7 November 2025
By Mosa Leteane from the African Youth for Transitional Justice Platform (AY4TJ)
In 1996, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) offered the world a model of how a nation could reckon with its violent past. Its promise was profound: to tell the truth, to foster reconciliation, and advance institutional reform to ensure non-recurrence of human rights violations.
Three decades later, however, the promises of the miraculous transition to democracy remain unfulfilled and increasingly elusive. For a generation that inherited the negotiated rainbow (nation) rather than the struggle, justice has become an undefined, deferred horizon— visible in policy, yet distant and limited in practice.
The idea of intergenerational justice forces us to confront unresolved aspects of the democratic project. It recognises that the legacies of violence, inequality, and structural exclusions do not end with those who directly endured them. Instead, they are transmitted across generations, shaping the lives, opportunities, and identities of descendants.
Intergenerational justice therefore demands that TJ processes account not only for what was done to the struggle generation, but also for what has been denied to their descendants. The TJ architecture established through the TRC was never meant to conclude with the publication of a report. It was a handover— a moral and institutional blueprint for future generations to build a society where there is accountability for past crimes, a holistic understanding of reparations, memorialisation that facilitates healing and critical reflection, and a society built on constitutional supremacy and equality. But over time, that continuity has fractured: compromised by administrative changes and widespread allegations of political interference.
Read: Justice undefined in South Africa
The silence between generations
In the course of preparing this policy brief, I sat in dialogue with two young South Africans — Sanelisiwe Jobodwana and Amahle-Imvelo Jaxa— both daughters of anti-apartheid activists. They are artists and advocates, using their voices to narrate the tension of being Born Free. Their reflections were grounded and deeply resonant, echoing the same frustrations and aspirations that fuelled movements such as #FeesMustFall, #RhodesMustFall, and #ReclaimSA. In their stories emerged a painful combination of disillusionment and hope. Disillusionment at what justice failed to deliver in the 1990s, and hope in a generation of witnesses now ready to tell their truth and create a context-specific definition of justice.
For Amahle, the TRC was a “complex process of public reconciliation” that recognised pain but provided minimal closure and institutional reform. For Sanelisiwe, “every conversation about race, education, or the economy leads back to apartheid and what did not happen.” Their stories reveal how the children of the TRC have become custodians of its deficits. They carry the personal impact of unacknowledged injustices and the institutional fatigue of a democracy still bound by its founding compromises.
These conversations are not merely stories; they are reverberating perspectives emerging from a country grappling with staggering youth unemployment and widening socio-economic disparities. By their very design, dialogues serve as pathways to co-creation— especially in transitional justice contexts, where injustice and loss are often ambiguous, contested, layered, and intergenerational. In such spaces, dialogue becomes both method and remedy: a means of broadening inclusion, challenging inherited silences, and conceptualising a context-specific definition of justice.
To demystify the notion and process of due regard for generational dimensions, this policy brief deliberately drew on the power of dialogue and storytelling— not only to trace the contours of injustice as experienced by participants, but also to imagine what meaningful inclusion in TJ might look like three decades later.
“There is a generation that was harmed by the transition because no one thought about the children, and we are now collectively all starting to recognise [its] scars.” –Amahle-Imvelo Jaxa
A fragmented justice field
Since the TRC’s conclusion in 2003, South Africa’s TJ landscape has both expanded and fractured. What was once a unified framework under the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act (1995) has splintered into separate domains —reparations, memorialisation, institutional reform, accountability, and education—each governed by distinct ministries, legal frameworks, and civil society initiatives. In the absence of a centralised state mechanism, civil society organisation (CSOs) have carried the moral and practical weight of completing the unfinished business of the TRC: reopening inquests, building archives, advancing the fight for reparations, and preserving the memories of the victims. Their work has sustained the pursuit of justice, but not without CSO-related issues such as funding and lack of state support—resulting in incremental, isolated, but deeply meaningful, victories for apartheid victims, survivors, and their families.
Defining intergenerational justice
Intergenerational justice in South Africa is difficult to define precisely because its foundations were never built to endure across time. The TRC’s temporal mandate (1960-1994) excluded both future victims and systemic harms that continued beyond apartheid’s formal ending in 1994. For today’s youth, justice feels both inherited and yet inaccessible— a process that has evolved into a field and language they were never taught to speak, yet instinctively understand through their lived experiences. Their knowledge, often overlooked in formal structures and coalitions, is crucial: when channeled through youth-friendly and participatory methodologies, it can shape programmes and interventions that are inclusive, cross-cutting, and sustainable.
To redefine intergenerational justice, we must reimagine it beyond courts and commissions. It must encompass memory, education, an expanded definition of reparations, and communal restoration as core components of justice and healing. Moreover, it should harness the digital and creative tools through which new generations reinterpret the past—curriculum reform, public history, and memorial spaces should have improved avenues for youth participation.
“Truth-telling is a form of activism, and we have a responsibility to speak the truth in all the spaces that we occupy, especially where there is a lack of transparency, and mistreatment of people – we have to call it out.” –Sanelisiwe Jobodwana
A call for intergenerational renewal
The policy brief, “Justice Undefined: A dialogue on the state of intergenerational justice in South Africa”, proposes three African Union Transitional Justice Policy-aligned pathways to inclusion and renewal:
- Strengthen knowledge management and advocacy:
Institutionalise youth-centered research and intergenerational impact assessments to understand how current TJ mechanisms affect both direct descendants of apartheid victims and the youth at large.
- Advance inclusivity, equity, and generational dimensions:
Integrate youth representation into existing transitional justice processes, from reparations to accountability.
- Strengthen TJ education, memorialisation, and healing:
Support youth-led spaces and programmes for dialogue, education, and healing where history becomes a site of critical reflection and healing, rather than (mainly) a static archive.
These proposals are grounded in AUTJP principles of inclusivity, participation, synergy, and capacity building—essential pillars for ensuring non-recurrence, sustainability, and transformation. To suggest that intergenerational justice is deferred and undefined in South Africa is not to accept its absence, but rather, to recognise a collective moment to redefine its parameters through dialogue, education, and meaningful youth participation in transitional justice.
***
Want to learn more? Join our webinar on Tuesday, 11 November (11:00-12:30 CET / 13:00 EAT)! Register now.
This brief is the third in a five-part youth-led series, ‘Legacy’, exploring the linkages between historical injustices, their enduring impacts in different African contexts, and the insufficiency of efforts to address these atrocities. Find out more.