Abstract

In this dissertation I sketch a conception of personhood as understood from within an Afrocommunitarian worldview, and argue that this understanding of personhood has implications for understanding the concept of reconciliation. Understanding ‘being human’ as a collective, communal enterprise has implications for how responsibility, justice, forgiveness and humanization are conceptualized. In line with this understanding of reconciliation and its cognate concepts, I argue that the humanization of self and other is required for addressing the ‘inferiority’ and concurrent ‘superiority’ racial complexes as diagnosed by Franz Fanon and Steve Biko. These complexes reach deeply within individual and collective psyches and political identities, and I argue that political solutions to protracted conflict which do not address these deeply entrenched pathologies will be inadequate according to an Afrocommunitarian framework