Keynote Address Windows across Time and the Search for What Really Matters: A Meditation on Transtemporal Transitional Justice Dr Undine Whande Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, Cape Town, South Africa I want to start with a quotation from Ben Okri that speaks to the title of my speech: We live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are living the stories we planted – knowingly or unknowingly – in our­ selves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.1 With your permission, I will take the liberty to invite a contemplative moment, a moment of looking at transitional justice through the lens of personal memory, and from the perspective of windows across time. In Western thought, time is mostly conceived of as linear. It leads from the present into the future, picturing the past as lying behind us. In this case, tran­ sitional justice is perhaps like taking a look at the past through a window in time, looking backwards. In ancient and indigenous cultures around the world, how­ ever, time is most often seen as cyclic. It moves from the present to the pastas-future. How so? The thinking is that the future re-joins the past in a loop: As I walk my life journey, I move towards becoming first an elder and then an ancestor. I walk backwards into the future, the past in front of me and visible, the future at the back. The future is, at the same time, the realm of the past because it is also the realm where I join my ancestors and from whence those not yet born come, too. Cyclic time emerges from the notion of infinity, from which life emerges and to where it returns. In the Western sense of time, the present, then, is a moment that is perpetually gone. It is now and it is past instantly. In the cyclic understanding of time, the present is expansive: it spans across generations and even signifies a kind of eternity, a never-ending now, and now, and now. I invite you to contemplate 1  Ben Okri, A Way of Being Free (London: Phoenix House, 1997). International Conference on Transitional Justice, Zimbabwe 7