On 9 November 1952, Sister Quinlan was killed by a crowd in Duncan Village, East London. Sixty years after her death, her relics were returned to Duncan Village. The following text is based on extracts from an address delivered at a memorial gathering in the East London City Hall on 9 November 2012.

This occasion, to remember and reconcile with Sister Quinlan, comes in our hour of need. What we need so desperately at this time is our future. The terrible end of Sister Quinlan's life in the streets of Duncan Village, a life we are here to recall and reflect upon, will remind us, perhaps cruelly, of the past that has already made us. In 1994, not only did we want to release ourselves from that past, we also wanted something else. We wanted to create a future.

The story of Sister Quinlan is the story of good intentions gone wrong in the frenzy of a thoughtless moment. It is also the story of a strange chemistry: the chemistry of loving, and killing, and loving again. It is about life, and death, and life again. The story ends today when we declare our love for her. And when we declare our love for her, we might declare our love for ourselves.

Can politics and love ever hold hands? Most of the time, politics cannot bear love. This is because politics is more likely to see in love the face of judgement. But politics knows instinctively that without love, it can only be a force of destruction. Love, on the other hand, has precisely the ability to see in politics the dangerous temptations of power. Love may want to tame politics, just as politics runs away to escape. But love knows that without politics as power, the world of its intentions may never be achieved.

Sister Quinlan's death, in the circumstances in which it occurred, had the potential to be a transformative event of self-reflection for those who committed the act, putatively in the service of a larger cause.

It has become a matter of habit for us to keep telling the stories of what was done to us. We do not tell as much the stories of what we Did.