RESTITUTION: WHAT IT IS AND WHY IT MATTERS
Restitution is a complex term. We typically hear it in a legal sense: a man who has stolen R1000 is ordered to make compensation in the same amount. We often understand it as a quid-pro-quo kind of arrangement: pay back precisely what was taken, and all parties can go their separate ways with the matter resolved.
We understand restitution to go much deeper than this, and to be one of the most significant tools available to us in addressing the residual ills of discrimination as well as other causes of inequity in our communities. Restitution involves seeking to set right the generational ills of inequality by engaging those who have benefited from the system, directly or indirectly, in transferring wealth and social capital and reinvesting in communities that are still suffering. We understand this not to be purely a black-white issue, although we believe addressing the apartheid past is part of our mandate; but we believe restitution should become part of our common vocabulary and set of tools for addressing situations in which any person or community has suffered harm.
Restitution is also a key component of justice, which we understand as the restoration of right relationships between ourselves, other people, and our environment, in which there is enough for everyone and no one goes without, and the dignity of every human being is revered. Theologian Cornel West has said that “justice is what love looks like in public,” and as we love our neighbors, we cannot help but seek justice with them.
We are also driven to restitution as a robust and appropriate response to the grace extended by black South Africans to their white compatriots since 1994. We must refute the idea of cheap grace and recognize that what has cost our countrymen much, cannot be cheap for us, to paraphrase Bonhoeffer.
Restitution is easy to imagine in concrete terms. We understand the loss of money, land or even life. Now imagine that theft not only of resources such as land, education and money has occurred on a broad scale, but also of intangibles: dignity, a sense of safety, self-worth, an understanding of one’s rights, a sense of belonging in one’s own country.
The process of restitution recognizes that this is precisely the situation we face in South Africa today. How we make restitution for not just the tangible but intangible things that are lost when a person or community is harmed and dehumanized is something we must struggle through together, with both humility and hope.
It may help to know what restitution is not before we think about what it is. Restitution is not charity. Charity suggests discretionary giving out of one’s abundance; it services poverty but does not eradicate it. Restitution, in contrast, is highly relational, potentially costly, and long-term. It aims to restore—or even create—whole, healthy relationships where before there was brokenness and suspicion. In this relationship, we progress past the point in which there is a clear benefactor and a clear beneficiary, roles that still leave power on one side and that can be unintentionally dehumanizing. The relationship demands that we listen to all sides, hear the voices of those wronged when they articulate their needs, and move towards healing together.
Similarly, while restitution is about justice, it is not about punishment. We are used to thinking of a retributive model of justice in which payment is exacted in proportion to the crime, but nothing is done to restore the offender to the community and the community may not benefit at all from the judgment. Restitution is about restorative justice, It understands that a crime is rarely just one person against another; it tears at the fabric of the whole community. The violation of the social contract is what is at stake. But perhaps we must begin thinking beyond even restorative justice. The very notion of restoration suggests that there was some previous time in which the parties lived in harmony and right relation with each other. Yet that is not the case; we do not have a time we can look back to as the paradigm of healthy relationships to which we seek to return. Perhaps, then, we should begin thinking in terms of transformational justice. Such an idea recognizes that we need a wholesale shift in the way we relate to each other—a transformation—that opens up new possibilities. Transformational justice asks us to go deeper, as we ask difficult questions about why things are the way they are, and how we can change the cycles in which we operate so that we can reduce conflict and create new and equitable relationships. Restitution is a key piece in achieving this establishment of right relationship.
(Shortened version, “Restitution Toolkit”)