The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is over. It must be over. It must close. It is time to move on. It is useful, however, to look back at the drama of the TRC experience in order to reach forward to something new - a milieu within which the atrocities of the past are not repeated. Given the response by some within the political spectrum to the Report of the Commission, it is expedient and it is right that the quest for what is indeed new be vigorously promoted. The habits of the past are not yet behind us.
 

In looking for the new it, is fashionable to ask: Did the TRC work? Did it attain its objectives? How much truth did it uncover? How much reconciliation did it accomplish? Has it discerned a new way forward? There is a sense in which the Commission was doomed to failure before it began, if it was ever thought that it could resolve all the entrenched problems associated with centuries of colonial and racial oppression. This is a past that included the Dutch occupation of the Cape in 1652, a century of British imperialism and almost fifty years of statutory apartheid. The long and tired saga came to the beginning of an acknowledged end in 1990 - as the first stages of a negotiated political settlement to a civil war began to unfold.

Such settlements do not occur with textbook clarity. The expectations of  those who demanded Nuremberg trials, as well as those who thought 'now that it is all over' we could forget the past and live happily ever after, were simply not realistic. South Africans were required instead to embrace a process the Chileans called reconvivencia. This is a period involving the
need to learn to live together, after years of separation and conflict. For the ship of state in this context to veer either too far towards retribution or too close to amnesia would be fatal. Accountability is necessary, while unbridled retributive justice undermines the possibility of peace.

I propose not to address the South African TRC in any detail in what follows - while using it as a model to explore related but broader concerns - concerns from which no gender, tribe, nation or ethnic group is immune.

Universal in nature, they are vividly illustrated in the deep-seated human passions, concerns and afflictions which have emerged from the stories of perpetrators and victims during the life of the Commission. It is only acknowledging the brooding presence of these emotions in humanity itself that makes it is possible for them to be dealt with in a constructive manner.

I seek to do two things: One, to provide an insight into humanity as gleaned from the South African experience - both its evil nature and the quest for something new that resides within it. Two, I appeal to proponents, essentially, of the arts - poets, story-tellers, musicians,  creators of fine art, artists of the stage and people of religious belief (for reasons to which I return later) to assist this generation to break out of what Max Weber has called the 'iron cage' of captivity, in pursuit of something new. I will argue that this constituency of people, which within the context of this audience, it needs to be emphasized, includes believers, have a significant contribution to make to the creation of a new human order. It is an argument sustained by a diverse theoretical tradition extending from Max Weber, via Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King to Rene Girard and others. While not forgetting - we need to free ourselves from debilitating into a paralyzing form of memory.
 
 

Behind the Mask

Melodrama is to be avoided. I also do not wish to be seen to be too pessimistic about human nature - portraying some kind of Protestant propensity to what theologians call original sin. On the contrary, I believe that it is in facing the capacity of humanity for evil that we can unleash within ourselves an energy to do good. When hope seems least likely, it can only emerge from the cauldron of that  which seems to deny its very existence. The TRC has reached into the cauldron of suffering and despair - creating a space within which those who have borne this suffering could tell their stories. Those directly  responsible for this suffering as well as those who simply stood by and allowed it to happen (sometimes out of fear or a sense of helplessness, sometimes because they benefited from a system that generated this suffering) were invited to listen to these stories. In the context of this drama the nation has been compelled to acknowledge the suffering of the past. If earlier most whites refused to acknowledge the extent of black suffering, today few deny that it happened - although few whites chose to attend TRC hearings or are ready to take responsibility for the restitution of those who suffered most. Some victims and survivors who have testified before the Commission have spoken of a sense of cathartic relief which the experience afforded them. Others still feel that the Commission has not done enough to dress their wounds.

I tell the story of but one such person, Joe Seremane - whose brother Timothy Tebogo Seremane was executed in 1981 in the Quatro detention camp in Angola by cadres of the African National Congress who judged him to be a spy, working for the South African apartheid regime. In brief, Seremane's concern is that the matter was not probed sufficiently by the Commission. "Memories are not so short that it can be forgotten that many have been killed under trumped-up charges of being a spy or a sell-out by fanatic elements in our struggle for liberation," he notes. In  his appearance at the Commission he made several requests: The return of his brother's bones. "Where," he asked, "was my brother buried?" He demanded access to the records of his brother's trial. He asked for the names of his interrogators, prosecutors and executioners, so that he and his family could make peace with them. He asked that both sides of the allegations concerning his brother's alleged spying activities be disclosed in public so that society could judge whether or not he was a South African agent. "You owe us a lot; not monetary compensation, but our bones buried in shallow graves in Angola and heaven knows where else." He quotes words from Langston Hughes's Minstrel Man:
 Because my mouth

Whatever the truth of the various allegations (by Seremane and the counter charges by the ANC) the pathos of Seremane's story should not be missed.  His perception is that his brother was unjustly sentenced - and alienation is driven by perception. A fierce critic of the apartheid regime, he was imprisoned and tortured by the apartheid police. He was a dedicated member of the liberation struggle. Appointed by the African National Congress (ANC) led government to be chief commissioner of the newly formed Land Claims Court (and later dismissed), he now discovers that his comrades in struggle had executed his brother. "I have been on [Robben] Island, I have gone through hell. I have been tortured, nearly lost my life? I have seen what it means to be tortured. But when I think of Chief Timothy and compare the way he died? my suffering is nothing?," he told the Commission's special hearing on prisons in July 1997.
 

A dramatic story. Whatever the truth concerning detail, it illustrates the extent to which healing needs to take place. His story is the stuff of which drama and poetry is written. And yet, tragically, Seremane's story is but one of many that have shaped the story-telling experience of the Commission. It identifies the agony of alienation among brothers - and there are many such stories. Yazir Henry, a young and vulnerable Umkhonto we Sizwe (the armed wing of the African National Congress) soldier reflects on the experience of having been dreadfully tortured and forced to lead the security police to the hiding place of a comrade-in-arms, Ashley Fransch. Unbeknown to Yazir Henry, they were intent to kill not capture. "I heard a very big explosion, it sounded like a rocket had been launched and then ?(whispers) there was silence? And they shouted that it was over. In my head all the time, and even now - although now I am asking the same question: Who sold me to the police? ? (cries) Anton died! ? With that question on his mouth ? And I wake up at night with the same question! ? (cries)." Yazir Henry struggles, inter alia, to be reconciled with himself.
 

Alienation between those who fought on the same side is, of course, as (perhaps more) vividly portrayed within the structures of the State. The resentment experienced by apartheid's operatives who see their political masters as cowards and sellouts for refusing to stand by them in their hour of need has resulted in a cleavage within Afrikanderdom, equal to anything the volk has known in its divisive history. Former State President, FW de Klerk's, dismissal of those who carried out the orders of the State Security Council as a 'few bad apples,' will fester for decades to come in the minds of those whose task it was to do the evil deeds of the past.

The anger and hostility of war between enemies is equally devastating. The atrocities afflicted by one side on the other leave deep and gaping wounds. The reaction to the exhumation of bodies buried in shallow graves across the country is but a single window into the wounded memories that haunt this nation. The stories of the more than fifty bodies exhumed are the stories, sometimes of askaris (former cadres of the liberation movements who were 'turned' and became spies) who had served their purpose, sometimes of brave soldiers of the liberation movements who refused to capitulate to their captors and often of operatives who were captured, tortured and when no further information could be extracted from them, killed. The Commission has identified a further 200 graves that it was simply not able to open. I offer you the comment of Richard Lyster, a Commissioner in the TRC who witnessed the exhumation of the body of Portia Ndwandwe, acting commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe in Natal at the time of her death:
To me this was the most poignant and saddest of all exhumations, for a number of reasons? She was a woman, then the extreme remoteness of the terrain, and the conditions of her detention and death. She was held in a small concrete chamber on the edge of the small forest in which she was buried. According to information from those that killed her, she was held naked and interrogated in this chamber, for some time prior to her death. When we exhumed her body, she was on her back in a fetal position, because the grave had not been dug long enough, and she had a single bullet wound to the top of her head, indicating that she had been kneeling or squatting when she was killed. Her pelvis was clothed in a plastic bag, fashioned into a pair of panties indicating an attempt to protect her modesty. She must have heard them digging her grave ?
 

It is not easy for the wounds of memory which Portia Ndwandwe's young son and others bear to be healed. Less dramatic but equally painful suffering festers behind the mask of normality and respectability for all who have suffered in the South African conflict. We laugh and we drink our wine. It is not polite to over-burden society with the suffering of our age. Anew nation has been born.
 

Poor chap, he always loved larking

And now he's dead

It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,

They said
 

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always

(Still the dead one lay moaning)

I was much too far out all my life

And not waving but drowning
 

A new nation must be born. There must be wine. There must be laughter in life. We must, however, also take time out to face the tragic dimensions of the reality of the past that continues to gnaw at the heart of this new land. Only in facing the memories of the past can we travel with them, not only weeping, but (dare I say it) also laughing.
 

South Africa is a tragic place for so many of its unhealed citizens. There is unfinished healing waiting to be happen. Yes, it is absurd to suggest a Commission of two and half year's duration can heal the wounds of he past, make reparation and reconcile a nation. The Commission's attempt to enable the nation to acknowledge the truth about itself has, however, hopefully created a space for the nation to begin the difficult process of healing itself. It is a process that must necessarily include many facets -including material restitution and psychological counseling, political confrontation, residual criminal trials and the refusal of some to ever forgive. Life is a bag of mixed virtues. Perhaps it is only this mix, which will sadly but inevitably leave some in perpetual pain, that can contribute to meaningful nation building.
 

If reconvivencia (learning to live together) is to be a reality, it necessarily involves getting to know one another - getting to know what has shaped one another's character, driven one another to war and motivated one another to commit the most heinous gross violations of human rights. This involves sharing life's stories one with the other. A new genre of South Africa's stories which peer into the past and expose the present - not in order to fuel ideological divisions nor to preach moralisms, but to sensitize and to heal, is only beginning to be born. Poets, dramatists, musicians, song-writers, painters, sculptors and story-tellers can help heal the nation. The irony is, however, that the arts are starved of funding in South Africa at the very time when they are needed most.

Timothy Garton Ash speaks of "the more adventurous current fiction" and the theater as providing "a partial substitute for the lack of a free press" in the East Germany of the 1980s. He describes, for example, the Deutsches Theater and the Volksbuhne as a "kind of sly cultural resistance so familiar from my studies of Berlin in the 1930s" comparing it to the "anti-Nazi resistance writings of Brecht and others". The Story of Anne Frank has produced an empathetic understanding of anti-Semitism in the Netherlands that no political analysis can rival. Ariel Dorfman's play, Death and the Maiden, has probably done more to quicken the minds of readers around the world about the Latin American dictatorships than all the analytical texts on the subject put together. The anti-war ballads of the Vietnam war era stirred the minds of the American populace -contributing to the creation of a climate that persuaded Nixon to end the war. The impact of poet and artist in anti-apartheid resistance at home and abroad is beyond calculation. Similar artistic resources need now to be mobilized in the creation of a reconciled nation. Artists and the arts generally, need to facilitate the process of mutual understanding and sensitivity, to promote nation-building and reconciliation in South Africa but also in situations of more guarded and subtle forms of personal, economic and political alienation elsewhere in the world. There is healing waiting to be done. The mask of normality hides the cries of the heart. South African writer and poet, Antjie Krog, sees truth, the quest for which stands at the center of the South African experiment in transition, "as the widest possible compilation of people's perceptions, stories, myths and experiences." In pursuit of this many-sided truth, the artist, story-teller and poet can "restore to memory and foster a new humanity. "This wide truth, she suggests, is "perhaps justice in its deepest sense." The genre of memory must be allowed to flow where it will, giving expression to bitterness and anger as well as life and hope. It is at the same time important to recognize that the "politics of memory" can be abused by politicians to fuel the fires of hatred - as seen in the case of the Anglo-Boer war, in Northern Ireland and the situation in the former Yugoslavia. This makes it important to include stories that look forward (rather than backwards) towards restoration in the nation's repertoire of story telling. Memory as justice and not least as healing is at the same time often about victims working through their anger and hatred, as a means of rising above their suffering - of getting on with life with dignity.
 

The Non Fascist Life

The flip side of the challenge to heal the victims of past suffering, is the challenge to heal those responsible for this suffering. Some in South Africa were directly responsible for past suffering, others simply allowed the gross violations of human rights to occur. I want to focus on a general rather than a specific aspect of the challenge associated with perpetration. It involves the creation of an open, inclusive society - a society in which, to quote Michel Foucault, "all forms of fascism, whether already present or impending" are excluded. There seems little remarkable in what he says - until we expose ourselves to his understanding of the notion of 'impending' or, if you like, subterranean forms of fascism that so easily find a place in human nature.
 

I suggest there is perhaps a little perpetrator in all of us. Leon Jaworski, chief prosecutor in the earliest European war crimes trials after World War II, asks himself how it is that decent people murdered others so systematically? The question haunted him all his life and in 1960 he published a book entitled After Fifteen Years, in which he effectively said: "Watch out." "It can happen to you." Josef Garlinski, a member of the Polish resistance army and Auschwitz survivor reflects on the brutality he was required to endure from his Nazi captors and reminds us, in his book, Fighting Auschwitz. Having told his story with devastating human impact, he goes on to remind us that the young SS officers responsible for such deeds "could have been your sons or mine." A black South African artisan, proud of his son's educational achievements and advancement in the South African Police, asked in disbelief how his son, a sensitive and deeply religious young man, could possibly have become a culpable member of the police riot squad sent into Mlungisi, the African township outside of Queenstown, to quell an anti-apartheid uprising. The moving testimony of Ginn Fourie, mother of Lyndi Fourie who was killed in the Heidelberg Tavern massacre, carried out by three young APLA (Azanian People's Liberation Army) operatives in December 1993, captures the importance of discovering the humanity, compassion and courtesy of her daughter's assassins. At the close of the amnesty hearing for the young men responsible for the deed, Mrs. Fourie met with them as they were about to be returned their prison cells. She had on a previous occasion offered them her forgiveness. They had suggested that perhaps there was a need for joint counseling, involving perpetrator and victim or survivor. I quote her account of the meeting:
 

The warders insisted that the meeting adjourn, a hug for each indicated the depth of community we had entered into in this short while. The amnesty applicants then shackled themselves, which at that moment symbolized to me the enormous responsibility which accompanies freedom of choice and the sad outcome of making poor choices. Tears came to my eyes. Humphrey Gqomfa (one of the killers) turned to the interpreter and said: "Please take Mrs. Fourie home." Once more I was amazed by the sensitivity and leadership potential of this man, the same man who was also a perpetrator of gross violations of human rights against my own daughter.
 

The focus of the TRC has been on what could be regarded as the exceptional. The nation was, in the process, horrified by the killers of Vlakplaas. It is outraged by the poisoning exploits and drug industry which emerged from South Africa's experiments in chemical and biological warfare. The media has understandably focused on these events - labeling Eugene de Kock, the Vlakplaas commander, "prime evil". Jeffrey Benzien, a Western Cape Security Branch policeman, who demonstrated his notorious "wet bag" method of torture before the amnesty committee, was seen on television screens and captured on the front page of most newspapers in the country. Such killers and torturers have been represented as psychopaths, aberrations and misfits. The stories of 'the ordinary' within apartheid have not made it to television screens with the same impact as these more horrific events. Steven Robins, perhaps a little too zealously, suggests that all too often the public representation of the perpetrator before the TRC conformed to the Hollywood notion of a white South African policeman, portrayed as "evil-looking Nazis with thick Afrikaans accents". The outcome has been the undermining of the ability of ordinary South Africans to see themselves as 'represented' by those who the TRC defines as perpetrators. It was too easy for too many to walk away, saying "Well, at least I did not kill anyone." In crypto-biblical style, many have silently observed, "thank you God that I am not a murderer, a torturer or an assassin - like those evil people paraded on our television screens. I thank you, God, that I am not like Eugene de Kock or Jeffrey Benzien." The focus on the outrageous has drawn the nation's attention away from what Hannah Arendt has called the "banality of evil". Foucault suggests that "fascism is in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power; to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us."
 

We too often fail to recognize the little perpetrator - the impending or latent fascist, within. Indeed, the size of the perpetrator, and its capacity to do harm, is perhaps determined by the circumstances in which we find ourselves. To recognize the possibility of evil in each of us is to take responsibility to ensure that past evil does not, in one form or another, reoccur in the future. The attempt by some within the African National Congress to stop the publication of the TRC report, because it was unhappy with the Commission having found this organization to be responsible for certain gross violations of human rights, is suggestive in this regard. The Archbishop in his prophetic way (and prophets at times speak without nuance) was quick to warn that the seeds of tyranny were present in this initiative. Suffice it to say, however, South Africa's new constitutional democracy allowed for the challenge to happen and for the court to rule against the ruling party. This is the good news. Constitutional democracy is working. The saga suggests the reality of political gain as well as the need for vigilance in the promotion of human rights - more specifically, the freedom of information, as the basis of democracy.
 

Itzhak Fried suggests that individuals in most societies know that a constellation of high fever and coughing may indicate pneumonia, our society needs to be aware of symptoms that suggest the possibility of human rights violations being committed. I suggest the following are, inter alia, among them:
 

• The curtailing of free speech in favor of a paranoiac promotion of 'the truth'.
• Threats to the freedom the press and political exchange.
• The marginalization, let alone the demonisation, of 'the other' - those who challenge 'our truth'. In South Africa they used to be labeled communists, anarchists and un-South African. It is a process that begins, however, not with demonisation per se, but with an inability to empathize and an unwillingness to understand the other. It is this "incapacity for identification," suggests Adorno, that is the root of fascism.
• Interference in the process of the rule of law.
• The suspension of basic human rights in the interest of the state (what is usually called national) priorities.
• The restriction of the activities of civil society.

The role of the satirist, comic, cartoonist, story-teller, artist and court jester - as well as the harshest political critic, is required for democracy to flourish. This is a process which must go beyond cerebral response - it must include those emotions that can only be captured in story-telling, poetry and song. Joseph Jaworski, in reflecting on his father, Leon Jaworski's, book After Fifteen Years, takes the scenario further in suggesting that it is decidedly not only governments that exploit power. It happens in business, academic institutions and similar organizations where power is frequently wielded without the restraints of public criticism and open debate. Needless to say, it can raise its ugly head in every human relationship - wherever "two or three are gathered."

It occurs, he suggests, wherever the 'undiscussibles' that impede a healthy exchange of ideas remain undiscussed Reconciliation

I have referred to two deep-seated human passions: The legacy of past suffering which resides in all but the most remarkable of people, and the reality of the little perpetrator, the potential fascist, within in each of us. These passions are counter-balanced, I suggest, by an equally deep-seated desire among most (but not all) people to move beyond past legacies and above petty fascist tendencies toward an existence that allows for the possibility of peace, justice and ultimately reconciliation. It involves the human impulse to move both beyond being a victim and ceasing to be a perpetrator.

The South African political settlement, described by some as a 'miracle', is but one example of this impulse. It is the story of two warring groups - divided by all the 'isms' of the modern world, entrenched in generations of prejudice and oppression, coming together around a table to talk peace. The historic compromise (for all its strengths and weaknesses) is today celebrated around the world -- a compromise, the details of which still need to be worked out. With the initial euphoria over and the demands of the challenge that awaits the nation needing to be faced, there are fewer and fewer people who are still prepared to talk of the South African 'miracle'. The compromise has huge economic and other implications that reach beyond the scope of this paper.
 

The legislation governing the TRC presupposes the need for national reconciliation. It, at the same time, gives expression to two related but distinct conceptions of reconciliation. The one is captured in what the Act calls "peaceful coexistence". The other is a higher notion of "reconciliation".
 

Coexistence involves working together as a basis for putting in place those things that make for mutual survival - an appropriate legislative structure, a civil service, legitimate policing and the like. It involves arguing with one's political adversaries late into the night, accepting that the next day it will be necessary to live and work together at a number of different levels. As such it requires the first step (often reluctantly) towards honoring one's political commitments - if only out of self-interest. It involves ways of identifying and responding to the fears and aspirations of those on the extremes of the political spectrum, with a view to incorporating as many as possible within these groups into the bigger national agenda. It involves refusing to allow past wrongdoing and resentment towards others to undermine the political process.
 

Reconciliation involves more. It implies the restoration and sometimes the establishment of a hitherto non-existent relationship of trust. This takes time. It involves hard work and persistence. It is likely to include compromises. It requires an understanding of the other person's fears and aspirations. It necessitates the building of trust and respect for the rights and legitimacy of political opposition groupings. It does not necessarily imply forgiveness.
 

Forgiveness involves more than reconciliation. It usually comes, if at all, at the end of a process of cooperation and reconciliation. It is deeply personal. Jeffrie Murphy, in a helpful essay on forgiveness, argues that "we do all need and desire forgiveness and would not want to live in a world where forgiveness was not regarded as a healing and restoring value." It is more than a Christian imposition as some have suggested.
 

These different levels of connecting-up tend to nest inside each other - a bit like Chinese boxes or Russian dolls. Different groups within society find themselves at different levels of interaction and no one group or individual within society is perhaps ever fully at home in either one or other category of engagement.
 

A powerful dialogue between the Polish dissident, Adam Michnik, and the then Czechoslovakian President, Vaclav Havel, in November 1993, captures the tension inherent to a nation seeking to redeem itself. Michnik tells that when he was in prison he resolved never to seek revenge. Yet he kept repeating to himself a fragment of Zbigniew Herbert's poem: "And do not forgive, as it is not within your power to forgive on behalf of those betrayed at dawn." We can forgive harm done to us. It is not in our power to forgive harm done to others. "We can try to convince people to forgive, but if they want justice, they are entitled to demand it."

Think, however, of the impact that forgiveness could have on the nation. It is essential that South Africans agree to coexist. National reconciliation is necessary for South Africans to become dedicated citizens of one nation. Forgiveness involves more. It is a coveted ideal to be gently pursued. It cannot be imposed.

The dialectic between coexistence and reconciliation should not be easily surrendered as South Africans learn to live together. If it is surrendered, we surrender too much. We loose what Horkheimer calls the "theological moment" - let's call it the "artistic moment," which allows for a space for critique, openness and renewal in society." No nation can afford the loss of this moment. The political quest must be to cut the Gordian knot of the past. It is to reach towards what Karl Jaspers in his celebrated essay, written shortly after the institution of the Nuremberg Trials, called the "new world waiting to be built." "Unless," he warned, "a break is made in the evil chain, the fate which overtook us will overtake the victors - and all mankind with them."
 

Question: Can the resources of the arts and religion be harnessed, as they were harnessed in opposing apartheid, to reconcile those who carry within them the burden of past memory and guilt of perpetration? Resistance art was, of course, experiential art - it emerged out of resistance. It is this that suggests the burden of art that heals, lies on the shoulders of those directly affected by the past, or at least sufficiently moved by it to be committed to the healing of the future. The responsibility of those so committed is to facilitate the emergence of a genre of art that speaks even to those who would prefer not to engage themselves in healing process.

It is likely to involve not merely the weight of the past, but also the joy and celebration of what can emerge as the future.
 

Why Religion and the Arts?

Why an appeal to religion and the arts? I return to Max Weber's 'iron cage'. He feared nothing more than, what he called, the "inescapable universal bureaucratization" which hangs over society like the sword of Damocles. Agreeing with Karl Marx that revolution was the "expropriation of the expropriator," he was at the same time not convinced that the new would be fundamentally different from the old. He feared most the power of the all encompassing structural forces of society - which are capable of surviving the most radical revolutions. For him they are epitomized in the dominant culture, in habit, social convention, political structures, the economic order and the love of power - all of which militate against the possibility of what is new. Trapped in the past, we perpetuate the norms, behavior and (all too frequently) the gross violations of human rights of the past. Camus' warning of the danger of the revolutionaries of the past becoming the hangmen of tomorrow can from Weber's perspective, never be dismissed as mere bourgeois pessimism. In the words of Foucault, "How does one keep from being a fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant?"
 

The question is how to break out of the captivity of the past? Rubem Alves, the Brazilian poet and social analyst suggests it has something to do with imagination. It has to do, he suggests, with the need for humanity to break out of what he calls the "arrogance of power" - which perpetuates past thoughts, answers and structures. Look, he argues, not to those who epitomize what contemporary society regards as 'success' - a brand of success which succeeds only within the limitations of the very structures that need to be breached. Look rather to those who dream new thoughts and see new visions: poets, artists, visionaries, musicians and believers- those who dare to dream new dreams, those who celebrate the possibility of a different kind of future. It is only as alternatives visions confront the long held presuppositions that the possibility emerges of the iron cage being sprung. Creativity, new ideas and imagination is, however, rarely acceptable to the status quo. "Creativity," suggests Alves, is for those who benefit most from the existing order, a "forbidden act." It is dismissed as absurd, as ridiculous, as heresy. Yesteryear, society burned heretics at the stake. At least they were taken seriously.

Today they are simply ignored.

But every now and again an alternative option grasps public attention - perhaps only because it emerged from a situation within which there was no other real alternative. The TRC was, in a sense, that kind of necessity. Seeking neither revenge nor amnesia (because neither were politically possible), an alternative to dealing with the past had to be found. It is still too early to say whether it has worked. The nation is not yet healed. There is no broad based reconciliation. But there is a chance for this to happen and South Africa needs all the help is can get to ensure that the best use is made of this time of grace. We need material and economic assistance, as well as links with other cultural and human rights institutions internationally. We also, however, need the will to overcome the past - to deal with the memory of wrongs and the guilt of perpetration.

It constitutes an inward need - driven by spiritual and psychological forces, which enables people to embrace one another, even when material restitution, that is so vitally necessary, is not fully available. The forces that challenge and provoke the human soul need to be tapped to enable this to happen. It is here that artists and believers who are sustained by what Weber defines as the charisma of life have a role to play. Values cannot be imposed. Hope cannot be demanded. The soul of a nation cannot be bought. It can all be gently nurtured and artistically nudged and massaged into reality.
 

Weber's salutary reminder of the dangers of oppressive religion which he saw as being manifest in most forms of institutional religion needs to be heeded. He would have said the same of the established arts. He at the same time recognized the renewing power of transforming religion and the arts which draws on the vision and resources of marginalized society - those who Weber saw as carrying within themselves the possibility of escaping the imposed social constructions of the powerful - that perpetuate the prevailing social order. (It is here, of course, that Weber's sociology finds common ground with liberation theologies and protest art of different kinds. It also finds its link with the work of Rene Girard on which this conference focusses.) Such life-giving forces - possibilities of renewal, are perhaps always critical forces that question the old as well as the emerging new order of any society. They recognize the possibility of new forms of exploitation and imposed power. They acknowledge the inherent difficulties involved in the creation of the new.
 

WS Merwin's prose poem entitled, "Unchopping a Tree," provides a powerful metaphor on renewal, reminding us of the limitations of any human attempt to heal. The author describes the incredibly difficult process of how one could go about reconstructing a tree - placing each fallen branch, withered twig and dried leaf in its appropriate place, as well as relocating birds' nests. Herewith the final lines of the poem:
 

The first breeze that touches its dead leaves ? You are afraid the motion

of the clouds will be enough to push it over. What more can you do? What

more can you do?
 

But there is nothing more you can do

Others are waiting

Everything is going to have to be put back.
 

Have the leaves been placed in the correct place? How many twigs are missing? Will the birds recognize their nests? Will the tree take root and grow? Perhaps endurance, not restitution, never full recovery, not even full healing, is all that survivors can strive for. Some dare to hope.
 
 

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