Picture: Johnthefrankmusic on Pixabay, published on 25 April 2018 and under the Pixabay free licence.
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We cannot change the past. We can change what the past is allowed to reproduce in the future.
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This article is based on a presentation delivered at the Restorative Transformation Collaboration workshop at the Old Luckhoff School Building, Banhoek Road, Stellenbosch, on 8 August 2026. The gathering focused on restoration, restitution, reparation and transformation through intentional community engagement.
What exactly requires repair?
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What would it mean to repair the continuing effects of historical injustice in Stellenbosch? This question takes us into difficult territory: land, memory, inequality, belonging, institutional power, responsibility and the kind of future we want to build together.
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What would it mean to repair the continuing effects of historical injustice in Stellenbosch? This question takes us into difficult territory: land, memory, inequality, belonging, institutional power, responsibility and the kind of future we want to build together.
Stellenbosch is a place of considerable beauty, wealth and institutional strength. It is also a place whose social and spatial arrangements continue to carry the effects of dispossession, racial ordering and unequal development.
People may live in the same town and participate in the same institutions while experiencing Stellenbosch very differently. Historical repair, therefore, concerns the continuing effects of injustice on social relations, opportunities, spaces, institutions and people’s sense of belonging.
I approach this question from within, rather than as a detached observer. I am an academic at Stellenbosch University, and much of my work has involved sustained community engagement around dialogue, memory, historical recognition, social repair and just forms of restitution. I have developed an affection for this work and for the people with whom it brings me into relationship.
This work has taught me that repair cannot simply be designed by institutions and delivered to communities. It is slow, relational work. It requires listening, trust and humility. It also requires institutions, and those of us who work within them, to be willing to learn and sometimes to change through the encounter.
The past remains active
Historical injustice does not disappear when discriminatory laws are repealed. Its effects can remain embedded in where people live, who owns property, who gains access to good education, how institutions work, and how advantage and disadvantage accumulate across generations.
The past also lives through memory. Families and communities remember what was removed, what was lost and what opportunities were denied. Institutions remember through their archives, buildings, traditions and practices. They also remember through what they leave unspoken.
History, therefore, does not travel neatly from the past into the present and then disappear. Something that happens today can make an older family or community history newly meaningful. Unresolved histories can also influence how people imagine the future.
This leaves us with three connected questions: What happened? How does what happened remain active today? What kind of future are our present arrangements producing?
Historical mapping is therefore essential. We need to know who lived where, who was displaced, who acquired property, whose labour contributed to Stellenbosch’s development, who gained access to its institutions and whose histories were pushed towards the margins of the town’s dominant story.
But historical mapping must recover agency as well as injury. Communities affected by displacement and exclusion were never merely people to whom things were done. They built families, organisations, neighbourhoods, livelihoods, cultural worlds and forms of solidarity. Repair includes restoring this fuller human presence to our shared account of Stellenbosch.
The unfinished work of justice
What passes from one generation to another is not only trauma. Later generations may also inherit the knowledge that something remains unfinished. Neighbourhoods were broken apart. Property was lost. A family’s opportunities were reduced. People’s dignity was violated. Yet, adequate repair never followed.
Present experiences of inequality can bring these older histories back into view. This is why remembering should lead to action. We remember the past partly so that we can recognise what continues in the present and prevent its repetition in the future.
South Africa’s democratic transition placed enormous value on reconciliation, and rightly so. Reconciliation helped a deeply divided country imagine a common political future. Yet, reconciliation becomes fragile when it is separated from justice.
Acknowledgement, apologies, memorials, public discussions and revealing neglected histories are all important. However, justice also involves a practical concern: After acknowledging harm, assuming it is truly acknowledged, what actions are taken to better people’s lives, expand opportunities and reform institutions?
A stronger approach to repair, therefore, treats just accountability as part of reconciliation rather than something that threatens it (Moosa 2026). Historical wrongdoing has to be named. Where people or institutions were directly responsible, that responsibility must be acknowledged. Material losses also require serious attention.
Those who suffered injustice should have a meaningful role in deciding what redress requires. Reconciliation becomes more credible when recognition leads to restitution, compensation where appropriate, changes in institutional practice and greater power for affected communities to shape their own futures. This is the difference between justice as public performance and justice as actual repair.
This approach is demanding. Accountability should address harm and create the conditions for more just relationships. Justice can be firm while still leaving room for generosity, restraint and future relationship. Forgiveness, if it comes, has greater moral meaning accompanied by truth and redress. It should not be demanded prematurely from those who have suffered.
Responsibility must begin with those who suffered the harm
Any discussion of historical responsibility should begin with those who suffered the injustice. Dispossession, forced removal, racial exclusion and unequal access to education, property and institutional power were experienced by particular people and communities. Their losses were real, and many of the consequences remain present. Repair should, therefore, begin with recognising the injustice, listening seriously to those who continue to live with its effects, and giving them a meaningful role in determining what justice and redress should require.
This starting point also demands clarity about perpetration and complicity. Where individuals or institutions directly participated in dispossession, discrimination or exclusion, they should acknowledge what they did, authorised, enabled or benefited from. A general expression of regret cannot replace an honest account of historical responsibility. Nor should the language of shared responsibility blur the distinction between those who suffered injustice and those who caused or enabled it.
Michael Rothberg’s concept of the implicated subject becomes valuable in the subsequent part of the discussion (Rothberg 2019). It explains why responsibility persists even when the original perpetrators and victims are no longer involved.
People living today may not have caused the original injustice, yet they may occupy positions shaped by its consequences. Some inherit property, educational advantages, institutional authority, professional networks or social influence that developed within earlier arrangements. Others continue to experience the losses and exclusions produced by those same arrangements.
These positions are not morally equivalent. The idea of implication should enlarge the circle of responsibility without weakening the claims of those who were harmed.
The central question is, therefore, not whether people living today should feel personally guilty for actions they did not commit. The more important question is what responsibility follows when we recognise that we occupy positions of advantage, authority or influence within conditions shaped by historical injustice.
This responsibility becomes especially important for institutions and people with the capacity to act. Remaining silent when injustice is known, following institutional routines without questioning their effects, or failing to use available authority to change unfair arrangements can allow historical harm to continue. The greater our capacity to influence circumstances, the greater our responsibility to consider how that capacity is used.
The moral sequence should therefore remain clear. We begin with those who suffered the harm. We recognise what was taken from them and what remains unfinished. We identify perpetration and complicity where these can be established. Only then do we widen the discussion to ask how others are implicated in the continuing effects of that history.
The implicated subject enters the work of repair in response to the claims of those who were harmed. The implicated person should not become the centre of the story.
From implication to reparative partnership
Recognising one’s implicatedness should lead towards action. People who possess resources, authority, knowledge or institutional access can become listening, learning and contributing partners in the work of repair.
Such partnership should, however, be shaped with those whose histories and claims are at stake. It is not the task of an ally to decide what repair should mean and then offer it to others.
Listening comes first, because affected communities must be able to describe the harm and its continuing effects in their own terms. They should help determine what restoration, restitution and reparation require.
Learning matters, because institutions have often assumed that possessing professional or academic expertise gives them the authority to define both the problem and its solution. Community knowledge, family memory, local experience and practical understanding are forms of knowledge in their own right.
Contribution follows from this relationship. It may involve financial resources, networks, professional knowledge, institutional decisions, changes in practice, access to opportunity or the sharing of authority.
Reparative partnership, therefore, does not ask those who suffered injustice to accommodate the moral journey of the implicated person. It asks the implicated person or institution to recognise the historical claim being made, to listen, to learn, to acknowledge their location and to contribute to repair in ways shaped with those most affected.
This is one reason critical community engagement has become so important in my work at Stellenbosch University. The university possesses considerable intellectual and institutional resources. Yet, it does not possess all the knowledge required for meaningful repair. Local history, lived experience, cultural memory and practical knowledge must enter into serious conversation with academic expertise.
The question should, therefore, move beyond what the university can do for communities. We should increasingly ask how universities and communities can work with one another, sharing knowledge, responsibility and meaningful influence over the work being undertaken.
From redress to transformed relationships
Restoration, restitution, reparation and transformation describe related dimensions of this work. Restoration concerns dignity, historical presence, voice and belonging. Restitution asks what can actually be returned, restored, compensated for or otherwise materially addressed. Reparation deals with the wider damage caused by historical injustice, including fractured relationships, lost opportunities, damaged trust and institutional consequences. Transformation asks how we change the arrangements that continue to produce unequal outcomes.
The purpose is ultimately to create a different quality of relationship. Repair should do more than settle an account with the past. It should create the possibility that distance and mistrust can gradually give way to mutual recognition, shared work and forms of civic friendship.
Such relationships cannot be produced by declarations of unity. They grow through truthfulness, accountability, justice and repeated experiences of trustworthy engagement.
Justice and generosity therefore belong together. Justice gives repair substance. Generosity can help shape the relationships that emerge through repair. Our aim should be a society capable of remembering its history truthfully while creating relationships that no longer reproduce its injuries.
Co-authoring a more just Stellenbosch
Historical repair is ultimately work on the future. We cannot undo what happened. We can, however, change how its consequences continue to shape the present. We can widen opportunity, recover neglected histories, change institutional practices, share authority and rebuild trust.
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Historical repair is ultimately work on the future. We cannot undo what happened. We can, however, change how its consequences continue to shape the present. We can widen opportunity, recover neglected histories, change institutional practices, share authority and rebuild trust.
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For me, this is also a deeply personal academic commitment. Working in and through Stellenbosch University has strengthened my conviction that part of a university’s public purpose is found where academic knowledge meets community memory, aspiration and struggle.
I value this work because serious engagement changes everyone who participates in it. It asks academics to listen differently, communities to engage institutions critically, and all involved to discover possibilities that neither could produce alone.
Three questions should therefore remain with us. What from the broader history of Stellenbosch remains active today? Where are we each situated in relation to that history, including histories for which we or our institutions carry more direct responsibility? And what might become possible if people historically pushed towards the margins became central participants in deciding what restitution and repair should mean?
The future of Stellenbosch should not simply reproduce arrangements inherited from the past. It should increasingly be co-authored through historical truth, justice, accountable responsibility and enduring community partnership.
We cannot change the past. We can change what the past is allowed to reproduce in the future.
References
Moosa, E. 2026. “Gaza and Muslim political theology: Three meditations on justice, extermination and the humanitarian order.” Political Theology. Published online 23 July 2026. https://doi.org/10.1080/1462317X.2026.2691443
Rothberg, M. 2019. The implicated subject: Beyond victims and perpetrators. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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