ABSTRACT
The title reference to a ‘politics’ of reconciliation is an invitation to put to question
what increasingly – more and more alarmingly too – is taken for granted in uncritical
calls for reconciliation. In this fin de siècle ‘fever of atonement’, as one Nigerian
scholar put it (Soyinka, 1999, p. 90), reconciliation has too often come to signify
in the political discourse of our time the call not just to put the traumas of the past
behind us but also, in a sense, to put behind us the very politics of the past. Against
this, our main concern has been to emphasise that ‘reparation of historical injustices’
requires that we face up to these injustices. That is what it means to do justice to
them and reconciliation can only, properly, be the contingent response, not the
unconditional outcome, of how societies face up to precisely that task.
