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 Wept arrives 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.