Apologies everywhere … and nowhere

An apology animates pain – of injury, its story, and effect – and promise – of acceptance, forgiveness, and reparation. As a repository of affective content, when, how, and whether an apology is given invokes fierce interpersonal, public, political, and scholarly debate, the undercurrent of which is often: does it actually matter to those who have been harmed? Defying simple definition and assessment, and multidimensional in how it is both expressed and received, those who are most closely affected by the actions to which the apology is a response are perhaps the ultimate arbiters of its authenticity and value. This is even more so in the age of social media, when apologies are publicly vetted, vilified or verified. The value of apology is mediated by, among others, historical and political dynamics, personal proclivities, legal imperatives, and judicial interpretations. It must be weighed against the gravity of the harm caused and the interpersonal and socio-historical contingencies that shape its impact. As a social act, an apology and the meaning it communicates is tied into how it may, or may not, change the conditions that led to the harm experienced. This makes it necessary to attend to what precisely a given apology seeks to reconcile. And for this reason, context is key.

We live, it has been suggested, in an age of apology (Brooks 1999), with recent years seeing insistent demands for apologies as part of a global reckoning with the enduring legacies of slavery and colonialism (Davis 2014: 271; Faulconbridge 2020; Schaart 2021). But, reduced to mere performance, devoid of reparative content, the significance of the apology for those injured may be overestimated. Moreover, as Wakeham points out, in the context of historical wrongs, apologetic ‘practices of atonement’ can limit the responsibility of perpetrators by putting the focus on ‘historically delimited, specific injuries rather than acknowledging … systemic ongoing practices’, so pre-empting ‘sustained investigation of grievances with statements of contrition’ (Wakeham 2012: 3). The ‘miracle’ of South Africa’s ‘peaceful’ transition from apartheid is closely linked in many minds to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, as a definitive moment of truth-telling, contrition, and forgiveness. For others, increasingly, that same process of truth-telling and reconciliation is marked as ‘unfinished business’ and as having failed to deliver justice for the harms of apartheid. Notwithstanding the postapartheid state’s grand plan to enlist law and rights to undo the racial, sexual, and gender inequalities and discriminations of the past (Judge and Smythe 2020), the political narrative has now largely turned away from ‘soft option’ remedies such as apologies towards the hard retributive edge of law – and particularly criminal law – as a way to address dignity harms.¹ In this regard, legal remedies have closely followed the turn away from apology and forgiveness as being core to national reconciliation. The interpolation of South Africa’s opportunity to reconcile with the past and thinking about apology’s role in reckoning and remedy for present harms are apparent throughout this book. All of the chapters are situated in a context of the generational harms visited by colonialism and apartheid, even where this is not the focus of the chapter, and the intractability of entrenched power relations as represented in absences of truth and justice. As such, the chapters resist being neatly categorised into timeframes or themes, for each is a meditation on the moment and on the conditions that inform it.

Situated in the precarity of South Africa’s present, this book leads us to ask what the cynicism of South Africans towards the reintegrative possibilities of apology (Braithwaite 1989), the increased politicisation of hate, and greater reliance on retributive legal remedies mean for apologies. The question links to concerns that apology alone cannot materially transform the interpersonal, social, political, or economic relationships – past and present, distant and proximate – in which injurious harms are located. Here, history casts a long shadow, in which the ideas of ‘forgive and forget’ that are frequently associated with politically negotiated apologies can obscure apology’s potential in the present. So, the apology comes to take on particular meanings within South Africa’s unfinished project of reparation and redistribution within enduring cultures of dehumanisation through which centuries of colonial and apartheid governance were built and sustained. In this sense, the generative possibilities of apology are bound up with an array of socio-political and economic conditions that are historical in nature, bringing under scrutiny what apology does with the past, and what it might in turn do for the future.

As a signifier of remorse and contrition, can the act of apologising lead an individual, a state, or a non-state entity (such as a corporation) to meaningful reform or reparation and spur action towards accountability and the undoing of harm in material ways? In light of South Africa’s history of institutionalised discrimination, whether and how apology facilitates the reconstituting of social relations, through reparation and compensation and in tropes of forgiveness and reconciliation, should be central considerations. Can it, as Tarusarira (2019) suggests it must, shift the bedrock – the foundation – underpinning the harm? A critical reading of the South African experience and its legacy of settler-colonialism foregrounds the urgency of doing so, and also its near impossibility, precisely because such a shift is necessarily structural, ideological, and relational, playing out in a context of extreme power disparities. Tarusarira calls this a transformative apology (Tarusarira 2019: 213), which is apt for the scale of structural change it urges. In doing so, it echoes South Africa’s commitment to a form of transformative rights-based constitutionalism that imagined the possibility of such a bedrock shift. The South African Constitution, suggested Justice Albie Sachs in 2005, ‘represents a radical rupture with a past based on intolerance and exclusion, and the movement forward to the acceptance of the need to develop a society based on equality and respect by all for all’,² an aspiration that remains substantively incomplete. Against this backdrop, our critical engagement with South Africa in this book provides glimpses of the transformative potential of apologies, the political imagination required for their realisation, and the dangerous implications and consequences of their absence.

Enacting apologies

In relation to political apologies – such as in response to state-sponsored harms or personal wrongdoing by political actors – scholars identify a more pared-down set of components, including an actual expression of apology, explicit acknowledgement of wrongdoing, acceptance of responsibility, acknowledgement of injury to victims, commitment to not repeating those actions, and offers of reparation (Tavuchis 1991: 19–20; Lazare 2004).

Nick Smith (2008; 2014) offers a detailed and useful account of the elements that he considers to constitute a ‘categorical apology’. These are: that the apology should corroborate an agreed upon factual record; that the person apologising should accept ‘causal moral responsibility’ for the harm caused; that they have the standing to accept blame; that each harm is identified in the apology (as opposed to a sweeping apology or one that deflects to a lesser wrong); that the apology identifies the violated values and principles underpinning the harm and (re)commits the offender to those shared principles; that it recognises and treats the victim as a ‘moral interlocutor’ worthy of an apology by virtue of their dignity and humanity; that it shows categorical regret for the actions that caused the harm (as opposed to a justification of those actions and associated outcomes); that the apology is expressed to the victim and includes a commitment to not reoffend; and that it involves practical responsibility in the form of redress, with the offender’s intention being to benefit the victim’s well-being, rather than their own, along with the ‘appropriate degree and duration of sorrow and guilt as well as empathy and sympathy for the victim’ (Smith 2014: 17–19). Most apologies never meet this categorical standard, with its ‘thick conceptions of repentance’ (Smith 2014: 19), but Smith suggests that it is a good benchmark against which all apologies might be measured and a number of chapters in this volume do so.

In law, the apology can operate as a remedy and to reduce culpability (and so mitigate liability and punishment) in criminal courts, as well as in other areas that include vernacular law, delict/torts, environmental law, and health law. Because what is said counts materially, there is an industry of experts to advise on how best to tick the mechanistic requirements that allow for a show of remorse (an infamously ‘overused, opaque, and imprecise term in law’ [Smith 2014: 3]) through apology, without admitting liability. As an ethical and moral concern, the utility of the apology is also connected with the desire to communicate a particular disposition of oneself in respect of a breach or harm, and to repair relationships. If non-defensive, it can turn attention to the value of the relationship and give the victim the opportunity to be heard and to consider their response to the offered apology. Time and space to consider an apology is an important mediator of how it is received (Zechmeister et al 2004; Petucci 2017: 444). Critical too is who offers and who authorises the apology, particularly in the case of wrongdoing by a state, corporation, or institutional entity. The figure offering the apology should be, to use Goffman’s term, a ‘ratified person’ (Goffman 1967; also Thompson 2008: 31) who speaks as a ‘representative’ and carries sufficient authority to communicate on behalf of the wrongdoer. But, drawing on a content analysis of political apologies, Blatz, Schumann, and Ross (2009) caution that political apologisers typically dissociate the regime they serve from the one that perpetrated the harm, praising victims for their fortitude and forbearance, while ignoring the continuities that inhere in state power. For political apologies, publicity is central to both the performance of the apology and, more critically, in creating a record of contrition and concomitant responsibility. Research shows, however, that while apologies may be effective in restoring trust in interpersonal relations (Fehr et al 2010), they are often less effective in intergroup conflicts (Reinders Folmer et al 2021: 2), with the performance of remorse being treated with suspicion. According to Reinders Folmer et al (2021: 11), victim groups in intergroup situations ‘… are less inclined to take conciliatory initiatives from outgroups at face value [which] undermines the effectiveness of apologies relative to interpersonal contexts’ and may lead to more violence. This is unsurprising, since formal state or corporate apologies are often means to resolve conflict without violence that at the same time expose the fissure between their enactments and a meaningful change in the power relations from which their necessity arises. And yet, as Brooks argues, ‘[h]eartfelt contrition just might signify a nation’s capacity to suppress its next impulse to harm others’ (Brooks 1999: 4).

With truth

Giving a full account of the harm for which it is summoned or sought lies at the heart of apology. South Africa’s TRC sought to provide official recognition of the truth about the apartheid past and to render an authoritative account of the gross violations of human rights that took place under the apartheid regime. In the end, its capacity to give that full account ended up falling short, as did its ability to provide for meaningful reparations to victims, whether directly or indirectly, of apartheid. The TRC’s approach to reconciliation and truth seeking was largely ecumenical, valorising forgiveness and founded on the premise that disclosure, catharsis, and absolution, including bringing together the victim and perpetrator within a confessional frame, would bring resolution. Its granting of amnesty for truth has been linked to ‘unrequited expectations for justice’ – a ‘justice deficit’ that precludes reconciliation with the past (Gibson 2002).

Exposing the truth is necessary to reconciliation and has the potential to unmask the denials that lend personal and institutional legitimacy to wrongdoings, in turn connecting abstracted notions of brutal power to the leaders and functionaries through which that power is enacted. The disclosure of the facts of gross violations, and the knowledge of how those atrocities came about, are truth’s painful offering. Consequently, the acknowledgement of truth is seen to provide justice to victims and survivors and to restore the wider society (Millar 2011). However, the expression of contrition for the suffering inflicted on another is not a matter of truth alone, for reparation is irreducible to solely the presence or absence of truth. For this reason, a purely positivist approach to evaluating truth revelations is inadequate in that the ultimate objective of those revelations must be to reconcile those members of a society who previously held opposing views of the past regime (Kaminski and Malepa 2006: 386).

The value of the TRC has been critically, and often negatively, assessed in relation to the partiality of the truth it accessed as well as the lack of criminal and social justice, and reparative redress, that followed (Stanley 2001). This criticism, and the deep disappointment it signals, is threaded through many of the chapters in this volume. It is also in this context that the recent apology of the former apartheid leader F.W. de Klerk should be understood. As apartheid’s last president, de Klerk led the National Party into a handover of political power that ushered in the democratic rule of the African National Congress (ANC), the former liberation movement. Upon his death in 2021, a pre-recorded “last message, addressed to the people of South Africa” was released, in which de Klerk made a final attempt to apologise for apartheid.³ De Klerk is considered by some white nationalists to be a sell-out who went too far by ceding state power without defeat, and by some black nationalists as having manipulated the ANC into a constitutional compromise that kept white privilege in place (van der Westhuizen 2021). Until fairly recently, he had refused to concede that apartheid was a crime against humanity. This contested legacy is the scene for how his apology is variously interpreted – as reiterating the obfuscation of apartheid truths, as a defensive strategy without adequate reparative action, or as marking a heartfelt shift in acknowledgement and contrition. In considering the various modalities of truth-telling posited by the TRC,⁴ Twidle charges that the Commission was not able to deal with how these multiplicities of truth ‘might modify, contradict, unsettle or work against each other’, pointing towards all that is ‘the unknowable, the unreconciled, the unforgiven’ (Twidle 2019: 4), which de Klerk has, in a sense, come to signify. The contending meanings attributed to de Klerk’s apology circuit back to the apology’s necessary imbrication with both truth and justice. As Norval argues, ‘[j]ustification of the pursuit of truth and justice derives its strength from an appeal to more fundamental intuitions about the just treatment of citizens in a democratic society’ (1998: 252). Such intuitions animate the reception of the apartheid leader’s final words at a time when imaginaries of more settled forms of truth and justice, past and present, abound.

Alongside justice

Thinking of apology alongside justice, particularly in the case of harms that are integrally connected to systems and structures of historical injustice, is of particular importance to this volume. The relationship of apology with justice seeking is complex. Central are social commitments to justice and peace in the wake of violence, as ‘prerequisite for forgiveness’ (Regehr and Gutheil 2002) and a way of making moral amends (Golding 1984–5: 133) that ‘signifies a human gesture beyond the structural relationships created by law’ (Alberstein and Davidovitch 2011: 154). The apology, then, provides evidence of contrition – proof that ‘something was done’, responsibility was taken, and redemption was deserved. In this sense, apologies are (or should be) consequential, and can therefore be inhibited by fears of having to pay the price for a particular action by effectively admitting guilt: ‘(s)ome apologies are not made because of where they could lead; apologies as a path towards reparation, for instance’ (Ahmed 2021). Shying away from accountability, bureaucratic apologies, in particular, suggests Ahmed (2021), are ‘a way of appearing to recognise harm without really doing so’ and of seeing harm without truly seeing it.

The reconciliatory function of apologies focuses on them being reciprocated with forgiveness, referred to as the ‘apology forgiveness cycle’ (Tavuchis 1991; Shnabel and Nadler 2008), and stresses the delivery of apologies that match the psychological needs of the victim, thus enabling interpersonal reconciliation. Where there are limited apparatuses to negotiate fraught social relations, such as in South Africa, the dynamic (albeit messy) use of law, including to compel an apology, is inevitably central, with two dominant tracks emerging. The first views apologies within a restorative justice framework that draws on vernacular systems and processes, with both the harm and its remedy seen as embedded within a communal context. Mostly, this approach treats apology and compensation as a ‘soft option’, suited only for family matters and less serious offences, which are diverted out of the system. The reality, however, as scholars like Mnisi Weeks (2018; and in this volume) have shown, is that vernacular courts in South Africa exercise authority over offences that include murder and rape – often responding to the failure of the state system, but sometimes also as the forum of choice, although Mnisi Weeks urges that these processes should neither be uncritically assumed to be restorative nor taken to be the easier route to remedy. The generative possibilities for justice at the intersection of state and vernacular systems in South Africa remain largely unexplored. The second track builds on the conciliatory/reconciliatory approach of the TRC and is most apparent in South Africa’s Equality Courts, the legislative basis for which was laid down in the late 90s, with the explicit object to ‘facilitate the transition to a democratic society, united in its diversity, marked by human relations that are caring and compassionate, and guided by the principles of equality, fairness, equity, social progress, justice, human dignity and freedom’ (Preamble to the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act 2000⁵). These specialised courts are empowered to impose an ‘unconditional apology’ as a possible remedy, with the most common outcome for successful complainants being payment of monetary compensation to the complainant or to a charity, along with an ordered apology (Emdon and Judge 2018).

Many more of the interpersonal affronts to dignity that could be taken to the Equality Courts in fact come before criminal courts as charges of crimen iniuria (an unlawful and intentional affront to the dignity of another). Particularly in respect of racist speech and conduct, there has been a marked shift away from conciliatory remedies, including apology (most apparent in the case of the ‘Reitz Four’⁶), and towards harsh retributive measures like imprisonment, as in the case of Vicki Momberg, where the repeated use of the ‘k word’ led to a two-year prison term.⁷ For ordinary South Africans and for the courts it seems, in this regard at least, sorry is no longer enough. This occurs alongside continued demands for the prosecution of perpetrators of apartheid crimes as identified in the TRC report (Truth and Reconciliation Commission 1998), with the opening of inquests into unlawful deaths during apartheid, and the establishment of a dedicated office within the National Prosecuting Authority to prosecute these apartheid-era offences.⁸

We have suggested that meanings and legitimacy are variously assigned to acts of apology and relate to how such acts are received by those who have been injured or aggrieved, as well as to the extent of their transformative potential. As a concentrated point of social connection, apologising can embody explanation or excuse, culpability or contrition, reparation or repentance. The demand it attracts is also deeply connected to the politics of recognition, whereby the humanity of a person, a community, or a people who have experienced a harm linked to the denial of their full humanity might be recognised and acknowledged through apology (see van der Westhuizen in this volume). At the same time, saying sorry does not take the place of reparation and justice; in fact, it might sometimes be deployed to thwart precisely those ends.

Engaging power

The contributions to this volume open up, rather than settle, questions about if and how apologies contest historical and contemporary configurations of power. Approaching the discourse of apology as constitutive of structures and articulations of power draws attention not only to what apology says, but also what it does.⁹ Given the injuries that characterise the South Africa condition, apologies are a place where power is contested in historically contingent ways. Here, the act of apologising may reinforce and sustain existing relations of power, or offer counter conduct that opens up new political and relational possibilities. In part, this volume seeks to remedy the lack of attention given to the relationship between apology and the exercise and articulation of power, suggesting ways in which this connection might be theorised to consider how power figures in the discourse and materiality of apology. Questioning the transformative force of the apology in relation to power is also to explore its limits and potential within a force field of contemporary reckoning and recovery.

In the same way that injury and violence may be products of power, so too is the apology. In the social field in which relationships are governed, acts of injury, and of remorse and accompanying reparation, are mediated by conditions of power. As this volume shows, particular social, political, legal, and institutional arrangements produce formulations of (non)apology that are embedded in systems and structures of power, reflecting too how the relationship between self/ves and other/s are conceived of therein. By extension, its (im)potency is imbricated with overlapping regimes of inequality that give succour to the injuries to which it is a response. At the same time, as a social practice, the apology draws people into circuits of exchange, reproducing or transforming these (see Nkomo and Kiguwa in this volume). Through the agency of the wronged, and as a counterweight to their denial and silencing, the productive value of apology can serve to put shame and blame where they rightfully belong: at the source of the injury. As both representation and expression, apologies bring into sharp focus the realities of harm and accompanying claims for reparation. These are a means through which rights and recognition can be authorised, and yet apology’s deployment may also function as a normalisation strategy to deny such claims. These dynamics may be accentuated in contexts where harms are systemically embedded. Such is the case in settler-colonial states, where apologies may serve to co-opt the recipient into a politics of civility, ‘a strategy of containment … substituting rhetorical gestures of atonement for more radical processes of redistributive justice or political power sharing’ (Wakeham 2012: 2). In this way, they may ‘perform the semblance of rapprochement’, says Wakeham, ‘without unsettling settler privilege … bypassing more radical forms of structural transformation that would destabilize the power asymmetries underpinning white authority’ (Wakeham 2012: 3, emphasis in original). Instead, the apology in this context is demanding ‘performative responses from those marginalized subjects it addresses’, reducing forgiveness to ‘acquiescence to the colonial status quo’ (Wakeham 2012: 6).

At the same time, Wakeham cautions to the limits placed by apology on discourses of remediation, particularly in respect of land, sovereignty, and the duration of atonement (Wakeham 2012: 5). In this sense, apologies provide (or impose) closures on past wrongs, but they also inscribe an end point for the resolution of those wrongs. In settler states, apologies may therefore ‘foreclose upon any need for ongoing anticolonial resistance in the present and future’ and, instead, impose on subject groups the responsibility to accept the apology and so to effect conciliation (Wakeham 2012: 6, emphasis in original). Impatient refrains directed at black South Africans to ‘move on’ from apartheid demonstrate how easily blame for unfinished reconciliation is displaced, further exacerbated by the democratic state’s failure to significantly transform persisting inequalities.

Compelled by these realities, this book aims to locate its enquiry of apology in the South African ‘epistemic bedrock’ (Tarusarira 2019) of enduring conflicts, out of which apologies emerge, while resisting the possibility of foreclosure that is ever-present where apologies land on uneven ground. Locating apology in this way, and through the lens of power, tempers the tendency to view it as an instance – a decontextualised and individualised act – and, instead, to see it as thickly situated in the time and place that produces its appearance (or lack thereof) in particularised ways. This requires a departure from a zero-sum reading of apology as either all or nothing, seeking instead to interrogate its value in exposing how structure, system, agency, and context all mediate its transformative (im)possibilities.

Apology unsettled

As alluded to in the book’s title, the ways in which apologies are, if indeed they are, made and received, denied and accepted, and how too they come to matter or not, is unsettled terrain. As already discussed, complex and interrelated social, cultural, legal, and political meanings are given to, and constituted through, them. These meanings also emerge within prevailing cultures of apology and their relationship to histories, politics, and laws that regulate, punish, and also remediate harm.

The chapters in this volume explore various forms of apology – from the most intimate of settings to the level of state and structure – and problematise their consequences for reparation, reconciliation, and justice in South Africa and beyond, opening up wider conversations about impact and import in both practical and theoretical terms. Drawing on contemporary debates on racist hate speech, gender-based violence, and the legacy of the TRC within continued struggles for reparation and decolonisation, the chapters interrogate the value and force of apology in urging and imagining more equitable social relations. Violence is a leitmotif in the volume, with the authors capturing the interlacing of structural and intimate violence visited on South Africans through colonialism and apartheid, and their implications for thinking and doing apology. Written in multiple registers, including poetry, personal reflections, fictional accounts, and scholarly treatments, the chapters to follow explore and critique the apology through both historical and contemporary frames.

Siphokazi Jonas situates this volume in the ‘burning tongues’ and ‘tenderised bellies’ of Empire, in the death and blood and words that have harvested the old-new South Africa, and throws down the gauntlet: ‘we do not “get over” / the fettered trunks of our lost histories, / naked roots and fallen family trees’. It is an intimate meditation on the problematics of apology and the twinned assumption of reconciliation.

Yasmin Sooka explicates how apologies are approached within the field of transitional justice in both international and regional spheres, and as requiring acknowledgement of apartheid as a crime against humanity. She illustrates how the discourse on apologies in South Africa has tended to advance the notion of forgiveness as opposed to accountability for the crimes of the past, exposing the inadequacies of apartheid leaders’ apologies and particularly in the absence of reparative measures, and of perpetrators being held criminally to account.

Sindiso Mnisi Weeks sounds a caution on the use of imposed apologies as remedies in judicial processes, contrasting this with mediation processes wherein an apology might arise from one or other party in response to an understanding of the harm and pain caused. Focused on vernacular dispute management forums that are frequently used in rural communities, the chapter interrogates the risks and constraints of creating laws to regulate these forums that rest on normative and colonial ideas about traditional dispute management practices and remedies. Specifically interrogating the value and purpose of apologies in relation to the recognition of traditional communities and their governance, Mnisi Weeks warns against the continuation of repressive harmony mythologies that reiterate colonial discourses.

Nurina Ally and Kerry Williams interrogate why and how a court-ordered apology is an effective remedy through two Equality Court cases concerning hate speech against minority groups. They suggest that compelled apologies – when properly framed and crafted – serve as a potent mechanism to restore and vindicate dignity and equality rights, arguing that it is necessary for the courts to further articulate their remedial value. Recognising that a compelled apology is a dynamic and malleable legal remedy, the authors illustrate how it might be successfully enlisted to further the corrective, restorative, educational, and deterrent goals of equality legislation.

The ethical and moral repair work required in the aftermath of apartheid’s destruction are taken up by Shireen Hassim in the figure of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and her appearance before the TRC. Where reparative burden is placed and how apology may be obstinately refused mark out how the performative resolutions and truth logic of commissions might be disrupted, exposing fractures in the acceptance of the terms of transition itself. In this nuanced reading of Madikizela-Mandela’s resistant (non)apology, Hassim exposes the limits of the TRC’s apology script, and how it elided other forms of harm and injustice associated with apartheid-era crimes and with violence as a political strategy.

Entering the topic by way of the racist event and its backlash, Nkululeko Nkomo and Peace Kiguwa read a number of contemporary incidents of racism through affect and racialised embodiments, encounters, and social bonds. This affective prism enables an examination of public apologies in relation to historical antipathies towards black bodies, as represented in racist events, and disavowals of past racial injustices. The mobilisation of pain and outrage, as an affective force that underlies the call for apology, is explored as a demand for recognition. In assessing the (im)potency of the apology, the authors underscore how, for a black majority, it is a superficial public gesture to pacify an outrage. They contend that in the absence of radically reimagining the basis of humanity itself, the prospect for public apology as an instrument for conferring meaningful human recognition remains elusive.

Christi van der Westhuizen deals with apology as a knowledge/power construct that is wielded to ensure certain political outcomes. Making the case for how whiteness, as an epistemology of ignorance, is constituted through the denial of racial injustice, the chapter explores how apology can work to disrupt whiteness and enable accountability, remorse, and recognition. Through the (non)apologies of three prominent Afrikaners, van der Westhuizen foregrounds the interaction between apology and humanisation wherein white denialism is dislodged and mutual humanisation is facilitated though the apology’s invocation of a recognition of injustice.

Diane Jefthas shifts genres to foreground the violence of intimate apologies. ‘I understand that daddy is very sorry’ and ‘daddy needs me to forgive him’ is how Jefthas’ fictional account draws us into the cycle of everyday violence in the most ordinary of places, the home. Through the eyes of a child, we see the play of visibility and invisibility, voice and silence, violence and calm, and are thereby provoked to imagine what sorry means inside the spiral of remorse and rage that is characteristic of domestic violence.

Leila Khan and Dee Smythe interrogate reparation in the context of sexual offences and the limits of criminal law. Focusing on a legal system that has both prioritised punitive over restorative approaches to justice and shown itself to be incapable of providing justice to the vast majority of victims of sexual violence in South Africa, the chapter explores the apologetic meaning of compensation for victims. Applying the framework of categorical apologies (Smith 2014), the authors enumerate how compensation is a feature of apology, its meanings for victims, and how it might be a potential remedial pathway that requires more concerted consideration in addressing the harm they experience.

Omowamiwa Kolawole considers the quest for restitution in medical negligence cases that violate patients’ dignity. He argues that in this context, proper acknowledgement of suffering is critical to giving effective apologies for medical wrongdoing. Considering the range of motivations that spur litigation and the material harms that are a feature thereof, Kolawole draws on an empirical study of health litigation to argue that apology can be seen as a form of restitution when centred on restoring a patient’s sense of dignity and agency, while simultaneously acknowledging the failure of the medical institution or practitioner. In the face of a systemic pattern of refusal by health authorities to acknowledge the facts of any wrongdoing for fear of liability, he argues for more willingness within health systems to accept responsibility, show categorical regret, and commit to reform and reparation.

Turning the line of sight towards corporations, Tracey Davies looks at contemporary failures of business leadership and governance, including through fraud and illegality, linking the associated impunity to a lack of remorse shown by the business sector for their role in gross violations of human rights during apartheid. Interrogating what constitutes an effective corporate apology, Davies also applies Smith’s (2014) categorical apology to expose big businesses’ handling of apology and reparations in respect of their role in both past and more recent harms and atrocities. Davies asserts a structural connection between the South African corporate sector’s unwillingness to accept moral responsibility for its role in apartheid, and the refusal of major corporations to morally apologise for harms caused in the postapartheid era, thus cementing a corporate culture of untouchability.

Central to the question of reconciliation in the settler-colonial state is landownership and property rights, reflected in past laws of dispossession and present laws that provide for compensation and restitution. In her chapter, Thuto Thipe illustrates that black and white freehold landowners are subjected to inequitable financial compensations on the basis of race. Laws intended to provide restitution of land and redress racial discrimination have instead become a vehicle through which black freehold landowners are yet again differentiated from white freehold landowners and receive a fraction of the compensation that the state paid to the latter. Arguing that the democratic state’s logic of land compensation has not substantively dismantled the valuing of land rights on the basis of race, the chapter reveals the inherent tension between the promise of postcolonial apologies (as represented in the remedy of land restitution) and the reality of continued land dispossession.

Circuiting back to the TRC, and challenging the normative coupling of apology with forgiveness, Jaco Barnard-Naudé theorises how the discursive context was ideologically loaded with pardon and mercy, which undermined the apology’s reparative potential. Viewing the TRC as an institution in which forgiveness was law, including through the mechanism of amnesty and aimed at securing the sovereignty of the new democratic state, it is analysed as representing a ‘ridiculous proliferation of mercy’ at the cost of shame, as an essential dimension of apology. The importance of shame in the facilitation of reparation is therefore obstructed by the TRC’s governing logic of ‘forgiveness’ and the failure to procure shame, which diminished its capacity to represent the actual victims of apartheid. The chapter argues that this failing is further manifested in a lack of reparation that is a function of the big Other of forgiveness whose presence remains in the postapartheid dispensation.

The final chapter offers a personal reflection on a 23-year-old justification by Heinz Klug, a constitutional law scholar who previously served in the ANC political underground and Umkhonto we Sizwe.¹⁰ In seeking to make sense of the elisions and insufficiencies of apologies, Klug foregrounds the tension between the lived experiences of victims and the denials, avoidances, and justifications of perpetrators. In his reflective evaluation of the process of truth and reconciliation and its ability to give a proper account of the crime of apartheid, Klug asserts that it is only through direct public accountability, remorse, and memory that an acknowledgement of those who suffered can emerge as a necessary barrier against future repetition of past injustice. Outraged at the failure to adequately recognise the lives of those who paid the ultimate sacrifice for freedom, Klug laments the forgetting and denial that risks a more just and sustainable future. While the liberation movement’s embrace of constitutionalism is described as a key achievement of the democratic transition and a safeguard against the capture of unaccountable and undemocratic power, Klug emphasises that a common responsibility on the part of all apartheid beneficiaries remains necessary for realising constitutional aspirations.

As editors, we recognise that bringing one’s mind (and the rest) to the topic of this book can invoke difficulties, ambivalences, or conflicts for us as writers. So, in the spirit of writing from where one is situated, and as an antidote to approaching apology as solely an abstracted, cerebral, or academic matter, we invited contributors to reflect on the writing process itself. These reflective narratives are presented at the end of some chapters and uncover yet another layer in the diverse terrain of meaning on apology.

(No) place for sorry

Sorry is never enough, especially if it does little to interrupt similar harm in future or leaves intact the social hierarchies and inequalities that may have produced the need for it in the first instance. Asking more from the apology – at the risk of imbuing it with excessive meaning – turns us back to the persistent conditions that make the call for apology necessary. Perhaps, then, the apology should be scrutinised according to the extent to which it acknowledges, accounts for, and assumes responsibility for past wrongdoing in ways that facilitate a transformative reconstitution of the social, and one that is substantively different from that on which the original injury was premised. This is a tall order for what is effectively a speech act. Yet, again and again, humanity turns to the apology – whether to demand it, distance from it, deploy it, or deny it. As we have argued, its potential, real or imagined, lies beyond its instance and is bound up with aspirations for rights, recognition, repair, and even reconnection, much of which still evades many spheres of interpersonal, community, national, and global life.

As the logics of injustice and harm are never quite out of reach – for anyone, anywhere, and more so in a place wrought from a violent past – one must consider what happens when the apology’s potential to repair (or to salvage), however dim, is abandoned altogether. And, if it were to be so, may it be because the injurious inequalities that bring the apology forth have been dismantled, rather than that shame, remorse, contrition, accountability, and reparative obligation are sacrificed for a more harmful future. For apology always returns to show its presence or absence in the places where suffering is made – and, now and then, where life persists and healing begins.