Abstract
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela is the most important African woman’s voice in South Africa, quite possibly in Sub-Saharan Africa, on the topic of political forgiveness. In my attempt to sketch the contours of an African feminist approach to forgiveness, I engage mainly with her work on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (henceforth TRC) of South Africa. In Section One of the chapter, I give an overview of what I consider the most important themes in her work on political forgiveness. Here, as I interpret and flesh out her ideas, I stay as close as possible to the letter and spirit of her own writings and interviews, also when I place her in dialogue with some other theorists such as Arendt, Jankélévitch and Derrida. Where I do take some critical distance, I will make that explicit. These central themes are: (i) her focus on the broader context of transitional and restorative justice; (ii) her descriptive approach; and (iii) what I believe she sees as the three main conditions of forgiveness, namely perpetrator remorse, victim witness and mutual empathy. In Section Two, I consider her as a proponent of an African feminist approach to political forgiveness. While I discern clear strands of African moral thinking related to the central notion of Ubuntu informing her theory of political forgiveness, I conclude that the feminist moments are relatively underdeveloped in her publications. The Ubuntu accents relate to her emphasis on how both victim and perpetrator play a crucial role in forgiveness, and how this can bring about a new society, not just repair an old, flawed social order. The shortcomings relate to her failure to do justice to feminist insights about how the burden of forgiveness falls to women.
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Notes
- 1.
The Commission was established through the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, No.34 of 1995, as passed by the Government of National Unity of the time.
- 2.
He says in response to the TRC, ‘As soon as a third party intervenes [in the scene of forgiveness as a personal face-to-face], one can again speak of amnesty, reconciliation, reparation, etc., but certainly not of pure forgiveness in the strict sense’ (Derrida 2002: 42).
- 3.
It is important to note that some criticise the expansion of the justice model as a ‘softer’ and too merciful option for perpetrators. Against this, Gobodo-Madikizela describes the expansion of the justice model beyond prosecution as particularly important in the first place for the victims, who need to be included, affirmed and given ‘some control over their narratives of trauma’, in support of their recovery process (Gobodo-Madikizela 2002: 11).
- 4.
Both the spectacular violence broadcast on national television during the 1980s and the clandestine operations of torture and murder that came to light at the end of the regime served in different ways to create and sustain deep social divisions.
- 5.
The policies of apartheid institutionalised racism in ways that permeated people’s lives. The legal system itself thus upheld injustice, and worked incessantly to silence thousands of righteous outcries. The original injustice was thereby doubled, in that it could also not register publicly as an injustice.
- 6.
As part of the South African transitional agreement, amnesty would not be blanket but rather conditional upon two elements: full disclosure and political motivation. In many cases, the Amnesty Committee of the TRC decided that witnesses were not making a full disclosure, which led to a rejection of their amnesty application.
- 7.
In this case, as she explains, ‘Black’ includes the Black, ‘Coloured’ and Indian groupings in the country. The Whites were predominantly strongly negative about the TRC process.
- 8.
Gobodo-Madikizela (2002: 29) is rightly scathing of the former apartheid political leadership who distanced themselves from the ‘foot soldiers’ such as Eugene de Kock who did apartheid’s dirty work in the shadows– including former presidents PW Botha and FW de Klerk.
- 9.
Here, Gobodo-Madikizela’s thinking is very close to that of Govier (1999: 71), who similarly holds that ‘no one is absolutely unforgivable, whatever he or she may have done in this world’, but that there are nevertheless many who are ‘conditionally unforgivable’, mainly because of a lack of remorse.
- 10.
In this respect, her book A Human Being Died That Night (Gobodo-Madikizela 2003), about apartheid mass killer Eugene de Kock, nicknamed ‘Prime Evil’, is telling. In their review, Judith Lütge Coullie and Vasanthie Padayachee (2004: 206) read the dying to which the title refers as the social-moral death of De Kock. However, it is precisely in his troublingly ambiguous ability to tell Gobodo-Madikizela about this loss of his own humanity, that she glimpses his capacity for human (re-)connection and remorse. His sense after one particularly brutal night that he had been permanently stained with guilt and had lost every ounce of human spirit, that his humanity had died, is for her the vulnerability that opens him up to the possibility of forgiveness.
- 11.
I will use the masculine pronoun throughout when referring to perpetrators of violent crimes, and the feminine pronoun for victims. This is not to deny that women have also been involved in atrocities, but rather to acknowledge the fact that the overwhelming majority of perpetrators of gross human rights violations on both ‘sides’ of the conflict in South Africa have been male. It is also a reflection of the fact that the vast majority of victim witnesses before the TRC were women, who mostly testified about male primary victims. It will become clearer that gender is not an innocent or neutral matter in national reconciliation.
- 12.
Trudy Govier (1999: 71) says in this regard that the category of the unforgivable forecloses the possibility of forgiveness and infers a permanent evil in a person’s character. This for her, belies the human condition, which is inter alia always characterized by the capacity for moral transformation, ‘which is the very foundation of human worth and dignity’. Gobodo-Madikizela agrees.
- 13.
It is notable that some highly popular current TV series play with this dilemma. For example, the serial killer in Killing Eve is a likeable, beautiful, adventurous, witty and glamorous young woman who kills purely for the thrill and the money, which allows her a lavish lifestyle in Paris. Not only the detective who tries to capture her, but also the audience, gradually come to see the murders from the killer’s perspective. Becoming a super-cool professional ‘hit-woman’ becomes at least a hypothetical possibility for the viewer.
- 14.
Gobodo-Madikizela gives a profound example of this in A Human Being Died That Night, when she, during an interview with De Kock, ‘remembers with shame her joyous celebration of the killing of a man who was perceived to be an apartheid state-puppet, Captain Craig Duli’ (Coullie and Padayachee 2004: 206–7).
- 15.
Recently, Candice Mama published Forgiveness Redefined (2019) in which she recounts her decision to forgive Eugene de Kock for the murder of her father, Glenack Masilo Mama, which had happened when she was only 7 months old. She makes very clear that forgiveness for her was ‘an act of personal liberation’ from a painful past and from the anxiety and hatred she carried towards De Kock, which had been draining her health since childhood. She forgave him for her own sake, even before she met him in person – similar to the ‘unilateral forgiveness’ described by Margaret Holmgren (1994). See also the Radio 702 interview with her at http://www.702.co.za/articles/371116/listen-meet-the-forgiveness-girl-candice-mama (accessed on 29 April 2020). Jankélévitch would say this is not true forgiveness, but for Gobodo-Madikizela, I think, Mama’s attitude represents one of the crucial conditions of forgiveness. Against Mama, however, she would see political forgiveness as essentially a dialogue rather than a monologue, and would suggest that the true pathos of forgiveness happened only in Mama’s actual encounter with a remorseful De Kock.
- 16.
To continue with Mama’s example: she had changed her relationship with De Kock even before meeting him, because she no longer wanted to be ‘entrapped, controlled and triggered’ by the event of her father’s death which had tied her to the killer through her hatred towards him. When she met him, she did not know whether she could ‘extend’ the one-sided act of forgiveness to what she calls ‘reconciliation’ with the perpetrator. She kept an open mind and found him to be ‘very aware of who he was and what he had done’, so that when she extended her forgiveness to him in person, both of them were taken aback (see http://www.702.co.za/articles/371116/listen-meet-the-forgiveness-girl-candice-mama). Here are clear echoes of Gobodo-Madikizela’s view that forgiveness cannot be controlled, but when it comes, it comes as a surprise, outside of the normal calculations of guilt and punishment.
- 17.
Space does not allow me to compare their positions in detail. Suffice it to say that Derrida’s attention to Jankélévitch’s work on forgiveness has placed the latter on the philosophical ‘map’ again, after decades of neglect that started with anti-Semitic exclusions while he was still alive. For my purposes, I only draw on what their positions share.
- 18.
I suspect Gobodo-Madikizela would not follow me in drawing this conclusion, because, in spite of seemingly approvingly quoting Derrida on this point, in other places she does speak of an ethic of forgiveness and links some ‘duty to forgive’ to the project of national reconciliation. Even the phrase quoted above, ‘within our grasp’, seems to suggest the forgiveness offered by individuals may serve a national cause, thereby losing its miraculous and gratuitous nature. The duty to forgive she postulates is furthermore rooted in the African ethic of Ubuntu, which she suggests might frame forgiveness as ‘necessary to promote the ethical vision of a compassionate and caring community’ (Gobodo-Madikizela 2009). I think finally this point is not fully resolved in her work and I return to it later, keeping in mind that her descriptive approach might for its part challenge the more philosophical vision proposed by Jankélévitch and Derrida.
- 19.
Although Gobodo-Madikizela acknowledges this, she pays little actual attention to the many refusals of forgiveness, whereby her reader might deduce that such refusals were irrelevant or detrimental to the national reconciliation aim. Thus in spite of her claim that the real aim of the TRC was reconciliation and that the Commission was caught by surprise when forgiveness took place, the way in which she writes may create the impression that interpersonal forgiveness was the preferred vehicle for national reconciliation. My own view is that clearly motivated instances of non-forgiveness should be investigated for their role in promoting the reconciliatory aim of creating a new moral community, because they shed more light on the lack of human empathy that underlies the absence of the conditions of forgiveness.
- 20.
The audience implicitly addressed by the victim is in a sense still under construction, is being called into being precisely through the details of the testimony that is given/gifted. Also, this emerging audience extends far beyond the direct perpetrators to include the TRC commissioners and officials, the journalists, other victims of apartheid and also its beneficiaries, even the international community. It is in the context of restorative justice always also a social system, a ‘meaningful world’ that is on trial, a world enabled and held in place by many role players. And what is at stake the birth of a new shared world.
- 21.
‘The significance of an apology lies in its ability to perform ... and to transcend the apologetic words. In other words, to validate the victim’s pain and suffering, an apology must communicate the appropriate emotion’ (Gobodo-Madikizela 2002: 16).
- 22.
The Latin root for contrition, ‘contritus’, means ‘ground to pieces’ or ‘crushed’ by guilt.
- 23.
In the mother’s oscillation between past and present tense in her account, Gobodo-Madikizela discerns how the event of the death of her young child is alive for her and still tormenting her every day, the memories of that day burnt into her senses. The past is not past, but relentlessly haunts the present.
- 24.
The story of Mrs. Elsie Gishi (Gobodo-Madikizela 2003: 83–84) from Cape Town about the death of her husband and the trauma of her young son vividly brings home the urgency of victim testimony. Mrs. Gishi uses the phrase ‘the most unspeakable state of death,’ which for Gobodo-Madikizela points to the lingering chasm between the traumatic experience and attempts to make it manifest, shareable and public.
- 25.
She takes over this phrase from Caruth 1995.
- 26.
I say this hesitatingly. Yet I do wonder whether a certain underestimation of the risks of victim testimony in political context might not be linked with my other criticisms about the prioritization of remorse, a possible duty to forgive, and the gendered nature of forgiveness.
- 27.
This happened e.g. during the Saint James Church hearing, when the victim asked the perpetrators to look him in the eyes and speak in their own language. My understanding is that he did not speak their language – it would have been translated for him in real time - but he was keenly aware of the barrier represented by the medium of English. He expected to find something more truthful reading the body language and vocal qualities of people who were speaking freely in their mother tongue rather than struggling with English.
- 28.
Again the encounter as embodied is shown to be important. Faku’s impulse was to take De Kock’s hand, to connect with him and thereby reaffirm his humanity, thereby include him once again in the human world. From there, from beside her, she would show him that there was still a future for him. She wanted to show him how a renewed relationship to his past, shaped and confirmed in the encounter between them, allowed for a renewed relationship to his future, also.
- 29.
Some African and South African authors she has drawn on include Mahmood Mamdani, Desmond Tutu, Alex Boraine, Kopano Ratele, Amanda Gouws, André du Toit, Chris van der Merwe, and Steve Biko.
- 30.
This is not surprising, given her training as a psychologist.
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du Toit, L. (2022). An African Feminist Approach to Forgiveness: Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela Considered. In: Satne, P., Scheiter, K.M. (eds) Conflict and Resolution: The Ethics of Forgiveness, Revenge, and Punishment. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77807-1_13
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