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I wish to thank the editors of JAPA for inviting five colleagues to comment on my paper, “Psychological Repair: The Intersubjective Dialogue of Remorse and Forgiveness in the Aftermath of Gross Human Rights Violations” (JAPA 63/6, 2015). I can hardly begin to do justice to their thoughtful comments, but I will do my best to address the issues they raise, and to explore how the different perspectives discussed in their papers might connect with some of the ideas I have been trying to develop in my work. My earlier discussions of forgiveness (e.g., Gobodo-Madikizela 2003) tried to articulate forgiveness as a response to a remorseful apology and presented both forgiveness and remorse as implying the “rehumanization” of both victims and perpetrators. In my recent work, I turn to the pivotal issue of intersubjectivity in the context of victim-perpetrator dialogue, and explore how the concepts playing a central role in the forgiveness response—acknowledgment, recognition, remorse, openness, forgiveness—work in practice and how they enable change and transformation.
Given the great relevance of the issues raised in the commentaries, I should, before responding, mention briefly what has happened in South Africa in the year since my paper appeared. The dramatic unfolding of events in all sectors of our society, including the turmoil in the governing African National Congress, exemplified, among other things, by a major investigation into the looting of government coffers, what has been termed “state capture,”1 led me to focus sharply on the question of what is missing in the reconciliation discourse.
On the twentieth anniversary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), black students' protests, which began at previously