A case for unforgiveness as a legitimate moral response to historical wrongs

Abstract: The emergence of forgiveness as the preferred mechanism through which historical wrongs are addressed within reconciliation discourses has meant that for the people who cannot forgive or will not forgive, there are no alternatives other than insisting on forgiveness until it hopefully one day arrives. As such, the point of unforgiveness is to constitute an agentic space where the people who cannot forgive can articulate their stance in ways that not only allow them to articulate their resistance to the injunction to forgive, but also constitute alternative spaces whereby they can articulate their stance in inclusive ways. If we constitute alternatives to the hegemonic injunction to forgive, we might be able to open spaces whereby those who are excluded from the reconciliatory discourses, manage to participate and enrich the spaces of reconciliation while refusing to partake of the calls to forgiveness