RESTITUTION AND RECONCILIATION: TOWARDS SOCIAL JUSTICE

With democracy in 1994, South Africa introduced the Restitution of Land Rights Act, 1994 (Act 22 of 1994)to restore land rights to individuals and communities dispossessed under apartheid's racial segregation laws.

- By Dr Wayne Alexander and Professor Siona O'Connell

This legislation represented more than administrative remedy it acknowledged that justice demands the restoration of what was taken and that freedom without restitution remains incomplete.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission exposed the lived experiences of those who endured apartheid through painful testimonies marked by profound trauma - trauma still visible in South Africa's social fabric today. Yet as scholar and filmmaker Siona O'Connell's work on forced removals reveals, certain silences persisted even after the TRC. The business of freedom remains unfinished. True reconciliation cannot coexist with profound inequality. How we engage with the legacies of a racialised and oppressive past will determine whether freedom becomes reality or remains aspiration.

Land restitution has documented numerous accounts of forced removals. Across South Africa, the damage is clear: families witnessed their homes demolished, belongings thrown onto trucks, entire communities displaced. O'Connell's documentary Uitgesmyt shows that even when land was returned - as in Elandskloof, South Africa's first successful restitution - the absence of infrastructure support, trauma counselling and economic development created a cycle of poverty that haunts communities decades later.

Many recall returning from work or from sea to find a note: "We don't live here anymore." Others were fetched from school and taken to unfamiliar places without saying goodbye to friends. One former resident reflected: 'I think I would have been a happier person. I tend to build walls and lock myself away - and I think I wouldn't have been like that had I stayed here.'

These are not merely individual stories of loss. They represent the systematic destruction of community bonds, the severing of people from place and the undermining of human dignity that makes genuine freedom impossible.