Keynote Address I want to ask you to calculate the time between the birth date of the oldest person whose hands you have held and the final year of youngest person if he or she lives a full life. Recently, some thinkers in the peace-building field have suggested that this time span is what we need to consider as the present – our 200-year present.2 In fact, this time span between the two ages is your 200-year present, a present made up of living memory, by people whose hands you have touched. This present spans three or four generations and is determined by the direct memory and experience of those actual people. Having touched those hands, you are the connecting point within these 200 years. You are like a unique relational crossroads in time. Let me expand on what this means for transitional justice by drawing on another example of personal memory and meaning-making. This is a picture of my daughter Tawana. She is five years old. She has at least three different roots. She is Zimbabwean, South African and German. Who is Tawana, what is her ancestry? She has a great-grandfather who wore the Nazi uniform. Though all family was always at pain to emphasize that he was ‘not really a Nazi’, he did wear the insignia of institutionalized racism, the swastika of National Socialism. He fought in the war that turned from murderous to genocide. He was a surgeon at the front who received honours for saving lives. He was also known for playing the violin. A man who was more Photo: Undine Whande interested in giving concerts than holding a gun and yet who was part of it all. At the ending of the war he was captured as a prisoner of war and sent to Siberia. He experienced the Russian Gulag, from where he returned several years after the war. Building up a life in East Germany after his release, he soon recognized that the communist system he was now living under resembled the autocratic traces of the past Nazi era, resembled that which he felt, in hindsight, was a betrayal of the culture and ethos he had wanted to 2  See John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). International Conference on Transitional Justice, Zimbabwe 9