Keynote Address got along so well, despite the geographical and social distances between them, sharing their stories of the experiences of war. So Tawana’s mother is a Nazi granddaughter and also a Zimbabwean muroora who is working on transitional justice issues, a person who was obsessing with the memories of the Holocaust since a young age, who lived through an intense close engagement with the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and now stands in front of you to ask questions about transitional justice in Zimbabwe. Now you have an idea where I am speaking from, and why a white German woman would stand in front of a Zimbabwean gathering at this moment in time speaking of such issues. In the work of transitional justice, it is important to locate your voice at all times, for who can speak about what is a truly sensitive matter? So, speaking from the place I have sketched through personal memory, I am asking: What kind of future can we build for Tawana? What kind of future will allows the reconciliation of these multiple ancestral lines that are perhaps asking to be redeemed and healed? What kind of future for Zimbabwe? I have entered transitional justice through the back door now, via the personal register, using the anthropological lens and the emotive lens of personal memory. You may ask yourself: How does this soft, fuzzy, emotive, memory-infused dimension relate to the ‘hard’ politics of the day that we usually consider primary when we talk of transitional justice? How does this psychological reality of four generations from two continents relate to the ‘business’ of transitional justice – if we accept the reductionist interpretation of transitional justice as creating stateled mechanisms for publicly engaging (and somehow pacifying) violent pasts? Like others, I, too, wonder at times why transitional justice has gained such prominence, why has it become so fashionable. I suspect it is because it poses a central question, linked to an age-old and ever-new dream of humanity: Can we as human beings facilitate our own evolution beyond never-ending cycles of violence and atrocity? Last week I was in Cambodia at a gathering on memory and memorialization. I walked the killing fields in a country of seven million people, where two million were brutally murdered by the Khmer Rouge regime about thirty years ago. This was done in the name of ideological re-education, in the name of a better human and a better humanity – but this ‘perfect human’ was, once more, as in the times of the Nazis, fashioned in blood. There is a second generation now in Cambodia, coming alive with trying to make sense of this, to make meaning, to shape its own identity and sense International Conference on Transitional Justice, Zimbabwe 11