Ubuntu Does Not Require Forgiveness

A Critique of the TRC’s Pressure on Apartheid Victims to Forgive Their Perpetrators

Abstract

This article argues that South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) instrumentalised ubuntu to promote forgiveness as a moral obligation for victims of apartheid violence. It argues that the TRC’s ethical framework misrepresented ubuntu by conflating it with amnesty and emotional closure, thus imposing undue pressure on victims to forgive in service of national unity. Drawing on transitional justice theory, the article traces how the TRC positioned restorative justice as a “third way” – a mechanism meant to achieve the goals of both retributive and reparative justice. Through public truth-telling and full disclosure by the perpetrators, the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act 34 of 1995 (PNURA) sought to validate the victims’ suffering while ensuring a form of moral accountability. However, in practice, truth-telling was framed as a substitute for accountability, and reconciliation was treated as contingent on the victims’ willingness to forgive. The article contends that this framework not only marginalised those unwilling to forgive but also transformed personal trauma into a political tool, thereby reinforcing state narratives of unity at the expense of the victims’ autonomy. Through a critical reading of ubuntu – particularly as interpreted by the philosopher Mogobe Ramose – the article shows that genuine ubuntu is not reducible to forgiveness, but rather grounded in accountability, restitution, and relational integrity. It concludes that the TRC’s approach betrayed the very ethical principles it claimed to uphold, undermining both justice and reconciliation. Instead of fostering healing, the TRC’s demand for state-mediated forgiveness risked retraumatising victims and distorting ubuntu into an instrument of political expediency rather than a meaningful path to communal restoration.