Undine Whande But how do you do that when so many are hungry, tired, fearful, shameful, or feel helpless, guilty, threatened? How do you heal when there is a void in the soul that makes people grab and grab and grab but when this void can never be filled with material things? Just a word on corruption, which seems to dominate the South African head­ lines so much. What does this have to do with transitional justice? Corrumpere, the Latin word at the root of the word corruption, means literally ‘tearing apart’. What is torn apart here? What is torn apart in the soul of the person who is trying to fill a void that covers a pain that is unseen? We want transitional justice to ‘fix things’, to make right, to stand for noble causes. But in transitional justice expert gatherings we tend to want to forget about pain as well. We want survivors to speak, even cry, but within confined and pre-mediated registers that we set for them. We do not want them to go berserk on stage, to shout and scream and holler their pain onto the nation. We provide counsellors and escort out those who collapse. We do not have the means or energy to walk the journey of pain that often follows after having allowed the ‘raw recall’ of pain in front of media and public. Not without reason the survivors have accused us in the transitional justice world of orchestrating displays of suffering without remedies on offer. Who or what are these displays of suffering feeding? What do we need them for? What do they give to survivors and what is the cost? At worst, in transitional justice, we may think we can sanitize a living process of memory of atrocity through some clever social engineering, if only we get it right. Are we out to sell the perfect package deal of tribunal, truth commission, repar­ ations and institutional reform programme, with some touchy-feely recon­cili­ation measures as the cherry on top to make what is quite a bitter dish palatable? And yet … we can make witness, even if at the heart of violence and atrocity there remains something unspeakable and beyond our intellectual understanding. Even when the raw recall of pain has a cost that is too much to ask for. We can and need to stay with it. Because it means that we choose not to look away when we meet those damaged by war and violence, even when the encounter rattles us. We can choose to look inside and attend to our own healing, as most transitional justice experts come into the field with their own story to tell and in search of their own answers to questions perhaps posed by a distant ancestor of their own. We have the choice to show up differently when we meet our neighbour, every day. What of Zimbabwe? What story are you living in? What story are we living inside, here in the region? How do we want to live? 16 International Conference on Transitional Justice, Zimbabwe