Title: South Africa and Rwanda: Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, Peacebuilding, Religious and Local African Authorities in Conflict Situations
Abstract: This paper explores the character of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRC) in SouthAfrica and the gacaca courts in Rwanda in a bid to understand how indigenous values emphasised within some of the different indigenous African cultures like Ubuntu (a quality that includes the essential human virtues -compassion and humanity) in South Africa accounted for the success of these institutions in these countries.What seems to be invariably missing in the other experiments of TRC across the continent is the lack of cultural considerations in their construct which this article argues that it accounted for their failure.While post conflict reconciliation remains relevant, as communities move from war to peace and from repression to democracy and vice versa by healing relationships and social structures, many of the experiences with TRC, especially in non-Western contexts have ended up not being able to promote peace through genuine social repairs.In cases like Liberia and Ivory Coast, among many others, these institutions have been criticised as sidelining indigenous cultural values to yield the desired transformative effect.While much has been documented about the relative strengths of tribunals and TRCs, one area that has received little attention is the religious and cultural relevance of these institutions.There seems to be inadequate space created for cultural and religious traditions within these liberal mechanisms of peace building.While relying solely on secondary data in the conduct of this research, we argue that the present peace approaches in Africa have not adequately considered the cultural factors of the continent in their formation.Even within the advent of mo-