 Welcome, I'm Jim Levenson, I'd like to welcome everybody to the Ford School of Public Policy. Thanks for joining us this afternoon. I'm so pleased to be able to introduce Yazar Henry to you. Yazar is the 2007 Harry A. and Margaret D. Towsley Foundation policymaker in residence here at the Ford School. Yazar's official bio reads as follows. Henry is a former anti-apartheid activist and a former officer in the MK, the military wing of the African National Congress. He is a poet, writer, and peace activist. He has written and published on politics, the politics of memory, trauma, identity, and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He currently works with former combatants, political prisoners, and torture survivors, and is the director of the Direct Action Center for Peace and Memory. Well, all of that's right, of course, but it doesn't really provide the context. And one lesson that you learn when you spend much time around Yazar Henry is the context matters. This is a guy after all who was a former combatant and is now a peace activist. I've known Yazar for about eight years, and it seems to me that the official bio that I just read is a bit understated, as is so often the case with Yazar himself. Here's what the official bio doesn't tell you. Yazar entered the military wing of the ANC during the struggle against apartheid at the age of 15. At an age when most of us were in high school, he was training as a combatant in places like Angola and the former Soviet Union. After training, he returned to South Africa. He was captured and imprisoned, accused of terrorism and treason. During his imprisonment, he spent seven months in solitary confinement as a teenager. Upon his release from prison, the apartheid government claimed that Yazar had turned on the ANC and he left prison as a hunted man, both by the apartheid government that he had fought against and by the group in whose service he went to prison. He went into hiding. He returned from exile in 1993. In 1996, Yazar testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and he has since founded the Direct Action Center, an organization that employs many former MK members and is doing amazing, simply amazing community development projects in the Cape Flats, a mostly impoverished area around Cape Town. He's touched the lives of many through his community projects, through his writings and through his lectures around the world. We are truly, truly privileged to have this guy who left high school to fight, and I mean really fight, against that which was so unjust to now be teaching here at the University of Michigan at the Ford School. Please join me in welcoming Yazar Kenner. For about an hour and then we'll take questions from the audience. I'm squinting, not because of anything that you've done. Just the bright lights are pretty bright. Thank you for welcoming me in such a way that you did. My talk here this afternoon is dedicated to the empty chairs in this auditorium. Where I come from, there are no empty chairs, even if no one sits in them. These are my ancestors that have traveled with me. My friends who have died and whose memory and honor I wish to dedicate my words this afternoon. When talking about my or my country's experience, the challenge is always to maintain a strong focus on celebration. The celebration of life, of survival, of resistance, of victory and of hope. And when I speak of hope here, I speak of the hope that drove us beyond what we at times thought was humanly possible. But it won't be that easy for me, I think today, as the focus of my talk is on cost. On what peace really means when it's not the same for everyone. And believe me, I don't always want to be the messenger of bad news. And I'm lucky to be at the Ford School and have sound knowledge that this is not the Middle Ages. So each time that I'm given this privilege to voice, to speak, to share, to feel in my body what it means to have privilege. I hope that the words that I share with you today will give meaning to my experience, but also to the experience of many ordinary men and women, children across the world who do not easily get the opportunity. And who are not easily able to speak about what they live or have lived daily. For this opportunity I want to thank Jim and Rebecca here at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. The Towsley Foundation and the representatives that are here, Jennifer. And to everybody who has worked so hard to make my visit here possible, especially Laura and Jill and Linda. And I know there are many lenders, I mean Kennedy. And I want to acknowledge specifically the public policy economics and social work students who have chosen to have an intellectual conversation with me during the semester. Those of them that are here, thank you for coming. I'm glad that it's, you know, you're not just tired of listening to me every Friday. Eleven years after the beginning of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission's public hearings and beyond its institutional life as one of many state commissions, its power continues to define, to reduce, to delimit, to foreclose. The meanings and the modes that individuals and collectives make as a response, both in the material as well as in the symbolic, a response to these long periods of war and resistance on the tip of Africa. I specifically am from Cape Town. This is my city represented on this picture. It's my mountain, both sides of it. It's center, it's core, it's top, and it's bottom. Both it's normalized and it's invisibilized violence that continues, that extends itself from there in the everyday to here right now as I speak. What is this economy of truth, reconciliation, and forgiveness? What is its historical timeline, its categories of the victim and the perpetrator? What does truth mean outside of its context and its history? What does forgiveness mean when it has entrenched itself systematically, when it continues as antecedent of a part of colonization of slavery? What is the working through of mourning, of assimilating trauma, of understanding torture, of reliving economic loss mean in this context? And how do we understand restitution of the self, of the individual, of the community, of those that make up my city and my country? How do we understand this mechanism that excluded the violence and the survival of the everyday? That makes it very difficult for us to understand what social and economic survival, community conflict, trauma, anger, rage, and especially the despair of an existence that is always already negated. What does this mean from the language of the mandating act and its legality to the ways in which human rights violations and its committee yearnings were conducted and mediated by print, electronic, and other forms of media, including us, the academy? What does it mean when selfhood is defined by disempowering passive interiority that only represents the damaged survivor coming to voice and forgets that his or her coming to voice is also about meaningful action and social change and that peace resides inside of this, actively lived in the everyday by those who can afford it and by those who are denied it when the context of language is itself implicated in the history of violence and of repression and victim connotates this reductionist notion and label emptied of all historical agency where we forget that one's life is relational to that that victimizes, destroys, tortures and sometimes makes life that distant in the distance away from the centralized focal point of the beauty that represents our mountain in my city. Absent, yeah, is the label in language that is sometimes articulated inside of these epistemological frameworks of the oppressor, the colonial settler who became the apartheid beneficiary and the oppressed South African people who paid for those benefits. Now post-conflict is not so easily separated from the TRC process, rather it nurtures the possibility for those who benefited, continue to benefit from colonial and apartheid rule to consolidate their social and economic relations of power informed sometimes by direct socio-economic restructuring and in my city particularly it is based on previously race or color or ethnic, clearly defined legislative, judicial categories. The conflict that we have endured, the concept of reconciliation cannot be and should not be easily equated with peace, I want to argue, if peace translates into the wholesale suffering of the majority in my city where the continued protection of white privilege and the benefit under the banner of colonial and enlightenment histories and the destruction in the name of progress and civilization are gradually cast along with ourselves into the obscurity of that side of the picture, where the majority of whites and Africans peace oftentimes translates into an unchallenged entitlement to leisure, pleasure and lifestyles that are secured through economic power and the unquestioning valorization of whiteness, a moral legitimacy that intersects with unlimited access to the neo-global economy. Today, 12 years later, I want to argue that reconciliation requires that those who do not have access to these lifestyles are expected to accept us and to forgive not only those who were the past tormentors but also those white identifying communities who continue to deny their structural role in that system in whose name the torment was perpetuated and to some extent continues to be. Forgiveness comes at a heavy price when it is you, the tortured that is expected to forgive the torturer when it is those who had their lands forcibly taken from them who are expected to forgive those who took it, when it is those who were forced out and from their homes away from their workplaces and in Cape Town specifically also away from our beloved mountain and the ocean that are expected to forgive those and some who still occupy our houses except of course that this is acceptable or understood as acceptable because we have forgiven them to the proxy of the state and its institutional mechanisms with the tacit support of what we think and have come to be told is the international community and the world. The question that echoes and remains not only in my heart and mind but echoes from the distant parts of my city back to its central core and to where people have this type of lifestyle is how does long-term peace come to be served when it is only or mainly the previously oppressed that are held responsible for sustaining it since we have been given only the option to accept the grounds of this type of conditionality what is the benefit of this peace when the poor pays and pays only for that peace to remain as a mirage slowly fading into the distance what is this cost when we say wow you know it's so cool I cannot imagine how someone can forgive a person or people who have done so much harm caused so much damage that it will take generations for the recovery to become visible now central to this idealization of truth and reconciliation is I want to say the international acceptance that are parted as a crime against our peoplehood our humanity has been settled in this idealization we South Africans are reaching out towards one another in forgiveness across these previously policed boundaries that organized our entire existence the idealization of reconciliation as an interpersonal intercultural interracial contact zone belies the persistence of social and economic apartheid that continues the souls of those who have survived have been cast into this rewriting of the memory of the dead and you can see it literally every day on our streets where large sections of the population damned under apartheid continue to be damned today the shiny the bright the new has not faltered through yet except for the promise that someday perhaps it might the obliteration of our humanity the humanity of those who remain impoverished in the name of forgiveness reconciliation and peace has entrenched itself as part of our political economy one that further normalizes the violence that created this city in this way this development this development I want to argue is not in itself problematic it is the violence it is that the violence of this development does not break with the historical patterns of this possession of exclusion and injustice entrenched by the previously state the previous state called apartheid might have taken three decades of war but finally we have arrived at the place where everybody and the world is able to accept black poverty as a logical conclusion we did not fight for this conclusion but of course we are very happy dancing in loincloths beating our drums at the edge of the world the apartheid ideologues could never have imagined this the fulfillment of their dream now the cost borne by those who have suffered needs to be considered more carefully it was stated that one aim of the human rights violation hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was restoration and it meant here the restoration about dignity the dignity of those harmed and there are today many critical voices who say that the commission did not fulfill its promises towards those who testified before it now I agree with these voices but I do not wish to leave it just here for I think that it is very difficult to hold accountable a body for the fulfillment of something it did not have the power to do the Archbishop Desmond Tutu recently so humbly told us at an academic conference whilst we were celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission he said I am sorry I am sorry we have made these recommendations but they have not listened to us and I sat there thinking hearing him and seeing the pain on his face as he made this plea for forgiveness publicly just last year so if it was not the TRC's responsibility to settle what the party did then whose is it? was it a party that we wanted settled? did we want to settle colonialism? did we want it to include slavery? was it a mixture of this historical totality and I sat there searching for answers and finding none why did we start counting in 1960 and not 1652? so who was the Arch as we come to know him? who was he referring to? when he said they, what did the South African government, the South African people, what did the international community, what did all of us sitting here today? was it just me? I think after some consideration that it is particularly the responsibility of those who committed the violence in the first place and who benefit from it now, who benefit from the large scale suffering of the majority of impoverished South Africans mainly black, not only but mainly, it is commonly argued in my country today and accepted globally am I shouting too loud? that all those responsible for a party have disappeared except for those I can count on my one hand who are still in prison who have not been given an amnesty for their condition now this is either true or it has been a grand deception and it happened whilst we were sleeping when we sat poker faced now I want to say that the materiality of witnessing and testimony and recovery exists inside of this history of the enactment of atrocity inside of the history of its survival and the surviving of atrocity but also inside of the history of resisting it actively the struggle for peace and dignity on the African continent and where I come from on the tip did not begin with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996 and nor did it end there witnessing testimony, recovery is not that easily made bereft of political content and historicity violence cannot so easily be simplified, forgiveness has many meanings and it has a cost, a price and at the moment it is being paid forward into the future by ordinary people in South Africa who have sacrificed their lives to it with the hope that it will return a peace in which their children may go to school and the pavements that do not exist right now will come into existence at some point in their lives and that when it comes into existence at some point into their lives it will be safe and they can venture out and walk on it in the same way or in similar ways that those of us who have the privilege to venture to this side of the city can do so right now now this commission is considered a miracle and I agree that it was miraculous but there are many sides to this miracle and all are not easily articulated they do not all filter and find themselves into the imagination of the world into the public imagination of those who live in my country oftentimes what you are familiar with and I think many of you here might be familiar with this is the story, the narrative, the metatruth South Africa, a country divided by race, two sides at war, no clear victory, no clear defeat in sight and there are these two great men, one black, one white and they agree to end the war through settlement the settlement leads to peace and we have this commission, another great man leads it a crime against humanity that has gripped the United Nations, the world and my country, my continent for many decades has ended now this transmission is often and is easily premised on that we all committed atrocity that violence is equal and because of this it can be forgiven and because it can be forgiven we can all reconcile ourselves with each other so like a good Hollywood movie all's well that ends well it remains stuck in me this question do we really start all over again as equals as if nothing happened in this version of reality where peace is beautiful and history is simple and politics has ended and we are all traumatized both the hunter and the lion sitting tired under a tree in the Kruger National Park can there be, can it be when there is such damage and that the damage is to such an extent that it is almost almost unpalatable that it is so embedded in our every day that it defies its own end and our respite it becomes easy to confuse devastation for life in my country we have many sand dunes and many ostriches and in this place you know that you find once you put your head under the sand we begin to reorganize to retell and make atrocity viable inside of our own minds even acceptable now how does one comprehend the scale of harm that one group can apply to another that one nation can commit against another I have been accused of delving going back a little bit too far but I cannot understand how a British officer can boil the head of a Tosa chief I cannot comprehend this I cannot understand that it's okay to imprison our kings I cannot understand how one can build houses on top of thousands of slave bodies we are we are today in my city just 300 meters 500 maybe 700 meters beyond towards that mountain beyond this one of our key tourist attractions and features excavating thousands and thousands of slave bodies how can this type of violence pass for history as development as long as we are silent as civilization as long as we allow it now I cannot understand how a system of law accepted as legal model and godly can be the grounds of the formation of the modern state I cannot comprehend now that it has ended how its legacy lives on especially since it's written in my skin it has found itself attached to deep contours inside of me and I can't remain silent about it even if that is not what everybody wants to hear hear at home because it doesn't fit into this nice narrative this maybe slightly just word ordinary experience where history comes to sitting your throat and throttles you where your words are drowned because you are the subaltern I would like to think that there can exist some reality in understanding these key questions of how these categories of witnessing and testimony and truth and reconciliation and forgiveness have come to be just that something to be studied outside of the complexity of what it means to be human how this narrative and the story can be excavated from inside of me whilst I am alive a fossil living although this commission has allowed us has allowed us to reach back only so far and to find this selective short term notion of peace and forgiveness it is becoming more evident that there is a stronger need to process what it means to live with the knowledge that this mechanism can in no way guarantee its sustainability that it's more than just a sacrifice of 20,000 stories of pain it is also the illusion of this experience of the majority of South Africans who continue to suffer from the persistence of structures of domination, violence and oppression that has been transfixed in the present and will no doubt be transported into the future if we do not do something about it if we are not in some way aware of its possibility it might just come and creep up in those moments when we are sleeping and we'll have to write a book about it afterwards and say how did it happen it is the inequality of this previously oppressive system and its afterlife that is mask and validated as normal bereft of history and political content that has come to sit in our throats like an olive pit with no branch how is it that the new looks and smells and tastes and feels so much like the old why is it that despite this perception that there has been so much talking and so much healing that there is still so much more to say why is it that black people in my country are not yet tired of talking of telling their pain to themselves, their community and to you but white people in my country are tired of listening today people are calling for this commission to come back and be reopened and it's only the beginning of this call and you will hear it in a few years if we are lucky to address what the TRC did not manage to do both within its mandate and what it was not mandated to do to answer this question of what collective recovery really might look like in my country as opposed to this current notion that all is well and I can tell you for sure that all is well, maybe, yeah but it is not well there I wanted to speak a little bit about myself but I'm going to skip the several pages that I spent the last few weeks writing about myself and how I come to stand here and to speak in this way driven by these empty chairs in this auditorium that follow me around when I'm in the lift on my own that make me want to speak this truth even if I don't feel like I want to this truth that made my life turn so radically from the romance of war and inside of the idea that we can and sometimes ordinarily easily play God to the fact that the distance from Heaven's invincibility to the flames of hell is most probably the same now I'm privileged and lucky and I promise you if you speak to my students they'll say that I also laugh and smile because I did not physically have death literalized on my body I survived I speak to you in the voice and with the urgency of the survivor struggling to communicate to convey to pray at this altar that it should stop there and anywhere else I know what it feels like to live in hell but my hell is very specific what it used to be it was a hell that was created by human beings we created it for ourselves with pretty laws and lies that include fair play the Geneva Conventions and the delusion that when we are at war we are somehow able to keep our humanity Jim spoke about it earlier my hell was called section 29 and it was justified because of internal security now when I say this I'm not claiming to be an innocent victim like the TRC created for all of us South Africans no far from it I chose it I chose to go there I chose to put myself in a place where blue eyed men with blonde hair the same age some of them as me shitted my soul and grinded my flesh and they argued they were just doing their jobs they were protecting their families their freedoms and their God I want to say that it is in this moment when the fracture of life the fact that peace is not simple that forgiveness cannot be simplified inserts itself into your world my world in that moment for a moment I've forgotten that I had all of these attachments where life doesn't make any sense where it's not easy to write it onto paper I want to say that it is in these extreme forms of human interaction that is intended to destroy you where your soul is the extended purpose to be shattered where both life can become meaningful or just stay that destroyed now detention came to settle in my soul I physically embodied the prison post prison the war ended except I had stayed alive in my body and as I battered myself the security forces of previous state before 94 and after constantly won daily battles battles that I fought for them the struggle for peace and dignity and forgiveness for us as Africans has not ended the fact that the world is actually not such a good place was hard to accept at first it is what makes me wake up today smiling it's what gives me reason to live and what gives meaning to my life far from the moments when I thought that it was only going to be meaningless the breath of freedom cannot be underrated in all its complexity more people should taste it, feel it and we offered the opportunity to live it in my city there are many less privileged than I the part that has a legacy that has not ended we are still divided by race in an extreme economy where the disparity of wealth between the rich and the poor for anybody who is prepared to open his or her heart who is prepared to look and just to think a little can be devastating we are giving up means at worst death in slow motion outside of this great spotlight that we call the international community it is in this context where everything, every act matters in the face of this type of objection these challenges do not produce any easy victories but it doesn't mean that there are no victories when people choose peace because they have learned that in its moment you can choose and hope that there will not be another war now I found it very hard to do this initially to celebrate life in the context of so much hardship is really hard work but it becomes easier with practice and over time when one celebrates each single victory each single victory no matter how small it is I want to conclude very quickly because of my time and return to this thing this notion of forgiveness what is forgiveness beyond the confessional booth because I'm constantly confronted with this notion wherever I go whether it's at home or elsewhere what is this forgiveness when it is political now how many Hail Marys and how many our fathers do we do for killing someone for stealing their land for structurally ensuring that the economic suffering is brought into the future for several generations how many Hail Marys for torture in the absence of being able to bring these people to justice what do we do how do we come to terms with what peace means if it is not by rebuilding the lives of those who have survived allowing them to mourn to reclaim themselves from this abjection this political economy of globalization and this constant pressure to rush to rush on to a place where those who have inherited the benefits of apartheid and colonization are allowed this benefit unconditionally personally for me it is easier to smell the scent of this type of rose whilst I'm clutching its thorns than to imagine that I can smell it in the absence of it having thorns forgiveness as a political tool if there is such a thing at all possible beyond the understandings of just me and you must grow socially and politically out of a full remembering of what we have done a selected retelling of something that is often times told as amnesia if out of this type of bitterness we are able to derive the necessary understanding strength and wisdom where we are able to put the world to live in peace and at peace first then maybe this peace will forever be stronger than the world to express other emotions of anger and bitterness and rage of hatred and revenge that it must be sustained by real financial and economic commitments that take the policy of redress and repair seriously if we are not to invest ourselves only into a peace that further that furthers and fosters our own imprisonment freedom for me must mean more than starving alive in a township at the edge of our city watching the possibility of peace from inside of the fence as I manicure the garden serve the food feed the baby and walk the dog of my oppressor it has to consider white anger as well forgiveness must include a cost to the apartheid beneficiary and this must become policy we have a responsibility I think as human beings to strive for a moment in time where the words never again or nunca más or ni vida where they mean more than glib words by plasters pasted over festering wounds it must mean that the violence committed as normality that follows this liberal moment of the nation state in our context and in our time just very recently that we should consider it very seriously and act to make it stop and it must stop not just for those who benefit for the forgiveness and the peace but for everyone let us rather not use the words if we do not mean to actively ensure them extended to every stomach in my city that is starving and I take responsibility for this in my own life because of this privilege of having survived alive slightly crazy you know now this idealism this type of globalization and this type of humanity I dreamt of as a 14 year old and I continue to dream of it now despite my experience, in spite of it and maybe this is the miracle because I am not alone in my country for me at least that 12 years after the war we continue in this quest sometimes easily forsaken ideal and belief that humanity will and has to find an alternative an alternative to resolving itself again through war and we pay for this it has a cost just because we easily cannot articulate it doesn't mean that it does not cost it does not have an economy outside of the numbers I have been taught here at the Ford School it seems to be funny so it's okay you can laugh now I want to continue to dream and I want to fight myself despite my personal experience and remember and I've said this before and I want to repeat it because I like the sound of it that butterflies have color and that they will remain beautiful regardless of what we do to ourselves as human beings but also to others and since I've been in an arbor I have decided to add that the squirrels on the dyag are not just rats with pretty tails especially come spring so I want to stop here and thank you for giving me this time and listening to me as I've attempted to give my own life meaning beyond the confines of my skin and my world which is represented on that slide and I want to say to you in thanks that it is okay to laugh with as much intensity as it is to cry and I hope to hold that tension as I search for peace and for a forgiveness that is not without anger so thank you very much Do you want to call people? If you could stand up and tell us who you are and can you start us off please? I did some work as a filmmaker around the role of civil society in the TRC process around the role of civil society in the TRC process and I want to ask you if you think that it was a mistake for South Africa to not go through the Nuremberg route because had we gone through the Nuremberg route because basically what actually happened was that we took the route that we took and in so doing we basically made the oppressor and put the oppressed person on an even plane so you have a situation whereby someone like Ashley Creel or someone like Steve Biko and all of those black freedom fighters who were fighting to protect their communities where they also put on the stand in the same way as you also had oppressors and in that way it nullified and I think that it actually diluted our cause in South Africa so as to give legitimacy to business for instance like Esquam and all of those people who are actually not paying for the wrongs that they did in South Africa and so do you think that maybe if we had gone the other route things might have been different in terms of having a clear cut understanding and definition on who the oppressor was, their responsibility and vis-à-vis that as long as you are aware that that's like several questions okay and maybe I'll just choose one of them and now I'll choose the choosing for me I think the key question that comes out of your questions is around the role of civil society and the route taken I don't think that what happened can be understood outside of its own historical context which I've said already it does require us to understand very particularly what civil society means what citizenship means and how we articulate ourselves as part of that sector of society or not and in our case I don't think everybody often times understands that not everybody is and becomes immediately taken into what it means to be a citizen and a part of the civil sector at the moment of the first cross, the first X that introduces democracy now I don't know whether the route that we have taken would have been any different had we gone the Nuremberg route, I do want to know and I do question often times why we took it I think we have to come to an understanding as to why and how we got there we can't change it, it has happened but to just assume that it was the right way without reflecting on ourselves today and understanding the challenges that stands, that faces us we have to implement a sustainable peace and ensure that the rapture of that picture does not turn into reality we have to ask these questions and for me I mean I ask why not Nuremberg why not Nuremberg in Chile, why not Nuremberg in Guatemala why not Nuremberg in Cape Town, why not Nuremberg anywhere else in the world except Europe is it a coincidence that we did not consider what it meant in order to convert our pressure into the new nation state using a mechanism that allowed those who maimed, tortured and killed to be left to be let off the hook without a policy framework that considers that was that an accident we have to answer that because if we do not find the answer to that as we have seen recently in Cape Town the questions will come and we might not be in a position if we fix ourselves on this side of the picture to answer those questions without the violence of the state silencing the echoes, the shouts, the pleas, the cries for forgiveness coming from those who have been born in the accident of their black skin at the edge of Cape Town Johannesburg, Durban and all the other major cities now we have had a lot of a lot of war we have been fighting for 30 years we have been fighting for hundreds of years the last 30 years is the 30 years that this commission covers but we have been fighting for many years and no, I think it is wrong to equate the violence of the oppressive mechanism with those of us who found ourselves inside of it to go from 14 to 19 in the split second I am lucky, I have said this before I have survived to tell the story the people you mentioned many did not I cannot forget their names I cannot forget those who just died now and those who died 200 years ago for the same reason except that the technology is different so why not Nuremberg I mean, I hope I hope that people will begin to ask this question allow themselves to ask this question we cannot say the archbishop didn't happen the truth commission did not happen we did not choose to resolve our conflict through this mechanism we did but I think we have to ask what the cost of it is at the same time as we do not or we are not able to deny this we are also not able to say for sure that that bloodbath that we are pounded over the head with that it might have come we don't know I think this is much more complexity to this reality than we are often told to study and believe one thing that I'm sure of is that the people who pay with their lives with their souls with the way that they have to live now has to be considered more seriously it is not to be left to accident it must be resolved through policy I don't want you to think that I didn't appreciate your sense of humor it's just very difficult to laugh and cry simultaneously as I heard you speak I always did review the TRC as a miracle a miracle I never expected to occur but as I heard you speak it seems to me that it's more a process of appeasement unless something is done about the right hand side of the picture wherein the abuser is allowed to keep the fruits of his abuse and the victim is euthanized slowly now, not as rapidly and that it is very common to compare this to Nuremberg, at least in my mind because appeasement took place in Czechoslovakia before the Second World War the appeaser was Chamberlain and he sold a bill of goods of peace now Czechoslovakia had no choice in the matter because again the US and Britain did nothing they were faced with an overwhelmingly strong enemy Germany the US is notorious for doing nothing in an age of genocide it still goes on how did this come to be who was the con man that sold the victim a bill of goods and who did nothing to allow this to happen do you want to but it sounds like a question to which you have an answer no, ideally I mean it's a statement of American policy do you want to answer it? because I'm not capable of answering so now I want to continue with this answer I'm not capable either but in fairness and in agreement and I think it is sometimes difficult to name the ghost the hidden hand without implicating oneself in allowing this to occur for me it's more complicated because having lived through that I'm responsible as well but I also know that I watched it happen unable despite wanting to work with unable with an inability to shape it as I thought it might be shaped and I know that is true of people who have less of an ability to extend to voice to act to make real their transformative capacity so yes I think this is a global issue which is very easy for the rest of the world too easy to say this is South Africa's problem and in 10 years time when we become Zimbabwe or 20 years time maybe 20 to say well they tried but they failed so the hope, the beacon that we've come to occupy for the international community will then be extinguished and I cannot allow that to happen because we will live the consequence of this destruction the people who live on this side of the city will have these benefits this ability will come here and there will be your doctors and we will drown in the fire because we don't extend and travel that easily in this global system unless I have the help of Jim for example Rebecca and you and others like you but I do not easily extend myself to that part of the world and I want to claim it I mean this TRC did not just happen South Africans didn't just decide on it where are these experts in conflict resolution that gave us the framework to begin with where are the economists from the World Bank that make us pay for it today still it is in this easy narrative they become, they are allowed they are easily able to shirk their responsibility of selling us arms today still now it's ours to do it, I don't know what but then it was to actually keep us in our place to build who borrowed, where was the money taken to build that and to create that because they come together these are two sides of the same coin of the same economy the one exists in the name of the other not on its know by itself the type of European city that we are told we have and in the way that its excesses are enjoyed cannot happen without that on the periphery I passed it and say ok it's over there and only go inside to look on a tour but I mean how do people imagine that that is normal I don't know but they do, we do so I don't want to just point the simple finger and create some conspiratorial theory of which I'm not also responsible and complicit the times come to stop I'd like to thank Yasir this talk has been everything for the talk of this school please join us for a reception outside