Archbishop Desmond Tutu Reflects on Working Toward Peace
When
I was a boy in South Africa, thousands of blacks were arrested
daily under the iniquitous pass-law system, which severely
curtailed our freedom of movement. As a black person over
the age of sixteen you had to carry a pass. It was an offense
not to have it on your person when a police officer accosted
you and demanded to see it. I remember vividly, when I would
accompany my schoolteacher father to town, how sorry I felt
for him when he was almost invariably stopped. Now there
was something funny for you: Because my father was an educated
man, he qualified for what was called an exemption. Ordinary
pass laws did not apply to him in that he had the privilege
denied to other blacks of being able to purchase the white
man's liquor without running the risk of being arrested.
But for the police to know he was exempted, he had to carry
his superior document. His exemption, therefore, did not
spare him the humiliation of being stopped and asked peremptorily
and rudely to produce it in the street. This kind of treatment
gnawed away at your very vitals.
Years later, after I was grown and married, and my wife,
Leah, and our children returned from England, where I had
gone to study theology, I faced an exquisite irony. My family
was having a picnic on the beach. The portion of the beach
reserved for blacks was the least attractive, with rocks
lying around. Not far away was a playground, and our youngest,
who was born in England, said, "Daddy, I want to go
on the swings," and I said with a hollow voice and
a dead weight in the pit of my stomach, "No, darling,
you can't go." What do you say, how do you feel, when
your baby says, "But Daddy, there are other children
playing there?" How do you tell your little darling
that she cannot go because though she is a child, she is
not that kind of child. And you died many times and were
not able to look your child in the eyes because you felt
so dehumanized, so humiliated, so diminished. I probably
felt as my father felt when he was diminished in the eyes
of his young son.
When I became archbishop of Cape Town in 1986, I set myself
three goals. Two had to do with the inner workings of the
Anglican Church. The third was the liberation of all our
people, black and white. That was achieved on April 27,
1994, when Nelson Mandela became South Africa's first democratically
elected president. The world probably came to a standstill
on May 10, the day of his inauguration. If it did not stand
still then, it ought to have, because nearly all the world's
heads of state and other leaders were milling around in
Pretoria.
A poignant moment that day came when Mandela arrived with
his elder daughter as his companion, and the various heads
of the security forces, the police, and the correctional
services strode to his car, saluted him, and then escorted
him as head of state. It was poignant because only a few
years earlier he had been their prisoner. What an extraordinary
turnaround! President Mandela 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.
This man, who had been vilified and hunted down as a dangerous
fugitive and incarcerated for nearly three decades, would
soon be transformed into the embodiment of forgiveness.
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 would appoint
to deal with our country's past.
Since that day, our nation has sought in various ways
to rehabilitate and affirm the dignity and personhood of
those who for so long have been silenced, have been turned
into anonymous, marginalized ones. I have been privileged
to be involved in the rehabilitation effort through the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to which the president
appointed me and sixteen others in September 1995. It was
the commission's goal to reach out to as many South Africans
as possible, offering amnesty to all, both those who had
been victims and those who had been perpetrators during
apartheid's long reign. Our slogan was: The truth hurts,
but silence kills. Our aim was to engage all South Africans
in the work of the commission, ensuring that all would have
the chance to be part of any serious and viable proposal
for healing and reconciliation.
At first we feared that few would come forward, but we
need not have worried. We ended up obtaining more than twenty
thousand statements. People had been bottled up for so long
that when the chance came for them to tell their stories,
the floodgates opened. I never ceased to marvel, after these
people had told their nightmarish tales, that they looked
so ordinary. They laughed, they conversed, they went about
their daily lives looking to all the world to be normal,
whole persons with not a single concern in the world. And
then you heard their stories and wondered how they had survived
for so long carrying such a heavy burden of grief and anguish
so quietly, so unobtrusively, with dignity and simplicity.
How much we owe them can never be computed.
The hearings were particularly rough on the interpreters,
because they had to speak in the first person, at one time
telling a victim's story and at another telling a perpetrator's.
"They undressed me. They opened a drawer and then they
stuffed my breast in the drawer, which they slammed repeatedly
on my nipple until a white stuff oozed. We abducted him
and gave him drugged coffee and then I shot him in the head.
We then burned his body . . ." It could be rough as
they switched identities in this fashion. Even those physically
distant from the testimony were deeply affected. The head
of our transcription service told me that one day, as she
was typing the manuscripts of the hearings, she did not
know she was crying until she saw the tears on her arms.
In January 1997, while still sitting on the commission,
I learned that I had prostate cancer. It probably would
have happened whatever I had been doing. But it seemed to
demonstrate that we were engaging in something costly. Forgiveness
and reconciliation were not to be entered into lightly,
facilely. My illness seemed to dramatize the fact that it
is a costly business to try to heal a wounded and traumatized
people and that those engaging in this crucial task may
bear the brunt themselves. It may be that we have been a
great deal more like vacuum cleaners than dishwashers, taking
into ourselves far more than we knew of the pain and devastation
of those whose stories we had heard.
But suffering from a life-threatening disease also helped
me have a different attitude and perspective. It has given
a new intensity to life, for I realize how much I used to
take for granted-the love and devotion of my wife, the laughter
and playfulness of my grandchildren, the glory of a splendid
sunset, the dedication of my colleagues. The disease has
helped me acknowledge my own mortality, with deep thanksgiving
for the extraordinary things that have happened in my life,
not least in recent times. What a spectacular vindication
it has been, in the struggle against apartheid, to live
to see freedom come, to have been involved in finding the
truth and reconciling the differences of those who are the
future of our nation.
Biography
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