wfn.org | Text of Oliver Tambo Lecture by Abp. Desmond Tutu

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November 6, 2001

2001-322

The South African Transition--Any Lessons? 

     The Most Rev. Desmond Tutu, Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town

     Oliver R. Tambo Lecture, Georgetown University

     November 1, 2001

     This is not the address I had intended making. I had hoped to use this
platform to reinforce my plea for a special Marshall Plan-like strategy to
assist Southern Africa to recover from the devastation visited on that
sub-continent by apartheid, just as Europe was helped to get back on its
feet after the destruction of World War II. I would have repeated my plea
for a grant of $2 billion for five years to help us deal with the horrendous
legacy of apartheid and to ensure that the miracle of our transition would
persist and we would have a success story out of Africa.

     But September 11 made me decide to speak on our transition in South
Africa, and to ask whether any lesson for others could be learnt from that
process.

     Almost everybody believed that we were headed for Armageddon. Violence
was endemic. Things were so bad that when the daily statistics on violence were
published and on any particular day 5, 6 or even 10 people had been killed,
we would sigh with relief and say, "Only 5, or 6, or only 10 people were
killed."

     It did seem as if all those dire predictions about a ghastly race war,
of a bloodbath overwhelming us, all were coming true. And then, instead of being
overtaken by a ghastly conflagration, the world watched with wonder and some
awe as South Africans of all races stood in those long lines, snaking their
way slowly to the polling booths, when South Africa went to vote in its
first democratic elections on April 27, 1994. The foreboding, the
predictions were amazingly not fulfilled.

     Then the cynics and others declared that we should wait and see, for as
sure as anything as soon as a black led government was in power there would
be an orgy of revenge and retribution. The blacks, for so long downtrodden
and oppressed, would get their own back and wreak revenge on the whites, who
had made them suffer so grievously and so unnecessarily for so long.

     And then--and then--instead of that much-feared outbreak of vengeance,
the world was stunned by the unprecedented TRC [Truth and Reconciliation
Commission] process. Instead of baying for the blood of those who had
oppressed them, the victims who should by rights have been consumed by
bitterness and resentment exhibited a remarkable magnanimity and generosity
of spirit in their willingness to forgive the perpetrators of some of the
most gruesome atrocities. They were ready to consider forgiveness and
reconciliation rather than punishment and retribution.

     It is seven years since the extraordinary democratic elections, and
three years since the TRC handed over its five volume Report to then
President Mandela. The extraordinary fact is that the arrangements that were
negotiated to make these two events possible are still holding. The land is
still enjoying a remarkable level of stability. Yes, there is violence,
there is unemployment, poverty and AIDS--but the violence is not political
by and large. It is not something designed per se to subvert the newly
established order. And when one looks at the level of social and economic
instability in say the former Soviet Union, then you would say what we have
in South Africa is like a Sunday school picnic in contrast.

     And what country does not have problems? Given our antecedents would it
not have been more likely to see children being escorted to school by armed
security personnel? That scenario has been played out, not as we would have
expected in South Africa, but in Northern Ireland. You would not have been
surprised had race riots erupted in South Africa--after all our racist past
made our country a prime site for such eruptions. And yet it has not been in
South Africa that race riots have happened. No, unbelievably, it has been in
Great Britain.

     Why did it all happen?

     There can be no doubt at all about the critically important role played
by our political leaders at the time. Had they been lily-livered and scared
of going against the considerable populist current, and if they had merely
pandered to the prevailing mood, then the chances would have been nearly
non-existent for us to have attempted crossing that particular Rubicon.

     Mercifully for us, God raised up--as Esther had been--for just such
times an F.W. de Klerk and a Nelson Mandela to be at the helm. We can safely
assert that had Mr. de Klerk's irascible and granite-like predecessor, Mr.
P. W. Botha, been in charge, it is highly unlikely that we would have seen
the epoch-making moves that Mr. de Klerk announced on February 2, 1990. I
could not quite believe my eyes and my ears as I watched him on TV
announcing those quite extraordinarily courageous initiatives. Whatever his
motives then, and whatever one's feelings about his subsequent conduct, we
have to doff our hats to him. He showed remarkable courage, and has carved
out, quite deservedly, a niche for himself in South African contemporary
history. His role was quite indispensable. He put paid to all kinds of
sacred cows in contemporary South African political discourse.

     But almost everyone would be quick to concede that had he had to deal
with an intransigent, bitter and vengeful counterpart, then it is highly
unlikely that the entire process could have made first base. What a blessing
with which God showered us when God raised Nelson Mandela at precisely this
moment--someone who had languished in jail for 27 years because he had had
the temerity to claim that he and other black people were actually human
persons, with the same inalienable rights claimed and enjoyed by their white
compatriots.

     Actually 'languish' is too negative a word, for in fact that time in
jail was not wasted. He had gone to jail as an angry, frustrated young
activist. In prison the fires of adversity purified him and removed the
dross; the steel was tempered. He learned to be more generous in his
judgment of others, being gentle with their foibles. It gave him a new depth
and serenity at the core of his being, and made him tolerant and magnanimous
to a fault, more ready to forgive than to nurse grudges--paradoxically regal
and even arrogant, and at the same time ever so humble and modest. Mr. de
Klerk could go ahead with his very courageous initiative because his
counterpart was not vindictive, bitter and resentful.

     It was not really popular to have done what these two leaders
did--anything but. On the white side the intransigent wanted to dig their
heels in and to fight to the last drop of blood. (And we later discovered
that there were arms caches buried in different parts of the country, and we
were just a whisker away from the bloodbath that had been so widely
predicted.) And on the liberation movement side there were those who
believed that they could knock the stuffing out of the apartheid
establishment, and who were hell bent on demanding their every pound of
flesh. They wanted all the apartheid functionaries to be brought to book in
a process of retributive justice akin to the Nuremburg Trial.

     Mercifully for us the 27 years gave Madiba [Mr. Mandela] an
unassailable credibility. He could say, "Let us forgive these guys!" and no
one could say, "You're talking glibly about forgiving--you don't know
anything about suffering!" Well, he could have retorted, "27 years you
know!" His moral stature and authority were, and are, impeccable and equally
unassailable, as the world has come to appreciate so adoringly.

     Wonderfully it was not just he. He was the most spectacular example.
There were many others, such as the late Joe Slovo, the Jewish Chairperson
of the Communist Party, greatly admired in the black community. He sold to
the radicals acceptance of the so-called "sunset clauses" that guaranteed
that white officials in the apartheid dispensation would not be retrenched
or lose their benefits with the advent of democracy and freedom. Or Chris
Hani, whose assassination brought us to the brink of disaster, and whose
popularity was second only to that of Madiba, idolized as the Communist
leader of umKhonto weSiswe, the ANC's armed wing, and who had been able to
persuade the fire-eaters among the young activists to agree to laying down
arms and ending the armed struggle. Clearly courageous leadership, ready to
take risks and refusing to pander to populist demands, played a crucial and
indispensable role in our transition.

     Perhaps I should have put this second factor at the top of the list; it
is this, that the time was apt, just right. In Galatians, St. Paul uses a
lovely phrase, "in the fullness of time" -- when everything was in place,
not a moment too son, or it would have premature; not a moment too late, for
then it would be obsolete, anachronistic. It was that there had to be a
Mikhail Gorbachev with his perestroika and glasnost. The so-called evil
empire had to have disintegrated so that white apartheid South Africa could
no longer hoodwink a gullible West about being the last bastion of Western
civilization in Africa against the depredations of Soviet expansionism. This
time coming too soon might have meant that Madiba would not have been quite
as he turned out to be a littler later. All happened in the fullness of
time--at precisely the right time, and no other.

     Our people were quite marvelous. They had a wonderful resilience and
sense of fun. They laughed through their tears, as when the sun shines while
it is raining. The apartheid system was vicious and did all it could to
break the spirit of our people, and to knock the stuffing out of them. I
have not ceased to marvel at their strength in the face of unspeakable
viciousness and evil, as we had evidence of it all in the testimony before
the TRC. Apartheid did its worst; it tightened the screws of repression
quite viciously and it created the climate that made possible the
perpetration of some of the most horrendous atrocities.

     I was quite devastated by the revelations relating to the biological
warfare program of the apartheid regime. It was all so cynical, as it was so
clinical--subverting science to such evil purposes. They had wanted to
poison Madiba while he was in prison, so that his brain would be affected,
and he would be disabled. Can you imagine what the consequence would have
been had they succeeded! They nearly killed Frank Chikane by dousing his
clothes with an organic poison. He was saved, miraculously almost, because
he happened to be visiting his wife, who was studying at the University of
Wisconsin, and somebody there was researching those poisons. Frank Chikane
is now the Director General in President Mbeki's office. 

     The apartheid regime came up against a formidable adversary in our
people, especially the women. Without them we would not have had our
freedom. One of our freedom chants declares, "Botha/Verwoerd, when you touch
the women you touch a rock." And we had vibrant civic organizations that did
not allow politicians free rein.

     We did indeed win a spectacular victory over the awfulness of apartheid
but it is a victory that would have been quite impossible without the
crucial support of the international community. It was especially young
people (obviously not they alone) at colleges and university campuses,
through their protests and demonstrations who forced the institutions to
divest and helped to change the moral climate, until a previously reluctant
Congress passed the Anti-Apartheid legislation and mustered a Presidential
veto override to frustrate the White House opposed to sanctions against
South Africa, preferring its own constructive engagement policy that had
been so disastrous for the oppressed. Some of you were arrested,
demonstrated and rallied on our behalf.

     Even now it is a great privilege to be able to say 'thank you' on
behalf of millions of my compatriots. We were oppressed; now we are free, 
thanks to your support.

     We realized then, as we realize now, just how much we need the rest of
the world. No one is completely self-sufficient. Such a one would be an
aberration, a contradiction, for we need one another, since we are made for
interdependence, for a delicate network of complementarity. What is true of
individuals is true of nations. We were never meant to go it alone; to do so
would be to flout a fundamental law of our being, and all kinds of things go
horribly, badly wrong when we forget we are made for community, for family,
for togetherness. We saw this playing out in our own recent history. We are
democratic today because of the support of the rest of the world.

     We succeeded ultimately because this is a moral universe; right and
wrong, good and bad matter. There is no way ultimately that evil can have
the last word--that a lie can prevail over truth, that evil can in the end
triumph over good. This is God's world, and God is in charge, despite all
appearances to the contrary. We sometimes did wish we could have whispered
in God's ear, "God we know you are in charge, but for goodness sake, why
don't you make it more obvious that you are in charge?" And yet history
provides ample evidence of the truth of this assertion. 

     How many are the tyrants and despots who thought they ruled the roost,
who have come a cropper and bitten the dust ignominiously? In recent times,
Hitler, Mussolini, Amin, Marcos, Ceaucescu, Pinochet, Milosevic, ad
infinitum. They might indeed cause considerable havoc, but in the long run
(which is the only run that matters, as someone has put it) good is stronger
than evil, life is stronger than death, light is stronger than darkness,
victory is ours through Our Lord Jesus Christ, who has overcome death
through dying, and brought life and immortality into our reach.

     There is a nemesis in the scheme of things. You cannot flout the laws
of the universe with impunity and hope to get away with it forever. We have
been given a precious gift--to be morally responsible, those with the
freedom to choose to love or to hate, to obey or to disobey. It is a divine
gift, making us like God, and God, who alone has the perfect right to be a
totalitarian, has such a deep respect for our relative autonomy that he had
much rather we went freely to hell than compel us to go to heaven.

     And in this moral universe nothing is useless. The sighs and groans of
the persecuted and tortured, the courage and fidelity of the unremarked, the
generosities and compassion that happen unsung, the heroisms often
hidden--these do not just evaporate into the ether. No, they impregnate the
atmosphere. When you enter a happy home you do not need to be told--it is
there in the air you breathe, in the fabric. As when you enter a church that
has been hallowed by much praying, you know it; it is in the bricks and the
mortar, it is unmistakable. Nothing is lost, all make a contribution, even
the seeming failures; all and in the fullness of time, it all comes to a
head and others enter into the labors of their predecessors. It is God's
world, who watches patiently as it all unfolds, writing straight with
crooked lines, adjusting God's plans according to our response, our
waywardness and recalcitrance.

     This God we were able to announce to our people is notoriously biased
in favor of the weak, the hungry and the oppressed. Our people exulted as we
regaled them with stories of a God who was not deaf, who was not blind, who
was not stupid, but who heard their cry of anguish and knew their suffering.
And as of old God had come down to lead the rabble of slaves out of bondage
in Egypt, so God would come down and lead us from apartheid's bondage into
the Promised Land of freedom and democracy.

     This God who did not give good advice from a safe distance: "You see,
when you enter a fiery furnace it would be wise to wear protective gear."
No, wonderfully God entered the fiery furnace and was there in the midst of
it, sharing the anguish and agony, for this was Immanuel, God with us, this
God who was not respectable--judging from the company God kept of the scum,
the untouchables, the ostracized, the sinners, the prostitutes; the God
whose standards were so low that God waited for the return of the lost as a
father waited for a wayward prodigal, and gave a huge party for this one;
whose son died for us while we were yet sinners; this God who upset the prim
and proper ones because God extraordinarily expends so many resources on not
the righteous but the sinner; the God with a soft spot for the wayward, the
sinner, coming as he did to look for the sinner and not the good, turning
everything topsy-turvy. And calling for God's children not just to forgive
those who ill used them, but to bless them, and more startlingly, to love
them. Religion played a crucial role too.

     The faith communities and their leaders were prominent players in the
struggle and contributed hugely to the ethos that evolved in our country.
Madiba and other political leaders have been quite warm in the tributes they
have paid to the different faith communities for their part in the struggle.
When we marched in Cape Town in the Mother of all Marches, the first in a
series that mushroomed all over the country, I was arm in arm with a Jewish
rabbi and a Muslim imam, figuratively. No one denomination or faith
community on its own could have accomplished what we did together.

     Christians are well aware, or should be, of the woeful record of
Christianity--responsible for the Inquisition, for the burning of witches
and heretics at the stake, for the obscurantism that sought to frustrate
Copernicus and Galileo and others, for the Crusades that caused such bloody
mayhem among Muslims. Fervent Christians supported slavery, it was
Christians who supported Hitler in perpetrating the Holocaust in Germany,
and it was decent Christians who were the most zealous supporters of
apartheid. And it is Christians at one another's throats in Northern
Ireland, and it was Christians who were involved in the recent Rwandan
genocide.

     We are thankful for the cooperation of the different faiths in South
Africa when we fought against apartheid, and we know that any faith is
susceptible to subversion by extremist elements of one sort or another, and
that this phenomenon should not be used to condemn all its adherents. We too
know of extremists in all our faiths, and have always declared that they do
not represent the faith at its best. .

     Language we discovered is a very potent force. It does not just
describe reality, it creates the reality it describes--hence the agitation
of women against sexist language. It was that often, and often the
appellation boxed a person in an unalterable identity, far too frequently
one that dehumanized, demonized, as if that one was forever defined by their
past.

     We would hear after some gruesome evidence before the TRC that so and
so was a monster or a devil, and we had to keep reminding people that the
conduct of the person could be described in the most trenchant manner--it
could be defined as diabolical, as monstrous, etc.--but we had to keep in
mind that this one still remained improbably a child of God. A monster did
not have moral responsibility, and so could not be held accountable for what
had happened. But far more seriously was that we close all possibility of
change--that there was no hope. We declared that this one could be
rehabilitated, could become better. If that were not the case, then the TRC
process was pointless, for it was established on the premise that
confession, forgiveness made possible the move towards a new dispensation
where former enemies would be reconciled and become friends. It was to say
human history is a closed system because deterministic, fatalistic; once
thus, forever condemned to be so. 

     Mercifully the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ declare history
to be open--that it is possible to be different, that we will be surprised
at those we find in heaven, for ours is a faith of ever new beginnings; God
gives up on no one.

     Language is potent. When we opposed apartheid's forced population
removals, and black people, especially the elderly, were dumped in poverty
stricken Bantustan homelands, an apartheid cabinet minister, referring to
those elderly, called them "superfluous appendages". Our mothers and
fathers, our sisters and brother, people of flesh and blood--"superfluous
appendages". Perhaps we will pause to consider what we are about--how we
would be appalled, and quite rightly so, were those who died on September 11
to be described as "collateral damage".

     We discovered that it is quite impossible to get true stability,
security and peace through the barrel of a gun--through violence and might.
We were surprised to find that in the end it was not an eye for an eye,
retributive justice, revenge and tit for tatting that give birth to true
security. We were even more amazed to discover that something so spiritual,
so religious as forgiveness, as confession, was not nebulous, reserved for
the privacy of personal intercourse with one's deity, but that it all
belonged in the realm of real politick; that getting one's own back, seeking
to even the score, was a futile business, setting off an inexorable spiral
of reprisal provoking counter reprisal, which in turn would provoke its own
counter reprisal endlessly. 

     Reconciliation, forgiveness, seeing the other, even one's worst enemy,
as still human with possibilities of rehabilitation and changing for the
better--that these were ultimately the only viable methods available.
Violent reaction to the suicide bomber who was to be condemned quite
unequivocally just seemed to give rise to further suicide bombers. That
seems to be the case so distressingly in the Middle East, in Northern
Ireland, in Kosovo, etc. It is no facile, glib slogan to say, "No future
without forgiveness". It just happens to be the truth.

Conclusion

     God does have a huge sense of humor. Who could ever have imagined South
Africa to be a sign of hope, an example of anything but the most awful
ghastliness? Precisely. We were such an unlikely lot, and God chose to use
us precisely because of that--that we were not over virtuous we would not
have sustained such an evil system for so long, and clearly we were not too
bright either. It was so that God could point to us for all the world's
troubled spots to see and say, "They had a nightmare called apartheid, it
has ended and yours too will end. They had a problem thought to be
intractable. They are solving it. Nowhere can anyone ever again think that
their problem was intractable."

     We were appalled as we listened to some of the testimony being given
before the TRC, and we wondered, "How low human beings can sink." We all
have an awful capacity for the most ghastly evil. But that was just one side
of it. As we heard and saw people who had suffered grievously not baying for
the blood of their tormentors, but instead demonstrating an extraordinary
magnanimity and generosity of spirit to forgive their tormentors, we were
exhilarated and realized that we all have a wonderful capacity for good.

     You are a wonderful people, warm hearted and generous to a fault. My
family and I have experience of that. You're a great people. Many of us have
been inspired by your history of a struggle to attain political independence
to aspire for our freedom and democracy. The exploits, especially of African
Americans in sport, the arts and in so many other ways, especially their
civil rights movement, fired our imaginations and told of what we too could
attain.

     Of course, you are now the only super power in the world; your economic
and military power are undisputed really. But that should not be the measure
of your greatness. It should be because of your moral stature; it should be
about what you do with your economic, military and political might; about
who you support and sponsor out there, whether they embrace the same values
as you. It should be about what sort of policies you implement out there;
whether it causes you anguish that unarmed civilians--little defenseless
children, mothers and grandparents, just ordinary people--are being killed
as at the present time, and whether you country's policies cause God's
children out there considerable suffering. 

     It should be about sharing your enormous affluence and your political
and social values of justice, freedom and equity--that there is a place in
the sun for all. How gratifying that so many, many voices in this land are
being raised at this time to say, "America, let us engage in serious
introspection. This is an opportunity for a hard look at ourselves." That
way lies the way to true greatness.

     You and me are made for goodness, for love, for transcendence, for
togetherness. God has a dream that we, God's children, would come to realize
that we are indeed sisters and brothers, members of one family, God's
family, the human family; that all belong, all white, black, and yellow,
rich and poor, beautiful and not so beautiful, young and old, male and
female. There are no outsiders; all, all are insiders--gay and straight,
Christians, Muslims, Jews, Arabs, Americans, Protestants, Roman Catholics,
Afghans--all, all belong.

     And God says, "I have no one to help me realize my dream except you;
will you help me?"

Source: Georgetown University Office of Communications

Preamble and small portions omitted; punctuation and spelling altered.