The role of the ICC in transitional justice and its contribution to reconciliation in Africa

Consensus is building around the need for transitional justice to secure redress for corporate human rights abuses. However, there has been less scrutiny of the transitional justice mechanisms to be deployed in pursuit of corporate accountability. This article therefore questions the extent to which truth commissions and restorative justice theory can serve the aims of corporate accountability in the context of transitional justice. To do this, the article examines the Business Hearings held by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in particular focusing on the interactions between the Congress of South African Unions and Anglo American Corporation. The findings reveal how the rhetoric of restorative justice was used as a basis for reintegrating business into post-apartheid South Africa, whilst denying the need for reparations. The article concludes by addressing key lessons learnt, and warns against relying on truth commissions as a basis for delivering corporate accountability within transitional justice.

The third wave of democratization has meant the end of autocratic rule and oppressive state-sponsored practices in many countries around the world. Yet the transition from authoritarianism and state-sponsored terror to more open and participatory societies has its own imperatives. After autocratic rule and protracted conflicts, it is necessary to heal the wounds caused by years, sometimes decades, of mistrust, fear, and violence. Systematic violations of human rights, in the form of oppression, physical and psychological violence, and death, leave lasting individual and collective wounds. Transitional (or restorative) justice is designed to address and (hopefully) mitigate such legacies left by the previous regime. In doing so, it draws on a variety of instruments: criminal prosecutions, special tribunals, amnesties, apologies, memorials, lustrations, and truth commissions (TCs), among others. The end of the Cold War also gave a new impetus to international criminal justice. Special tribunals for the former Yugoslavia, for Rwanda, and for Sierra Leone were established, as was, most prominently, the International Criminal Court, originated in the 1999 Rome Treaty and based in The Hague. For many, this portends a major shift in international relations, one in which the traditional, Westphalian, and sovereignty-centered international system gives way to another, based on more porous units, in which individual and human rights have more sway and human rights abuses trigger a more proactive international reaction. In turn, these developments have given rise to a whole new field of study: transitional justice. This is an interdisciplinary field in which political science, law, sociology, history, anthropology, psychology, theology, and other disciplines converge. Not surprisingly, since transitional justice emerges as a result of the developments described above, it is, much like democratization and political transitions, also marked by contingency and paradox. Transitions are fluid and political action and the uses of the law find themselves under a different set of rules than under ordinary circumstances. Grasping the transformative opportunities presented by the conjuncture becomes a key test of political leadership. (1) Truth commissions have emerged as a popular tool of transitional justice, especially in cases where a delicate balance between the extant remnants of the previous regime coexist with the new dispensation. (2) TCs have come to the fore because of their flexibility, their open-endedness, and their ability to act as a bridge of sorts between an evil past and a democratic present, thus laying the foundations for a future society at peace with itself. At first, transitional justice was mainly concerned with transitions from authoritarian to democratic rule. However, after the large number of internal conflicts that arose in the post-Cold War era, it has also been applied within the wider panoply of nation- and peacebuilding instruments following the end of a war or conflict. This has been especially true for Africa. Some transitional justice tools, like TCs, have shown to be so prevalent and useful for a variety of reasons that they are now deployed in advanced Western democracies, like Canada, to investigate historical human rights abuses as well as to investigate the conditions that led to the breakdown of democracy, as happened with the TC set up in Honduras after the June 2009-January 2010 crisis. Especially in Latin America and Africa, TCs as well as truth and reconciliation commissions have been deployed to come to terms with past injustices while rebuilding trust in government and among social groups, although they have also been deployed in Asia, Europe, and North America. (3) While they share a number of common features, TCs must reflect local specificities to address the crimes of the past amidst the fluid, uncertain, and challenging conditions that are the hallmark of democratic transitions. …

Sierra Leone established two post-conflict institutions to address the crimes committed during its decade long civil war which officially ended in 2002. The Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) was established to promote justice by trying “persons who bear the greatest responsibility” (Statute of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, 2002, Article 1) for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other serious violations of international humanitarian law, while the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SLTRC) was mandated to offer a forum for victims and perpetrators alike to tell their wartime stories in an effort to promote reconciliation. How were women's expectations for justice and reconciliation met through the two transitional justice mechanisms? Although both institutions made notable attempts to include gender-specific crimes as an important component of their work, the all-important third ingredient in the “toolkit” of transitional justice – reparations and reforms – remained underutilized, and would have had a more positive impact on women's lives than the two institutions. This chapter highlights some of the achievements of the Court and Truth Commission, which were arguably superior to earlier transitional justice institutions, such as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SATRC) in addressing women's needs, but concludes that unless social, political, and economic improvements are made that empower women, women will remain vulnerable to sexual and other human rights abuses not only in times of war but in peace time as well.

The adoption of a resolution by the United Nations declaring 2009 the International Year of Reconciliation signaled the remarkable influence of truth commissions in international and domestic law. This article is a reflection on truth commissions. More precisely, it focuses on forgiveness of perpetrators as a unique outcome of this relatively new trend in transitional justice. The article identifies some developmental trends in the debates on forgiveness in the context of mass atrocity. Using a case example from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the article considers the subtleties of cultural nuances in the dialogical exchange between victim and perpetrator when both victims and perpetrators are black Africans. The discussion raises the question of whether forgiveness in societies emerging from mass violence might be viewed as a moral imperative necessary to heal societies from a destructive past. The article concludes by arguing that stories of forgiveness in politics may inspire reflective engagement with the past by perpetrators and bystanders who supported repressive governments, and that this may help create a reparative humanism and the possibility of societal transformation.

This chapter surveys prior scholarship about transitional justice, with an emphasis on studies about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It marshals this research to make the case that the development of the field of transitional justice has given rise to a rhetorical tradition that provides those working in the field with a series of “enabling constraints.” It highlights the specific argumentative devices of the rhetorical tradition, such as the ideograph of reconciliation, truth commissions’ means of establishing ethos, and the genre of the truth commission final report. This discussion provides the necessary background for the rhetorical analyses in subsequent chapters, which explore how the elements of the tradition discussed here were reaccentuated by the members of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission to meet the contingent demands of their own context.

This chapter is a comparative analysis of two contrasting transitional justice processes in Nigeria and South Africa. While the latter’s transition from apartheid is lauded as a success story, the former’s transition from military rule was less successful. Politically, the two countries share challenges of failing to manage various differences such as racial, religious, sectarian, linguistic, tribal, ethnic and geographical differences, as the case may be, as part of the nation-building projects. Due to its challenging transition, Nigeria is stuck in a paradigm of war. The chapter argues that the same problem also manifests in South Africa, albeit via different symptoms such as xenophobia, tribalism, racisms, ethnicity, sexism, ageism and many other negative -isms. This chapter uses two units of analysis, namely, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SA TRC) and Nigerian Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission (Oputa Panel). The purpose of this chapter is fourfold: first, to provide the background to the establishment of the two transitional justice mechanisms; second, to use the SA TRC to evaluate the Oputa Panel; third, to account for the failure of the Oputa Panel; and lastly, to draw lessons for transitional justice in Africa in general and Nigeria specifically.

Increasingly, the historical significance of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is becoming globally apparent. Within South Africa, debate about this imperfect but undeniably productive, transformative institution continues, long after the TRC formally shut its doors. The design of the many truth-seeking, reconciliatory mechanisms to emerge in Africa and elsewhere in recent years has been informed by comparative discussion in which the South African experience features prominently.The TRC has been viewed as a groundbreaking confrontation with the challenges facing any transitional society: to discover the truth about the past, to account for it in ways that promote justice, and to develop reconciliation strategies that enable previously divided people to look forward, together. It represents an historic moment in which humane ways of dealing with an atrocious past have been cultivated.

African Truth Commissions and Transitional Justice examines the functioning of truth commissions in Africa, outlining the lessons learned, the best practices, and the successes and failures of seven African truth commissions. Its introduction and conclusion then work further to place truth commissions within the growing academic field of transitional justice. The first African truth commission was convened by the despot Idi Amin for reasons unrelated to the defense of human rights, but despite this ambiguous beginning, other African truth commissions have done important work. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission of 1996 has become the ‘gold standard’ for future truth commissions not only in Africa, but throughout the world: it unearthed much truth about the Apartheid era abuse of human rights and took vital first steps towards restorative justice in the Republic. Each truth commission is distinctive. However, although much has been written about South Africa’s truth commissions, much less is known about the other six studied in this book—and an attentive reader will notice the suggestive patterns which emerge.

Frequently, authoritarian regimes that perpetrate administrative massacres leave a mark on the past of a people’s history, which has to be remembered and understood so that people can project its future with freedom. Considering that the transitional justice process can be an opportunity for emerging the memory of a traumatic past and of its horrifying events, this article intends to discuss the role of testimony (and testimonial truth) actualizing the right to truth and memory, questioning the principles and the forms whereby courts and truth commissions usually search for the factual truth; and outlining how testimony could be able to deal with the wounds of the past and their unrepresentability, exposing a truth that surmounts the facts. The examples explored in the article are from the Eichmann trial in Israel, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) after Apartheid, and the Brazilian National Truth Commission (NTC) after the military regime.

In the context of comparative legal history, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is contrasted with the Study Commission for Working Through the History and the Consequences of the SED Dictatorship in Germany. In an extensive examination, central aspects of the commissions' mandates and their implementation are analyzed, thus providing a deeper understanding of the two truth commissions. Whilst the final reports of the commissions serve as a central source, personal interviews with experts in transitional justice and contemporary witnesses from South Africa are also included in the work.

Frequently, authoritarian regimes that perpetrate administrative massacres leave a mark on the past of a people’s history, which has to be remembered and understood so that people can project its future with freedom. Considering that the transitional justice process can be an opportunity for emerging the memory of a traumatic past and of its horrifying events, this article intends to discuss the role of testimony (and testimonial truth) actualizing the right to truth and memory, questioning the principles and the forms whereby courts and truth commissions usually search for the factual truth; and outlining how testimony could be able to deal with the wounds of the past and their unrepresentability, exposing a truth that surmounts the facts. The examples explored in the article are from the Eichmann trial in Israel, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) after Apartheid, and the Brazilian National Truth Commission (NTC) after the military regime.

INTRODUCTION One of the most theoretically neglected and empirically under-researched, yet potentially one of the most important, legacies of truth commissions are their recommendations. As discussed elsewhere in this volume, truth commissions have become a significant means of confronting human rights abuses committed by the military, state agents, paramilitaries or opposition forces during repressive regimes or periods of armed conflict. The prime function of a truth commission is to investigate and document human rights violations, and to make its findings public through a report. Another central function of truth commissions is to make recommendations to the government with two main aims: to address violations of the past and to prevent such violations from reoccurring in the future. There are between 50 and 70 truth commissions in existence worldwide – depending on the criteria one uses to define the universe of truth commissions. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is arguably the world's best known, and the one that has received the most scholarly attention. However, the model of a truth commission was developed and perfected in Latin America. As of 2018, this region has had 13 official (that is, state-endorsed) truth commissions in 11 different countries that have completed their work since the early 1980s. Adding the two official commissions that never published a report and various non-official truth commissions, there have been a total of more than 20 truth commission efforts in Latin America. Widely known commissions include Argentina's National Commission on the Disappeared (CONADEP), Chile's National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation (Rettig Commission), and Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Lesser known truth commissions include those of Ecuador, Haiti, Panama and Paraguay. A latecomer on the truth commission scene in Latin America is Brazil – which published its final report almost three decades after the country's transition from military dictatorship to democracy in 1985, in response to a presidential initiative. Truth commissions have recently also been established in Colombia and Bolivia, suggesting that this form of documenting human rights violations is far from passe in the region.

This article discusses the political possibilities of personal forgiveness in transitional justice. Personal forgiveness is extended by a single human victim who has been harmed by a wrongdoer. The victim forgives only that harm which has been done to him or to her. Personal forgiveness is distinguishable from three other forms of forgiveness: group forgiveness, legal forgiveness (a form of group forgiveness), and political forgiveness. In the context of transitional justice, I argue that: (1) personal forgiveness is a necessary condition for political forgiveness; (2) group forgiveness (including legal forgiveness), while not without a normative function, cannot effectuate either personal or political forgiveness, and (3) personal forgiveness requires a shared narrative framework to lead to political forgiveness. These assertions lead to two further observations. First, because the state has a normative role in its (limited) capacity to forgive on its own behalf and a practical role in its ability to spread and to transmit a shared narrative framework, the state is an important actor in political forgiveness. Second, because the primary historical example of political forgiveness in transitional justice is the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that unfolded within an explicitly Christian theological framework, it may be that the shared narrative framework need be religious or even Christian in nature.

Violence against sexual and gender minorities in periods of conflict and social unrest has received increased attention by the international media. While much has been written on anti-queer violence and oppression of sexual and gender minorities around the world, there has been very little written in regard to addressing historical and current acts of violence in transitional justice literature. In light of ongoing violence, what would the incorporation of sexual and gender minority experiences in transitional justice mechanisms, such as truth and reconciliation commissions, mean for sexual and gender minorities? Can truth commissions be a viable structure for addressing historical and continuing anti-queer violence and discrimination? In trying to construct a truthful account of anti-queer violence and the subjugation of sexual and gender minorities, how would a national truth commission address the diversity of locations, times, and fluid sexual and gender subject positions and narratives? I seek to address these questions by examining the challenges that truth commissions face in including the experiences of sexual and gender minorities. First I will review how previous truth and reconciliation commissions have addressed heterosexism, homophobia, and anti-queer violence. From there I will explore the underlying heteronormativity inherently found in truth and reconciliation commissions and ways in which truth commissions would benefit from incorporating queer theory and queer legal theory. Lastly, I will outline key steps that need to be taken for future truth commissions to better incorporate sexual and gender minorities in order to open up truth commissions to non-heteronormative and queer identities, histories, and experiences.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes My thanks to several hosts for occasions between 2001 and 2003 when I presented papers on the TRC and gender: at the University of Adelaide Department of English and the Adelaide Research Centre for the Humanities and Social Sciences; the University of Leeds Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History; the University of Chicago African History Seminar Series; and the University of Tulsa Departments of English and of Gender Studies. My grateful acknowledgement also to the National Research Foundation and the University of Cape Town Travel Grants Committee for facilitating the visit to the University of Leeds. Ubuntu is defined as ‘humanity, goodness; … Human-heartedness; compassion; the qualities embodying the values and virtues of essential humanity, or of Africanness’, see A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles (Oxford University Press, in association with the Dictionary Unit for South African English) Oxford, 1996. See also John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (Heinemann) London, 1969, p. 108; Mark Sanders, Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (Duke University Press) Durham, NC and London, 2002, p. 124; Mark Sanders, ‘Reading Lessons’, Diacritics, vol. 29, no. 3, 1999, pp. 3–30. I use here the formulation translated from the Xhosa by Noni Jabavu, The Ochre People (1963) (Ravan Press) Johannesburg, 1982, p. 69. See also Ellen Kuzwayo, Sit Down and Listen: Stories from South Africa (The Women's Press) London, 1990, p. 122, for the saying in six indigenous South African languages; and Ellen Kuzwayo, ‘“My Life is My Neighbours”’, Monitor: the Journal of the Human Rights Trust, special issue on Human Rights in South Africa, 1988, p. 133. See Nomfundo Walaza, quoted in Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull (Random House) Johannesburg, 1998, p. 213; and Kuzwayo's Sit Down and Listen, pp. 121, 122. Sanders, Complicities, p. 119. In 1991, then Bishop, later Archbishop, Desmond Tutu said: ‘It seems to me that we in the black community have lost our sense of ubuntu—our humanness, caring, hospitality, our sense of connectedness, our sense that my humanity is bound up in your humanity.’ Sunday Times, 26 May 1991, p. 2. Krog (the importance of whose autobiographical account of being a reporter on the TRC cannot be underestimated) also speaks of Tutu's Africanisation of the concept of reconciliation as a practical ethics, not as ‘far removed from the world’ as the Western Christian concept of forgiveness may sometimes seem. For Tutu, says Krog, ‘hatred and revenge [ … ] dehumanise not only yourself, but your community’, Country of My Skull, p. 143. In his Xhosa novel Ityala Lamawele (1914), Krune Mqhayi shows the mother of the homestead opening the homestead to people in need and teaching the young girls that ‘womanhood means looking after and caring for even those unknown strangers’; quoted in his own translation by Peter Mtuze in his ‘A Feminist Critique of the Image of Woman in the Prose Works of Selected Xhosa Writers (1909–1980)’, PhD, University of Cape Town, 1990, p. 31. In the same novel, men who lack ubuntu are considered not sufficiently morally elevated to be marriageable: girls choose between male twins, one of whom shows ‘concern for the welfare of the people of this homestead; is generous to its daughters and to strangers and looks after its livestock’, while the other twin ‘roams about and attends dancing sprees all over the country’, p. 30. Cynthia Ngewu, one of the Guguletu Seven, said: ‘This thing called reconciliation … if I am understanding it correctly … if it means this perpetrator, this man who has killed Christopher Piet [her son], if it means he becomes human again, this man, so that I, so that all of us, get our humanity back … then I agree, then I support it all’, ellipses in original, quoted in Krog, Country of My Skull, p. 142. It is also worth remarking that as a cleric Tutu performed, let's say, as a man in a frock. Note also that Krog's chapter ‘Truth is a Woman’ refers to the special consideration women give to others, ‘this story of the power of women to care, endlessly’, Country of My Skull, p. 245. See Sanders, ‘Ambiguities of Mourning: Law, Custom, Literature and Women before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, Law Text Culture, vol. 4, no. 2, 1988, pp. 105–51. Sanders, Complicities, p. 125. Thomas Mofolo's Sotho novel Chaka (1931), for instance, portrays women exhorting men to battle and forewarning against cowardice: ‘True men are gone, we remain with strange beings, / We remain with men-like beings who are not men!’, Daniel Kunene (trans.) (Heinemann Educational Books), London, 1981, p. 19. Moreover, a female doctor medicates Chaka so as to turn him into ‘a fierce person’, p. 14. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Choreographies’ in Peggy Kamuf (ed.), A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (Oxford University Press) New York and Oxford, 1991, pp. 441–56, where he speaks of the feminine as an escape from phallogocentrism, whereas ‘woman’ inhabits a gendered economy. Fiona Ross, ‘Existing in Secret Places: Woman's Testimony in the First Five Weeks of Public Hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, seminar paper, Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town. See also Beth Goldblatt and Sheila Meintjes, ‘South African Women Demand the Truth’ in Meredeth Turshen and Clotilde Twagiramariya (eds), What Women Do in Wartime: Gender and Conflict in Africa (Zed Books) London and New York, 1998, pp. 27–61; Ilse Olckers, ‘Gender-neutral Truth?: a Reality Shamefully Distorted’, Agenda, no. 31, 1996, pp. 61–7; Fiona C. Ross, Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (Pluto Press) London, 2003; Sanders, ‘Ambiguities of Mourning’; Sanders, Complicities, pp. 197–211; Annalet van Schalkwyk, ‘A Gendered Truth: Women's Testimonies at the TRC and Reconciliation’, Missionalia, vol. 27, no. 2 (1999), pp. 165–88; Lyn Graybill, Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Miracle or Model? (Lynne Rienner) Boulder and London, 2002, pp. 97–112. Goldblatt and Meintjes, ‘South African Women’, p. 29. Their submission was presented as ‘Gender and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: a Submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, May 1996, <www.truth.org.za/submit/gender.htm>. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, 7 vols (Juta) Cape Town, 1998–2003, vol. 4, p. 283: ‘Don't forget to tell us what happened to you yourself if you were the victim of a gross human rights abuse.’ Ross, Bearing Witness, pp. 93, 42, 46–7, 25, et passim. Ross, Bearing Witness, p. 50; Graybill, Truth and Reconciliation, pp. 105–6. Sanders, Complicities, p. 200. Olive Schreiner, Dreams (1890) (Wildwood House) London, 1982, p. 49. Goldblatt and Meintjes, ‘South African Women’, pp. 48–52. For other reasons see Graybill, Truth and Reconciliation, pp. 103–6; Krog, Country of My Skull, pp. 238–40; and Ross, Bearing Witness, passim. The relation between the ‘individual’ and the ‘systematic’ in Mtintso's argument is precisely what is at stake in my own thinking: only by bringing the former into the latter, as occurs through following the philosophical moves of ubuntu, can a gendered social analysis occur. Maxeke, quoted in Ellen Kuzwayo, Call Me Woman (The Women's Press) London, 1985, p. 103. Kuzwayo, Call Me Woman, p. 103. The paragraph that follows has its basis in several paragraphs from an earlier essay, ‘M'a-Ngoana o tsoare thipa ka bohaleng (the child's mother grabs the sharp end of the knife): Women as Mothers, Women as Writers’ in Martin Trump (ed.), Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture of the 1970s and 1980s (Ravan Press) Johannesburg, 1990, pp. 230–3. Emma Mashinini, Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life: a South African Autobiography (The Women's Press) London, 1989, pp. 91–5. Mashinini feels lacking in her relation with those around her in Denmark (white medical personnel, and male torture victims from other countries who have been so ‘derailed’ in prison that they could not get along with their families, p. 91), measures herself through her relations with her family as well as with the community back home, whose rejection of her would be like dying ‘twice over’ (p. 94), and takes pride in her inability to follow her Danish doctor's advice, ‘Live for yourself’ (p. 95). Key moments in Mashinini's Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life are as follows: her husband's acceptance of her political activity (p. 26) and the unusualness of her equality with male activists (p. 33); her embrace of white activists (pp. 80, 105, for example) and her disgust with the treacherous black journalist (p. 92); her love of ‘beautiful things’, such as crystal glass and her BMW (p. 98), and, throughout the book, the easy and unapologetic movement between her maternal life and her work as a trade union leader. Sanders, ‘Reading Lessons’, p. 11, citing Stanley Friesen, Missionary Responses to Tribal Religions at Edinburgh, 1910 (Peter Lang) New York, 1996, 124ff. See Margaret Daymond, Dorothy Driver, Sheila Meintjes, Leloba Molema, Chiedza Musengezi, Margie Orford and Nobantu Rasebotsa (eds), Women Writing Africa: the Southern Region (Feminist Press/University of Witwatersrand Press) New York/Johannesburg, 2003, pp. 1–82. On the one hand, conforming to the Black Consciousness (BC) demand that black women not threaten black solidarity but also—presumably—dissociating herself from the feminist-individualist terms associated with a white South African feminism, Christine Qunta proclaimed: ‘I take the view that we are Africans before we are women’, Tribute, August 1990, p. 44. On the other hand, motherhood slips smoothly into the realm of the communal in the manifesto of the BC Black Women's Federation, formed in 1975, which speaks of black women's efforts ‘to present a united front’ and ‘to redirect the status of motherhood towards the fulfilment of the Black people's social, cultural, economic and political aspirations’. Asha Rambally (ed.), Black Review 1975–1976 (Black Community Programmes) Durban, 1977, p. 109. Ross, Bearing Witness, pp. 25, 64–5, passim. Jacques Derrida, ‘On Forgiveness’ in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (trans.) (Routledge) London and New York, 2001, p. 60. A few men did nonetheless present their stories at the Women's Hearings, and are excluded from the TRC Report. In Country of My Skull, Antjie Krog takes care to include the testimonies of men who suffered genital torture (one, for example, speaks of the ensuing sexual impotence, p. 183), and she provocatively opens her chapter detailing the sexual abuses against women (chapter 16, ‘Truth is a Woman’) with the testimony of Alwinus Mhlatsi, who presents himself in the vulnerable position associated with women, pp. 233–5. Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, vol. 1, p. 53. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Routledge) London and New York, 1994, pp. 65, 43. Ubuntu is a (non-examinable) school subject in high schools in Kwa-Zulu Natal. Dubbed the ‘Inkatha’ subject, it teaches Zulu nationalism, and is a subject ‘devoted to the values and philosophies of the organisation’. M. Kentridge, Unofficial War (1990), p. 104, qtd Dictionary of South African English. The word is prevalent in tokenist business organisations and facile talk about economic equality. Derrida refers to hospitality as an opening up to the absolute stranger, the stranger being the one ‘who puts me in question’; see Sanders, ‘Ambiguities’, p. 34. Derrida also speaks in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness of the madness of forgiveness as a forgiving of the unforgivable, and of the difference between forgiveness and the ordinary ‘economic’ transactions of reconciliation, pp. 32, 49, for example. Yet both seem necessary, in his thinking, as some sort of guide or check to the other. Using this logic, and recalling also Derrida's statements in ‘Choreographies’ about the undecidability of sexual difference, in a process of reconciliation properly informed by ubuntu the alterity of masculinity and femininity to each other would thus be held in constant tension with any exchange of experience, exchange of understanding. See Lisa S. Price, ‘Finding the Man in the Soldier-rapist: Some Reflections on Comprehension and Accountability’, Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 24, no. 2, 2001, pp. 221–7. Sanders, Complicities; Carolyn Burdett, Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism: Evolution, Gender, Empire (Palgrave Macmillan) London, 2001; and Graham Pechey, ‘Olive Schreiner, the Short Story and Grand History’, Critical Survey, vol. 11, no. 2, 1999, pp. 4–17.