Nadine Gordimer, J.M.Coetzee, and Andre Brink: Guilt, Expiation, and the Reconciliation Process in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Sandra Chait has noted that the transfer of power from oppressor to oppressed is usually characterized for the former by shock, sorrow, and anger at the chaos of the upheaval. She adds that the oppressors are finally compelled to confront their culpability and that their authors invariably attempt through mythology to account for what went wrong. Chait notes that, in the case of South Africa, the transition to democracy had been sufficiently gradual to allow white South African writers "a gestation period in which to ponder collective guilt and, as in Germany, to search the past for answers to that inevitable question, 'How could it have happened?'" 1 Yet for South African whites generally, as for white South African writers, there has been, perhaps expectedly, no consensus about the appropriate ethical response to the historical guilt of apartheid, just as there has been a deep anxiety to acknowledge the culture of violence in post-apartheid South Africa as part of the enduring legacy of apartheid. Perhaps no single incident has highlighted this with such dramatic intensity as the initiative championed in 2000 by the former African National Congress legislator and diplomat, Carl Niehaus, and a former president of the Black Sash, Mary Burton, to have whites collectively apologize to blacks for the sins of apartheid.