What does it mean to forgive? A play asks, 30 years after the TRC

Thirty years after the start of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC),Under the Shade of a Tree I Sat and Weptarrives not to commemorate but to question. In collaboration with the Kosovo-based Qendra Multimedia, the production draws an unlikely but deeply resonant parallel between the TRC and Kosovo’s Movement for the Reconciliation of Blood Feuds. The latter was a grassroots initiative in the early 1990s that saw more than 1 200 blood feuds resolved through acts of public forgiveness.

On paper, the comparison feels almost improbable. One is a state-sanctioned process emerging from the end of apartheid; the other, a community-driven movement rooted in centuries-old customary law. But in playwright Jeton Neziraj’s hands, the two become mirrors, reflecting not just each other but the fragile, often contradictory nature of reconciliation itself.

The play doesn’t offer easy answers. Instead, it asks a deceptively simple question: Why do people forgive? For Neziraj, the origins of the work are as intimate as they are historical.

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It began, he tells me, with a meeting. “An old man wanted to have a coffee,” he says, recalling the encounter in Kosovo in 2024. The man had sought him out to talk about the blood feud reconciliation movement, frustrated that it had slipped to the margins of public memory.

As he spoke, recounting his involvement in the process, he began to cry. “That moment was it,” Neziraj says. “It was a crucial moment.” The emotions of that encounter which were raw and unresolved decades later, became the spark.

For Neziraj, it was a reminder that history is not something fixed in the past but something that continues to reverberate through the present, often in ways that remain unexamined. In Kosovo, the reconciliation movement had once mobilised hundreds of thousands of people, with families publicly forgiving the killers of their loved ones in an effort to halt cycles of retaliatory violence. But the outbreak of war soon after eclipsed the acts of collective courage, burying them beneath the larger narrative of conflict.

“Somehow nobody really wanted to go back anymore,” he says. The play, then, becomes an act of return. A way of excavating what was left behind.

The connection to South Africa emerged almost organically. In searching for a “mirror” through which to examine Kosovo’s experience, Neziraj and his collaborators turned to the TRC, a process globally recognised, extensively documented and yet deeply contested. When Neziraj first visited Johannesburg in 2020, he connected with Greg Homann, the artistic director of the Market Theatre, and the seeds of a collaboration were planted. What followed was a years-long process of research, exchange and ultimately co-creation, bringing together performers and creatives from South Africa, Kosovo and across Europe.

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