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theological whistling in the dark and one was frequently tempted to whisper in God’s ear, “For goodness’ sake, why don’t You make it more obvious that You are in charge?”
The symbolism was powerful: the solidarity with those who for so long had been disenfranchised, living daily in the deprivation and squalor of apartheid’s racially segregated ghetto townships. After all, I was one of them.
Those long hours helped us South Africans to find one another. People shared newspapers, sandwiches, umbrellas, and the scales began to fall from their eyes. South Africans found fellow South Africans—they realized what we had been at such pains to tell them, that they shared a common humanity, that race, ethnicity, skin color were really irrelevancies.
The white person entered the voting booth burdened by the load of guilt for having enjoyed the fruits of oppression and injustice. He emerged as somebody new. He too cried out, “The burden has been lifted from my shoulders, I am free, transfigured, made into a new person.”
Luther King, Jr., had said, “Unless we learn to live together as brothers [and sisters] we will die together as fools.”
The world probably came to a standstill on May 10 when Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa’s first democratically elected President.
He invited his white jailer to attend his inauguration as an honored guest, the first of many gestures he would make in his spectacular way, showing his breathtaking magnanimity and willingness to forgive.
gross abuse of human rights”—many South Africans remembered that awful deeds had been perpetrated in the past. They remembered the Sharpeville massacre when, on March 21, 1960, a peaceful crowd demonstrated against the pass laws and sixty-nine people were mown down when the police panicked and opened fire on the demonstrators, most of whom were shot in the back while fleeing.
People had been filled with revulsion when they saw how people were killed so gruesomely through the so-called “necklace,” a tire placed around the victim’s neck and filled with petrol and then set alight. This horrible way of execution was used by township ANC-supporting “comrades” especially against “sellouts,” those who were suspected of being collaborators with the state.
Apartheid had succeeded only too well in dehumanizing its victims and those who implemented it. People remembered that all this was very much a part of our past, a part of our history.
These and similar atrocities pockmarked our history and on all sides it was agreed that we had to take this past seriously into account. We could not pretend that it had not happened. Much of it was too fresh in the memories of many communities.
“victor’s justice.”
The call to punish human rights criminals can present complex and agonizing problems that have no single or simple solution. While
We have had to balance the requirements of justice, accountability, stability, peace, and reconciliation. We could very well have had justice, retributive justice, and had a South Africa lying in ashes—a truly Pyrrhic victory if ever there was one.
adduced. A criminal court requires the evidence produced in a case to pass the most rigorous scrutiny and satisfy the criterion of proving the case beyond reasonable doubt. In many of the cases which came before the commission, the only witnesses
to events who were still alive were the perpetrators and they had used the considerable resources of the state to destroy evidence and cover up their heinous deeds.
Much of what transpired in this shameful period is shrouded in secrecy and not easily capable of objective demonstration and proof.
victims. Secrecy and authoritarianism have concealed the truth in little crevices of obscurity in our history. Records are not easily accessible, witnesses are often unknown, dead, unavailable or unwilling. All that often effectively remains is the truth of wounded memories of loved ones sharing instinctive suspicions, deep and traumatising to the survivors but otherwise incapable of translating themselves into objective and corroborative evidence which could survive the rigours of the law.…
The personal truth—Judge Mahomed’s “truth of wounded memories”—was a healing truth and a court of law would have left many of those who came to testify, who were frequently uneducated and unsophisticated, bewildered and even more traumatized than before, whereas many bore witness to the fact that coming to talk to the commission had had a marked therapeutic effect on them.
Our common experience in fact is the opposite—that the past, far from disappearing or lying down and being quiet, has an embarrassing and persistent way of returning and haunting us unless it has in fact been dealt with adequately. Unless we look the beast in the eye we find it has an uncanny habit of returning to
hold us hostage.
Death and the Maiden.
Our nation sought to rehabilitate and affirm the dignity and personhood of those who for so long had been silenced, had been turned into anonymous, marginalized ones. Now they would be able to tell their stories, they would remember, and in remembering would be acknowledged to be persons with an inalienable personhood.
“third way,”
granting amnesty to individuals in exchange for a full disclosure relating to the crime for which amnesty was being sought.
“My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours.” We belong in a bundle of life. We say, “A person is a person through other persons.” It is not, “I think therefore I am.” It says rather: “I am human because I belong. I participate, I share.” A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or
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Anger, resentment, lust for revenge, even success through aggressive competitiveness, are corrosive of this good. To forgive is not just to be altruistic. It is the best form of self-interest. What
dehumanizes you inexorably dehumanizes me. It gives people resilience, enabling them to survive and emerge still human despite all efforts to dehumanize them.
cold.” Thus to forgive is indeed the best form of self-interest since anger, resentment, and revenge are corrosive of that summum bonum, that greatest good, communal harmony that enhances the humanity and personhood of all in the community.
“a nation of victims” and that was an apt description up to a point. But we should also declare that ours was also wonderfully a nation of survivors, with some quite remarkable people who astounded the world with their capacity to forgive, their magnanimity and nobility of spirit.
In a real sense we might add that even the supporters of apartheid were victims of the vicious system which they implemented and which they supported so enthusiastically. This is not an example for the morally earnest of ethical indifferentism. No, it flows from our fundamental concept of ubuntu. Our humanity was intertwined. The humanity of the perpetrator of apartheid’s atrocities was caught up and bound up in that of his victim whether he liked it or not. In the
process of dehumanizing another, in inflicting untold harm and suffering, inexorably the perpetrator was being dehumanized as well. I used to say that the oppressor was dehumanized as much as, if not more than, the oppressed
“We are running this country,” and then when routinely they tortured him he says he used to think, “By the way, these are God’s children and yet they are behaving like animals. They need us to help them recover the humanity they have lost.”
“But there is another side, a more noble and inspiring one. We have been deeply touched and moved by the resilience of the human spirit. People who by rights should have had the stuffing knocked out of them, refusing to buckle under intense suffering and brutality and intimidation; people refusing to give up on the hope of freedom, knowing they were made for something better than
the dehumanizing awfulness of injustice and oppression; refusing to be intimidated to lower their sights. It is quite incredible the capacity people have shown to be magnanimous—refusing to be consumed by bitterness and hatred, willing to meet with those who have violated their persons and their rights, willing to meet in a spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation, eager only to know the truth, to know the perpetrator so that they could forgive them.
Each of us has a capacity for great good and that is what makes God say it was well worth the risk to bring us into existence.
A rustic Russian priest was accosted by a brash young physicist who rehearsed all the reasons for atheism and arrogantly went on, “Therefore I do not believe in God.” The little priest, not put off at all, replied quietly, “Oh, it doesn’t matter. God believes in you.”
the cycle of reprisal and counterreprisal that had characterized their national history had to be broken and that the only way to do this was to go beyond retributive justice to restorative justice, to move on to forgiveness, because without it there was no future.
So I told those dedicated workers for peace and reconciliation that they should not be tempted to give up on their crucial work because of the frustrations of seemingly not making any significant progress, that in our experience nothing was wasted, for in the fullness of time, when the time was right, it would all come together and those looking back would realize what a critical contribution they had made.
They were alienated from their Maker. Now they sought to hide from the God who used to stroll with them in the garden.
none but the most obtuse can doubt that we are experiencing a radical brokenness in all of existence. Times are out of joint. Alienation and disharmony, conflict and turmoil, enmity and hatred characterize so much of life. Ours has been the bloodiest century known to human history. There would be no call for ecological campaigning had nature not been exploited and abused.
ubuntu,
Jesus says, “And when I am lifted up from the earth I shall draw everyone to myself”1 as he hangs from His cross with outflung arms, thrown out to clasp all, everyone and everything, in a cosmic embrace, so that all, everyone, everything, belongs. None is an outsider, all are insiders, all belong. There are no aliens, all belong in the one family, God’s family, the human family. There is no longer Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free—instead of separation and division, all distinctions make for a rich diversity to be celebrated for the sake of the unity that underlies them.
when you embark on the business of asking for and granting forgiveness, you are taking a risk.
In relations between individuals, if you ask another person for forgiveness you may be spurned; the one you have injured may refuse to forgive you. The risk is even greater if you are the injured party, wanting to offer forgiveness. The culprit may be arrogant, obdurate, or blind; not ready or willing to apologize or to ask for forgiveness.
if a husband in this situation comes home with a bunch of flowers and the couple pretend all is in order, then they will be in for a rude shock. They have not dealt with their immediate past adequately. They have glossed over their differences, for they have failed to stare truth in the face for fear of a possible bruising confrontation. They will have done what the prophet calls healing the hurt lightly by crying, “Peace, peace where there is no peace.”4
True reconciliation is not cheap. It cost God the death of His only begotten Son.
Of course there were those who said they would not forgive. That demonstrated for me the important point that forgiveness could not be taken for granted; it was neither cheap nor easy.
In forgiving, people are not being asked to forget. On the contrary, it is important to remember, so that we should not let such atrocities happen again. Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what happened seriously and not minimizing it; drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens to poison our entire existence. It involves
trying to understand the perpetrators and so have empathy, to try to stand in their shoes and appreciate the sort of pressures and influences that might have conditioned them.
