Philosophical Witnessing: The Holocaust as Presence

12. Reconciliation: Not Revenge, Not Forgiveness, Perhaps Not Even Justice

« 12 » Reconciliation Not Revenge, Not Forgiveness, Perhaps Not Even Justice In a world where globalization is in everybody’s mind or waiting to enter it, the country of South Africa may still seem remote in history no less than in geography from centers in the “West.” This was even more notable about twenty years ago when a startling sequence of events was set in motion there that, coming at the end of a century marked by atrocities (some in 188 the presence as future South Africa itself), culminated in an act requiring an extraordinary effort of political courage and moral imagination. That sequence of events began with a change in the form of the South African government�in effect, a revolution�that was itself as unexpected as it was dramatic. Admittedly , the change took place on a smaller stage than the nearly simultaneous crumbling of the Soviet Union and its empire in Eastern Europe, although much like the latter, the events in South Africa defied the predictions of most expert observers. But much more than the other, the change in South Africa established a moral landmark in an otherwise barren political landscape where large-scale political changes, even for the better, typically seemed due either to large-scale and impersonal historical forces or blatantly personal and self-interested ones. By contrast, the revolution in South Africa, beyond certain evident economic and social pressures, reflected a significant moral dimension on its two sides�in both those revolting and those revolted against. An essential element of this moral dimension was its invocation of a principle of reconciliation or restoration even in the face of atrocity. If the revolution cannot be said to have been due entirely to this principle, it undoubtedly would have followed a very different course without it. The “scenario” of this sequence of events can be summarized simply . After 1948, a sustained period of white minority rule had hardened the lines of apartheid (the “separation” of races), dividing the 13 percent white populace from the 87 percent Black, colored, and Asians (principally Indian) in a country of 45 million and prescribing this in virtually every aspect of South African social and political life. No pretense was made in this arrangement of a principle of “separate but equal”: the differences asserted by the separation were stark, amounting in effect to a form of enslavement for the numerical majority. In 1989, a newly inaugurated president, Frederik Willem de Klerk, an established member of the governing Nationalist Party, set in motion the drafting of a new constitution that called for the dissolution of his government and for a new elective system based on the principle of one person, one vote. The several stages of this initiative’s evolution resulted by May 1994 in a new political and legal order that replaced authoritarian rule and official racial discrimination with democracy and universal suffrage. The minority who had ruled as white became a minority in fact; the majority who had been ruled because they were not white became a majority, also in fact. The now-past Reconciliation 189 president, De Klerk, agreed to serve in the new government as one of two “deputy” presidents under the newly elected president, Nelson Mandela, who a short time before had been freed from prison by De Klerk after serving 27 years of his life-sentence for “treason.” This exchange of roles was as striking a symbol of voluntary political revolution as the twentieth century (and perhaps any other) had seen. De Klerk’s initiative in this process was decisive, although the events leading up to his decision and those accompanying its implementation were complex, difficult, and intermittently violent. In the preceding two decades, South Africa had been a pressure cooker, with both the ruling minority and the disenfranchised majority resorting to violent as well as nonviolent means of asserting themselves within and outside South Africa. Indeed, following what seems a standard pattern in radical political change, the period between 1990 and 1994, from the time that the first steps of implementing the revolution (and thus easing the situation) occurred and the time that it was formally realized, produced more violence (more deaths: 14,000) than any similar period in the decades before that. It takes nothing away from the combination of moral imagination and personal courage in De Klerk’s initiative to acknowledge that he and his supporters within the Nationalist Party were motivated by...