Doing Justice To The Past: Living Ubuntu
by Dennis Wilson '01
In January of 1993 Amy Biehl, a determined young woman of 25 years, traveled to South Africa in those alluring and precipitous days when the apartheid state stood on the brink of implosion and a new, experimental democracy was poised to rise from its ashes. A Fulbright Scholar, Biehl was making the trip to study the role of women in the negotiations that would lead to the chartering of what is now heralded as "the world's most liberal constitution." Knowing that South African women faced multiple forms of discrimination, Biehl was committed to an exhaustive study of the political and social effects of gender and democratic transition.
Four months later, however, Biehl's mission came to a tragic end. Amidst the localized and often indiscriminate disorder that pervaded South Africa during that turbulent period, she was stoned to death as she was driving through an impoverished township to drop off a friend. Her lifelong ambitions remained as incomplete and hazy as the story of violence that led to her premature death; it was known only that her killing may have been precipitated by a local man urging his neighbors to attack any whites in the township.
From the fatal trajectory of those misbegotten stones, however, came a monumental act of atonement that was to signify the most hopeful elements of South Africa's struggle for democracy and reconciliation. In an effort to perpetuate the dreams of their daughter, Peter and Linda Biehl established the Amy Biehl Foundation and, later, the Youth on Violence Foundation, both directed at exploring the lasting effects of apartheid and its relation to widespread youth violence and disenfranchisement in South African townships. These foundations work from a holistic view of rehabilitation, incorporating education, sports, arts and employment, and they are largely self-sustaining. They are financed in part through a baking trust that provides much-needed food and entrepreneurial experience to the people of the townships.
Peter and Linda Biehl spend their time traveling between South Africa and the United States, working to provide direction in the townships and raise awareness of South Africa's situation abroad. This April, the Biehls visited Washington College to discuss a concept that has played a vital role in their own lives and in the life of South Africa's maturing democracy-the concept of ubuntu, or restorative justice.
Ubuntu is a concept of justice unfamiliar to many modern non-African societies. It implies a system of justice based on mutual reconciliation. To give a simplified example: one man has stolen another man's goat. When his act is discovered, he is asked to return the goat and to loan an additional goat to the victim's family to make up for lost resources. More importantly, he is expected to reach an understanding with the victim's family-to honestly explain his actions and to atone with his neighbors. In this way, the cycle of communal hostility is halted.
The implications of ubuntu, of course, go further than goats and local communities. Although the ubuntu system of justice has yet to be incorporated into the court systems, its framework has been applied to the nation's struggle to move on toward an inclusive future. The Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) is the embodiment of this attempt-it allows for perpetrators (black and white) of apartheid-related crimes to be granted diplomatic immunity and freedom from imprisonment. The main requirement? A full confession before the committee, the victim's relatives and, through the press, the world community. Through these open confessions, these open discussions of pain and misunderstanding, it is hoped that the people of South Africa will come together to reach a common ground and understanding.
It is a system not without complications. It is impossible to ensure personal or national reconciliation through law. Many disagree with the mission of the TRC, unhappy that it allows known criminals to re-enter the community. Also, experiments such as the TRC face hardships as a new generation rises to maturity: a generation that has nothing to reconcile with but a foreign and unfamiliar past.
Such is the nature of the ubuntu system, however, that its successes are not witnessed through theory or pedagogy. The fruitions of ubuntu are seen only in the hearts of those whose lives it has affected. Linda and Peter Biehl testify to the character of this statement. Eight years after the death of their daughter, they work hand-in-hand with two very unlikely community activists-two of the four men charged with the murder of their daughter. The Biehls attest that there is no hostility among the four of them, who have succeeded in living ubuntu. Having realized an unquantifiable loss and traveled halfway across the world to reconcile with that loss, the Biehls have determined to give back to the system of ubuntu what it has given them-an opportunity to generate understanding and forgiveness across sometimes impossible boundaries.
Dennis Wilson '01, a history major, spent a semester on academic exchange at Rhodes University in South Africa. He intends to become a teacher.
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