No Future Without Forgiveness

by Desmond Tutu

Whereas previously South Africans had traveled abroad furtively, hiding their national identity for fear of being rebuffed, now they walked tall, wearing their country’s flag on their lapels and stuck prominently on their luggage, blazoning abroad for all to know they were from South Africa, that land that had confounded all the prophets of doom by making a remarkably peaceful transition from repression and injustice to democracy and freedom.

What a metamorphosis, what an extraordinary turnaround. 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.

He would be a potent agent for the reconciliation he would urge his compatriots to work for and which would form part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission he was going to appoint to deal with our country’s past.

Many things went wrong. In some places it was clearly the result of a deliberate intention to sabotage the whole exercise, and yet it was nothing that the country did not manage to take in its stride.

a democracy in place of the repression and injustice of the old discredited apartheid.

We were very soon to discover that almost nobody really would now admit to having supported this vicious system.

because in the new South Africa, it is not Parliament that is sovereign. No, it is our new Constitution, regarded by most people as being one of the most libertarian and human-rights-oriented constitutions in

The Constitution is not just a piece of paper. It is a solemn covenant entered into by all South Africans through their elected representatives.

It is going to take a long time for the pernicious effects of apartheid’s egregiousness to be eradicated.

No, the debate was not on whether but on how we might deal with this only too real past.

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 Pyrrhi...

amnesty applicants had to demonstrate that they had made a

full disclosure to qualify for amnesty, so the normal legal process was reversed as applicants sought to discharge the onus on them to reveal all.

we established facts on the basis of a balance of probability.

we were exhorted by our enabling legislation to rehabilitate the human and civil dignity of victims, we allowed those who came to testify mainly to tell their stories in their own words.

different orders of truth which did not necessarily mutually exclude one another.

forensic factual truth—verifiable and documentable—and

“social truth, the truth of experience that is established through interaction,...

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.

“Archbishop, we have told our story to many on several occasions, to newspapers and to the TV. This is the first time though that after telling it we feel as if a heavy load has been removed from our shoulders.”

no general amnesty.

was felt very strongly that general amnesty was really amnesia.

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.

It seemed that in time the wounds inflicted then had healed and English and Afrikaner seemed to live happily together. Alas, however, the amicable relationship was only superficial and really quite unstable and uneasy.

Over the entrance to this museum are philosopher George Santayana’s haunting words, “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.”

unless the past was acknowledged and dealt with adequately, it could put paid to that future as a baneful blight on it.

Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean playwright, wrote a play entitled, Death and the Maiden.

She is then shown with the man completely at her mercy, tied up and helpless. She holds a gun to him and is ready to kill him because he denies strenuously that he could have done this and tries to produce an elaborate alibi. Much later, he eventually admits that he was the culprit and, very strangely, she lets him go. His denial hit at the core of her being, at her integrity, at her identity, and these were all tied up intimately with her experiences, with her memory. Denial subverted her personhood.

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.

that third way was granting amnesty to individuals in exchange for a full disclosure relating to the crime for which amnesty was being sought.

What is it that constrained so many to choose to forgive rather than to demand retribution, to be so magnanimous and ready to forgive rather than wreak revenge?

Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language. It speaks of the very essence of being human.

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 treated as if they were less than who they are.

Harmony, friendliness, community are great goods. Social harmony is for us the summum bonum—the greatest good. Anything that subverts, that undermines this sought-after good, is to be avoided like the plague. Anger, resentment, lust for revenge, even suc...

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...

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.

Very few constituencies are likely to take too kindly to candidates for political office who say their platform is to hand

over power to their traditional adversaries.

Be that as it may, we were blessed at that critical point in our history by having him there, ready to take risks and to lead by leading.

He found a man regal in dignity, bubbling over with magnanimity and a desire to dedicate himself to the reconciliation of those whom apartheid and the injustice and pain of racism had alienated from one another. Nelson Mandela emerged from prison not spewing words of hatred and revenge.

Everything had been done to break his spirit and to make him hate-filled. In all this the system mercifully failed dismally. He emerged a whole person.

The true leader must at some point or other convince her or his followers that she or he is in this whole business not for self-aggrandizement

aggrandizement but for the sake of others. Nothing is able to prove this quite so convincingly as suffering.

The ANC, like other political collectives of its kind, is really a huge coalition of different political philosophies, views, and attitudes.

It is a considerable feat to hold the party together because its members believe deeply in consensus, in what they call “receiving the mandate.”

It required a great deal of political courage and skill and authority to bring his organization along with him.

adoption of this Constitution lays the secure foundation for the people of South Africa to transcend the divisions and strife of the past, which generated gross violations of human rights, the transgression of humanitarian principles in violent conflicts and a legacy of hatred, fear, guilt and revenge.