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.
Yes. And those have been extremely harmful time to have had that failure by government.
So on balance, I think that the my last point is really that one of the things you don't do is
the whole problem of transgenerational justice in the context of reconciliation,
because it is different to today's generation to be thinking about reconciliation to the generation of the 1990s,
the generation that are the excluded part of South Africa. Young black South Africans, by and large.
And they, you know, they still feel excluded.
And then they're not, you know, looking around to decide who to blame for it, for the middle class.
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.
But we are turning this debate into a failure of either the Constitution or reconciliation or the whole democratic project.
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.
I think the fault lies much more squarely with was this kind of what's happened since, what government has failed to do since.
And not saying that what government should have done is was, you know, obvious or easy.
But I think that it's it's to challenge our independent institutions,
to challenge the project that was set in the mid 1990s is probably to identify the wrong place for putting pressure to bear.
And so that, you know, I'll share your concerns, but otherwise nothing was really interesting.
And thank you very much for spending so much time to think about this one generation.
And I think that's really a valuable thing to have done. Thank.
Yes. The response immediately. Or should we avoid just one question?
The one thing I would like to say, which is I did not say anything on the third section of the book,
which is actually where the theoretical framework is expounded.
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.
Those two movements and and the two markers one needs to look out for whether this is in fact happening is inclusivity and fairness.
So not not not enormously burdensome justice, which is maybe too high, but incrementally,
every arrangement needs to be fairer and more inclusive, fairer and more inclusive.
And during our golden period, I would say that was the case.
We managed every time to have a new institution that was more manifestly more inclusive and fairer to the people involved.
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,
but ask the people inside it whether they think it's fair or not.
And and I think this fairness and inclusivity, if you take those as your as your guiding principles for interdependence,
then clearly corruption compromises fairness and inequality compromises inclusion.
And these are the two big things that where we felt and therefore we have we have
left the interdependence route as opposed to the the earlier times when we,
I think, subscribe to this because I'm going to switch up the recorder now and turn to the audience for four questions.