Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most

by Douglas Stone

In his autobiography, A Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela provides an example of how people who have been overwhelmingly victimized can still seek to understand their own contribution to their problems. He describes how he learned this from an Afrikaner: Reverend Andre Scheffer was a minister of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church in Africa.... He had a dry sense of humor and liked to poke fun at us. “You know,” he would say, “the white man has a more difficult task than the black man in this country. Whenever there is a problem, we [white men] have to find a solution. But whenever you blacks have a problem, you have an excuse. You can simply say, ‘Ingabilungu,’ ” . . . . a Xhosa expression that means, “It is the whites.” He was saying that we could always blame all of our troubles on the white man. His message was that we must also look within ourselves and become responsible for our actions – sentiments with which I wholeheartedly agreed.

As the saying goes, “Don’t knock down a wall until you know why it was put up.”