It was May 1999. I was seventeen, tall enough for my mother to worry that my height might betray us. As Serbian soldiers forced us from our homes in Kosovo, my family and I were hidden in the trailer of a tractor. My mother kept whispering, “Bend down, don’t let them see you.” My long body was no longer a source of pride; it had become a risk. 

I had almost forgotten this moment until last week, when I sat in the cold rehearsal room of ODA Theatre in Prishtina watching the actors prepare for the play “Under the Shade of a Tree I Sat and Wept”.

In one scene, a Kosovar actor explains that in the Kanun — a collection of traditional Albanian customary laws — a boy was considered a target the moment he grew taller than a rifle. On stage, the actor lifts a gun to measure himself, realizing he’s too tall. Suddenly, all the others crouch down, trying to make themselves shorter than the weapon. Both absurd and devastating, the gesture that brought me back to that spring day in 1999, when height could have meant death.

The play — written by Jeton Neziraj, directed by Blerta Neziraj with dramaturgy by Greg Homann — brings together actors from Kosovo, Albania and South Africa to stage two seemingly distant historical events: Kosovo’s Movement for the Reconciliation of Blood Feuds (Lëvizja për Pajtimin e Gjaqeve) and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Yet both stories orbit around the same impossible question: Can forgiveness heal a nation built on pain?

In 1990, Kosovo was still under Yugoslav rule as the Serbian regime intensified its repressive measures. All the while, Albanian families remained trapped in cycles of blood feuds, killing each other in the name of honor.

These feuds were rooted in the Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit, the centuries-old customary code that governed and regulated social life among Albanians. Under the Kanun, if a man was killed, the victim’s family was bound by honor to avenge the blood against the killer or his male relatives, creating long, often generational chains of violence.

That year, a group of students, activists and clergy, led by folklorist and professor Anton Çetta, began a moral revolution: they traveled from village to village asking people to renounce blood vengeance and instead forgive. The movement’s goal was to unite Albanians politically at a time of escalating Serbian repression, redirecting their energy away from internal feuds and toward collective resistance.

Among them was Catholic priest and activist Don Lush Gjergji, who later shared his memories in interviews for the play. In the production, he is mentioned by name, with his words woven directly into the script: “We asked people to forgive without conditions,” he recalls. “The true Albanian was once the one who took revenge. We made forgiveness an act of bravery.”

Thousands forgave. At Verrat e Llukës near Deçan, half a million people gathered, an almost biblical scene of reconciliation under an occupied sky. What happened there was political genius. By forgiving each other, Albanians united against a far greater enemy, the violence of the oppressor itself.

Five years later and thousands of kilometers away, South Africa was emerging from nearly half a century of apartheid — a system of racial segregation and white minority rule that had brutally oppressed the Black majority. In 1995, Bishop Desmond Tutu became chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the country’s historic attempt to confront its monstrous past. 

More than 22,000 victims gave statements, and thousands testified publicly about torture, murder and humiliation. Perpetrators could receive amnesty, but only if they “had been seen to provide a complete and truthful disclosure of a politically motivated act.”

In one of the play’s most haunting scenes, I hear the story of Lethabo Khumalo, a mother whose son was killed and buried without a hand. When she begins to testify before the TRC, her microphone accidentally cuts off; she collapses and never returns. Her story, along with her son’s missing hand, vanishes from the official record. Thirty years later, the playwrights imagine finding her in a psychiatric hospital, still haunted by the vision of the policeman holding her child’s severed hand. The only words she can utter are “Left!” and “Right!”, commands to move her wheelchair, as if in shifting her body might also shift her pain.

Having spent decades fighting the brutal apartheid system through nonviolent resistance, faith and public advocacy, Tutu entered the halls of Cape Town to listen to the testimonies of victims and perpetrators. He presided over these hearings not as a judge but as a moral witness, turning the act of listening and forgiving into a national reckoning. 

There was once upon a time…

It’s easy to see why Tutu and Çetta belong on the same stage. Both understood that forgiveness was a refusal that stopped hatred from writing the future. Both saw that the greatest act of freedom was not revenge, but forgiveness. But “Under the Shade of a Tree I Sat and Wept” refuses easy morality. It questions both processes, Kosovo’s reconciliations and South Africa’s truth hearings, not as failures, but as having been left unfinished. In one scene, the director tells the actors:

“Desmond Tutu sacrificed justice for forgiving, for no real change…”

The line cuts close to the truth. Forgiveness, when unaccompanied by justice, risks becoming a performance that comforts the powerful. The victims tell their stories; the perpetrators cry; the world applauds, but the structure of suffering remains.

In South Africa, the TRC promised “truth will set you free,” yet millions remained trapped in poverty and inequality, with little real justice delivered. Amnesty was often granted, but structural change never came. In Kosovo, the blood reconciliations of the early 1990s were never meant to deliver freedom on their own. They were a political act of unity, a way to turn inward communities away from revenge and outward toward resisting the Serbian regime. That struggle eventually led to political freedom and independence, the very goal people dreamed of in the 1990s. But the spirit of reconciliation never expanded beyond that moment. It did not extend to the political class, where division, corruption and poverty have taken root. And so, decades later, the country that won its freedom has become one of the places from which young people leave in search of a better life elsewhere.

The play’s title is also an image that connects both nations. In Kosovo, reconciliations often took place under trees, where elders gathered families to shake hands and weep. In South Africa, the “tree” symbolizes justice and truth, echoing traditional imbizo gatherings where communities met beneath trees to resolve disputes. This image lives on in the Constitutional Court of South Africa, whose logo is of a tree sheltering people of all races and genders.

Both trees offer shade, but not shelter from memory.

In the final act of the play, Çetta and Tutu meet on stage, in fiction, across time and geography. They greet each other with reverence, but soon argue bitterly. “You deceived your people,” Tutu tells Çetta, “You promised them a future of freedom. Where is it now?” Here, freedom itself is questioned: Kosovars gained their political freedom, but not the dignity, justice or shared reconciliation that could have held society together after the war ended. 

Çetta fires back: “You robbed your people’s forgiveness in exchange for false freedom. You humiliated them by exposing their pain. The whites benefited again!”

They end their quarrel not with agreement but with irony, each insisting the other begin telling his story first, until both start together: 

“There was once upon a time…

Oh, what a wonderful time it was!

A time not to be forgotten!

And it was completely different from this time now.

That was a time when people were not afraid to look the past in the eye!

People dared to imagine the future!”

And yet, both know that forgiveness has its limits. It does not resurrect the dead. It cannot rebuild justice from ashes. But it might, if only for a moment, make us human again.

The play turns forgiveness itself into a spectacle, showing both its moral beauty and its exploitation. The actors who embody killers and victims eat pizza between scenes, arguing about mayonnaise and “Desmond Mandela”, mocking their own ignorance. It’s grotesque and comic, yet painfully human. Because that’s what forgiveness is, not divine purity, but messy humanity.

The theatre becomes a new truth commission, one that admits its own manipulation. “We are sacrificing truth for success, for the success of this show,” the director concludes.

Just as the TRC made compromises in the name of healing — privileging forgiveness and disclosure over punishment — the artists acknowledge that they too shape, edit and simplify reality to create a powerful performance. When the director says, “We harvest from people’s traumas and give that to the audience,” he is confessing what art has always done: turn suffering into meaning. 

Some truths are left out, not to deceive, but because the stage can only hold fragments of a larger story. It becomes meta-theatrical: actors eat pizza while discussing trauma, or debate whether it is ethical to fictionalize testimonies. 

When rehearsals end, you are left wondering whether these two men, an Albanian folklorist and a South African bishop, were naive dreamers or the last moral realists of the 20th century. In their worlds, forgiveness was not just a theological concept or folklore; it was an infrastructure, keeping societies from collapsing into endless bloodshed.

When the play ends, Tutu and Çetta shake hands as smoke fills the stage. Above them, plastic hands, symbols of severed limbs and unfinished reconciliations, fall from the ceiling. One lands near the audience. For a moment, no one moves.

What lingers is the sense that forgiveness, to feel this radical, is almost absurd in itself. And yet, perhaps absurdity is all we have left — the absurd hope that by forgiving, we might break a chain that would otherwise have no end.

Images: Courtesy of Besim Ugzmajli

Editor’s note:
“Under the Shade of a Tree I Sat and Wept” premieres on October 17–18 at the City Theatre in Gjilan, followed by performances on October 22–24 at ODA Theatre, Prishtina, and October 29th in Prizren City Theatre.

The play is produced by Qendra Multimedia -Prishtina, The Market Theatre-Johannesburg, São Luiz Teatro Municipal-Lisbon, Teatro Della Pergola-Florence, Theater Dortmund-Dortmund, Black Box teater-Oslo, Mittelfest-Cividale del Friuli, Théâtre de la Ville-Paris).

 Want to support our journalism? Become a member of HIVE or consider making a donation. Learn more here.