The current discourse on the state of reconciliation in South Africa dominates socio- economic and political considerations there, perhaps because the concept of reconciliation remains unclear to most South Africans. The popular understanding of the concept of reconciliation causes even more disagreement twenty years after the racial segregation had ceased to be an official policy of the state. There is no definitive explanation of exactly of what the idea of reconciliation stands for today in South Africa.
94. Kim Wale, “Reconciliation Barometer Survey: 2013 Report Confronting Exclusion: Time for Radical Reconciliation.” IJR, Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, 2013; Adekeye Adebajo, Adebayo Adedeji, and Chris Landsberg, South Africa in Africa: The Post-Apartheid Era (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007).
Megan Shore has already identified this dilemma by articulating that the idea of reconciliation during the period leading to the TRC was not clearly “defined” but it was recognized as a significant step in the right direction.95 This dilemma continues even today.
However, in general, reconciliation refers to an amicable restoration of a broken
relationship between individuals, communities, or societies. It carries different weights in all these categories. It does not require complicated procedures when it occurs between two or three people. However, when it involves communities or the whole society, it becomes a complex process that demands legal commitments from those involved. Reconciliation comes as part of a dialogue or an understanding between the people or communities between whom a rift occurred. It allows individuals and communities to come together once more to start a new beginning in their relationship. In South Africa, the reconciliation needs to happen at all levels of the society. This is the reason it has become difficult to define in simple terms.
Different authors in South Africa have attempted to define the concept of reconciliation in the current South African context. In a recent book co-authored with Allan Boesak, Paul De Young defines reconciliation as “exchanging places with ‘the other,’ overcoming alienation through identification, solidarity, restoring relationships, positive change, new framework, and a rich togetherness that is both spiritual and political.”96
This expansive understanding of reconciliation suggests that reconciliation often demands a set of new, dynamic ideas, which unite people on the same journey as they travel along the way to a common destiny. However, it is clear that such a movement toward a common destiny cannot assume the same pace of all its members. A new framework should always come into play to accommodate different needs of individuals and communities at different
95. Shore, Religion and Conflict Resolution, chapter 6.
96. Allan Aubrey Boesak, and Curtiss Paul DeYoung, Radical Reconciliation: Beyond Political Pietism and Christian Quietism (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2012), 12; Brian Frost, Struggling to Forgive: Nelson Mandela and South Africa's Search for
times to keep the spirit of reconciliation alive. Here the idea of reconciliation will continue to evolve in South Africa as time goes by, and new challenges will emerge, but the journey will not stop.
Ernst Conradie and his colleagues have put together a work that attempts to “clarify conceptually” the idea of reconciliation, but they have not reached the same conclusion in defining the concept.97 Among them, an interesting definition of reconciliation has come from Sarah Hills, who suggests that reconciliation could be understood in terms of Christian sacramental theology or Eucharistic experience.98 Ideally, the Eucharist brings together Christians from all walks of life to share the symbolic spiritual meal as one body. In the Eucharist there is no distinction between the rich and the poor, all are children of God. The Eucharist is a combination of different elements, which include faith within the community, the sharing of bread and wine, and the word of God. All these elements are important parts of the Eucharist. If one of them is absent, the Eucharist will be incomplete.
Like the Eucharist, reconciliation needs and requires different elements to make it complete. It requires justice, restitution, restoration, forgiveness, political liberty, and economic empowerment for all citizens. For Sarah Hills, “reconciliation is a union between restitution and forgiveness.”99 Restitution is a mechanism through which a property stolen or forcefully taken is returned to its original owner, where that is possible, or a symbolic token is paid in its stead. In South Africa, the concept of restitution relates to land and its relationship to reconciliation in the country. Fair distribution of the land stolen from the black communities under Apartheid remains one of the major demands of black South Africans.
97. Sarah St. Léger Hills, “Why Words are not Enough” in Reconciliation A Guiding Vision for South Africa? Ed. Ernst Conradie (Stellenbosch: Sun Press, 2013), 94. 98. Ibid.
What makes Hills’s definition of reconciliation interesting is the fact that the Eucharist is not a one-time thing. It is a continuous exercise that brings Christian communities together now and then to celebrate life in Christ. Likewise, reconciliation is not a one- time thing, but an exercise which often directs everyday life in any transitional society. Hills’s approach is especially important in this debate for a number of reasons, even if it does not invalidate the points others have raised. First, it underlines the idea that religion must continue to be part of the process that promotes understanding of the reconciliation in South Africa. The contribution of the religious communities to the implementation of the TRC was not simply a promotion of religious ideals to make reconciliation easy, but to indicate as well that religion can offer clarifications to concepts that defy definitions in certain social situations. It will need to continue to contribute to the process constructively in this way.