MEMORIES OF A MODERNITY-TO-BE On truth and reconciliation in transitional South Africa Oscar Hemer

Let me start with a few words on the very notion of Modernity. It’s obvious that the declaration of its death in the 1980s was not only premature but also a particular phenomenon of the so called west. Modernity is very much alive in the world today, with China and India as the two giant challengers of Western economic and political supremacy. The ferocious modernization process in China resembles in many ways the modern projects of post WWII Europe (on both sides of the Iron Curtain) – yet in a much larger scale and at a much faster pace. Usually ‘modernization ’ and ‘globalization ’ are seen as equivalent to a lesser or greater degree and globalization is even sometimes regarded as the global fulfillment of ‘the modern project’. The liberal interpretation of ‘the end of History ’ has, for sure, been overshadowed by the backlash of (alleged and real) fundamentalist reactions and the ongoing global ‘war on terrorism’. However, the dominant globalization discourse – the idea of a ‘digital revolution ’ of ‘informatization ’ as equivalent to the previous industrial revolution – remains a rerun of the modernization rhetoric: a reconstructed grand narrative of progress, not necessarily more sophisticated than its predecessors were