Amazing addition to the Living Reconciliation series

Posted on August 25, 2011. Filed under: Events, Reconciliation |

I hope everyone enjoyed last night’s seminar on A Moral Imperative to Speak, which forms part of the Living Reconciliation series, as much as I did! And the future certainly looks bright with young leaders like Amanda Ngwenya, Rayne Moses, Jan Greyling and Noncedo Bulani rising in our ranks!

Today’s Cape Argus featured an article that focused on panelist Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu’s call to allow ‘white people an opportunity to heal from the wounds of apartheid’, and we hope to hear more from others who attended the event. We will also post more pictures soon!

I also thought I would share the very interesting opening remarks made by Professor Jaco Barnard-Naudé, who leads the Living Reconciliation initiative together with Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela .

Barnard-Naudé describes some of the inspiration and thinking behind the initiative:

‘It is in order to justify to you our choice of this word ‘living’ in naming our project that I refer to the work of Oscar Wilde (not the only enfant terrible from whom we will hear tonight) who, somewhat pessimistically, once remarked: ‘To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.’ While the Living Reconciliation Forum is inspired by a notion of ‘living’ that is more than mere existence as Wilde indicates, we believe, contrary to Wilde, that living does not have to be a rare thing, that all of us can learn to live and not just merely exist in the world. Living, when it is expressed as more than existence, suggests effort, action, vitality, work, difficulty, process, struggle. And it is not mere coincidence that this word imposed itself upon us standing next door as it does to the word Reconciliation. For is it not true that when we talk about reconciliation we are essentially naming this difficult, but vital, activity or event to which the notion of ‘living’ already refers?’

Read Professor Barnard-Naudé’s full remarks here, and please post your responses below!