Development Talk

Conference On Memory, Narrative And Forgivenesss

Held on the 22-26 November 2006 At The University Of Cape Town, Co-hosted By Faculty Of Humanities And The African Ethics Initiative, University Of Natal.

Siphokazi (Spoki) Mlandu, a previous research intern at DEVELOPMENT WORKS, shares her experiences of the Conference ….

The session I attended was on the Power of Narratives of Forgiveness, seeking to show the importance of story to forgiving and healing process.

Speakers at this session viewed forgiveness as a hard term to define as most believed that forgiveness is a process rather than a once off thing. One speaker suggested that the term could rather be broken down and be understood in two ways such as paradigm case and non-paradigmatic case. The former is a process in which both parties are able and willing to converse about the matter and the latter is the case in which one of the parties is unable and unwilling to engage in the process of process.

Speakers maintained that one of the conditions for forgiveness is closely connected with narrative. The forgiveness process must create a space where the one who asks for forgiveness and the one who is to forgiven narrate their stories in public. This gives an opportunity for the victim/survival to narrate how the injury fits into a self that seeks to get over the pain and violence of the injury. So as with the offender he has to come into public and offer narrative to make himself intelligible and offer reasons to trust that he is a changed person. This process is hoped to bring about healing to both parties since story telling is regarded as the most powerful tool to forgiveness.

The TRC was a powerful a space for the story telling. Some victims and survivals felt that the TRC helped them in the process of healing while others felt that TRC did not do much for them. Two people narrated their stories, one was the victim of the 1993 High Gate attack in Grahamstown and the other one was one of the mothers of the 7 boys who were killed in Gugulethu in 1986. However both parties maintained that telling their stories has helped quite a lot in the process of forgiveness and healing.