While in the past some paths were chosen for us, this Reconciliation Day is an opportunity to choose one befitting a post-apartheid era in which we’re equals, writes Kayum Ahmed.
On the day I stood in front of the Voortrekker Monument struggling to come to terms with its granite symbolism, I also visited Vlakplaas, where the flow of the gentle river passing by the farm is occasionally interrupted by the tortured screams of a different era.
In many ways, Reconciliation Day compels us to confront these historic symbols, to reflect on our past and to look at the new world – our post-apartheid world – through complex, sometimes personal and distant lenses.
For the past eight years a group of adherents to the Abrahamic faiths of Islam, Judaism and Christianity have organised an Interfaith Walk of Reconciliation in Cape Town on our national Day of Reconciliation.
The post-apartheid government renamed December 16 Reconciliation Day in 1995.
Before the political change in 1994, it had been a public holiday symbolising two significant events – the Battle of the Blood River where the Voortrekkers defeated the Zulu army in 1838 and the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe in 1961.
Since 2005, this walk of reconciliation event – at which all are welcome – has sought to mark the significance of Reconciliation Day in our young democracy’s calendar by demonstrating that, as an interfaith community at the tip of Africa, we live together in peace despite our turbulent history of colonialism, violence and apartheid.
This year’s walk in Cape Town starts at a new place – the mother church of the Dutch Reformed community of faith, known as the Groote Kerk.
Symbolically, this not only reminds us of our vulnerability, but also of how far we have come during the past 20 years and how the journey together into the future may look.
In Pretoria on Saturday, a Mandela Remembrance Walk took participants from Freedom Park to the Union Buildings head of Reconciliation Day.
At various points along the way on these walks, we pause to reflect and consider the paths we have taken, some by choice, and others, involuntarily.
The path to reconciliation is not an easy path. It twists and turns and winds, gently nudging and sometimes pushing us to confront our messy past and the uncertain future. But this path of struggle and conflict can also be a path of liberation and enlightenment.
At the SA Human Rights Commission, we are often confronted with deciding which path to take as part of our mandate to transform society, secure rights and restore dignity.
In one such matter that took place at the University of the Free State, five black workers who were cleaners at the university residences were filmed in a video made by three white students.
The Reitz video – named after the dorm building where the incident took place – depicted workers performing humiliating acts, including drinking urine out of bowls.
The students made the video to express their dissatisfaction with a decision taken by management to integrate the residences. Historically, the University of the Free State had institutionalised segregation separating white student residences from those for blacks. At the end of the video, the three white students look at the camera and say: “This is what we think of integration.”
The Human Rights Commission facilitated a reconciliation process between the black workers and the white students. We consciously decided to deal with this matter outside the formal court system. The night before the reconciliation ceremony, I was privileged to sit around the table with the former students and the workers.
There were two remarkable things that struck me about the reconciliation process that the commission facilitated.
One was the ability of the workers to forgive. I remember one saying to the former students: “You were our children and you will always be our children.”
The students were in fact young enough to be children of the workers they humiliated.
The second thing that struck me was the ordinariness of the former students.
We often assume that racists are monsters that lurk in the dark but they were ordinary people, like you and I – people who were able to cause such humiliation, pain and anger.
I often marvel at our capacity as human beings to, on the one hand, perpetrate such inhumane acts against one another, and to also have the ability to love unconditionally, give of ourselves and create positive change.
While some paths may have been chosen for us in the past, today, we have more choices than before.
On this Day of Reconciliation, which path will you choose?
* Ahmed is the chief executive of the SA Human Rights Commission. For more information about the Reconciliation Walk contact Di at 083 232 2349 or [email protected]; Mohammad at [email protected]; Laurie on [email protected]; or Gina on [email protected].
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Pretoria News