Post-Conflict Institutional Design: Peacebuilding and Democracy in Africa by Abu Bakarr Bah

Author:Abu Bakarr Bah [Bah, Abu Bakarr]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, World, African, Peace, Social Science, Developing & Emerging Countries, Education, Higher
ISBN: 9781786998019
Google: TNsNzgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 56614637
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2021-08-26T12:41:28+00:00

Introduction

In post-apartheid South Africa, the quest to address and redress over three centuries of dispossession through settler colonialism, slavery, and apartheid was negotiated through nation-building, unity, and reconciliation initiatives. Of these processes, this chapter seeks to examine attempts to advance a form of restorative justice through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and provide symbolic reparations through community and national memorialization projects. The latter was particularly shaped by the imperative to redress the memory landscape, as “less than one percent of about 4000 declared national monuments in South Africa related to pre-colonial African heritage.”1 Consequently, vigorous debates ensued about the future of existing monuments in the “new” South Africa, with the African National Congress (ANC) opting to retain most of the existing monuments.2

The processes of memory and peacebuilding in South Africa are shaped by the negotiated political settlement that anchored constitutional supremacy, human rights, and a liberal political economy as the basis of the post-apartheid state.3 Despite widespread public participation in the negotiated transition,4 many have referred to the settlement as an elite compromise that ceded political control to the ANC to secure the capitalist economy.5 It is within this context that the struggles for recognition, belonging, justice, change, and identity are traversed, often within the bounds of the post-apartheid memory project.

As a new model of transitional justice, the TRC in South Africa, was envisioned as a restorative justice mechanism that engaged with collective memory-making for everyone in society through truth-telling and confessions. However, in practice it became an exercise of political (elite) reconciliation because of its emphasis on proving that violations were politically motivated. The recommendations of this process included the provision of symbolic reparations that saw the creation of collective memory institutions such as museums, monuments, and memorials that would be utilized to redress the memory landscape and advance reconciliation. The evolution of indigenous memory institutions in post-apartheid South Africa enables us to explore how such mechanisms can be utilized for building peace and ensuring justice in deeply divided societies. The focus on memory institutions in post-apartheid South Africa is critical, because of the manner in which the ANC utilized indigenous transitional justice mechanisms to address and redress apartheid within the framework of innovative memory institutions.

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