Keynote Address innovative and vibrant, joyful and funny. How will we use that ability to relate across enormous social distances now that served the transition so well in the mid-1990s? Does that mean we are transitioning forever, that transition has no end? In the cyclic view time, that is the determining look at reality. There are just gener­ ational changeovers, not really endings and beginnings. Transitional justice is a marking of time, no more. Looking at what transitional justice set out to do in the 1990s – pointing out collectively that an autocratic regime had ended – and what is projected into it now – healing, repairing and transforming fragile states and situations of protracted conflict – it is evident that we set ourselves up to fail if we think that transitional justice is a remedy for all social and political ills. We have seen the limits to transformation the minute we seek finite endings and certainty of change. Instead, what the TRC did enables, and what future processes at best can facilitate is moments of introspection (looking inwards) and of transpection (looking across time) – moments of recognizing both continuities and shifts, of becoming better observers of what is actually happening around us, less emotionally entangled in our own projections. What was the TRC then? It was such a moment to mark time, to say that we have now chosen to live a different story. There is now a different South Africa, a plea to the world to see us in our striving and in our failures. The state sought to reinvent itself, only to find old patterns and forms resurfacing. Apartheid former security operatives now running businesses are caught dumping school textbooks in fields, former honourable comrades are found with their hands in the cookie jar. Cynicism reigns supreme among many that the TRC was all mercy and no justice, all talk and no repair, that golden handshakes were given while people’s suffering continues unmitigated and structural injustice prevails. Which is true. Travelling eighteen years into independence, we have not yet fully embraced our interdependence, or made amends, or sufficiently begun to repair the devas­ tated lives of survivors. In this region we can learn a lot from Kenya, Uganda, from colleagues in West Africa, Sierra Leone, Liberia, who have been travelling the post-independence road for longer, through several cycles. We know we need to learn to live in contestation non-violently, to value conflict as a teacher and a change-maker, if we heed the signs. We need to pass on the ability to stay in dialogue with the next generation, not to sell a rainbow story that appears an empty dream for many or to give promises of a change that is always just out of reach. International Conference on Transitional Justice, Zimbabwe 15