Pictured above: Desmond Tutu (1931-2021) and Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)
———————————–
The nation of South Africa is 90% black and 10% white. Until 1993, the white minority ruled, establishing a strict, racist society. Blacks were second class citizens, denied basic human rights, and kept in poverty. Any dissent was brutally crushed. Kidnapping, torture, and murder were widespread practices of the police, and it was all sanctioned by the highest levels of government. Tens of thousands were killed.
In 1993, after years of growing domestic unrest and international pressure, the nation transitioned to a democracy which included the right to vote for blacks. A black president was elected in the first post-apartheid election. Nelson Mandela, a political prisoner of the white regime for 27 years, was released in 1990, and in 1994 became the new president. Everyone expected trouble.
The new government faced the daunting task of dealing with the many political crimes of the past. How could such things be ignored? Would the new majority government seek revenge on the many white citizens who were involved in the torture and killing? The white majority was still very powerful, militarily and economically, and might begin a violent revolt rather than face persecution for their crimes. Would the cycle of violence be continued, as in so many nations; or might there be a way to avoid that and bring peace?
In 1995 President Mandela established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He appointed widely respected and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Archbishop Desmond Tutu to lead the commission. Tutu’s leadership emphasized confession and forgiveness over retribution.
The rest of the story is told in this January 2022 article about Desmond Tutu by Philip Yancey.
——————————————
The son of a schoolteacher and a domestic servant, Desmond Tutu would grow up to become a prominent figure on the world stage. With Nelson Mandela locked behind bars for almost three decades, the apartheid government in South Africa saw Tutu as their greatest threat.
Tutu’s reputation belied his simple charm. Interviewers remember his impish giggle and his corny jokes. Words were his power, for he commanded no armies other than the thousands who flocked to hear him speak. Only 5’4″ tall, he would bound up the steps of a stage, like an excited schoolboy, to address a protest rally. Richard Stengel, the former managing editor of Time, called him “perhaps the most spellbinding speaker I’ve ever seen,” adding, “His goal was always to mobilize people against injustice, but always, always toward forgiveness and love. In the face of so much injustice and despair, he never lost his faith, and never failed to inspire it in others. There may be no atheists in foxholes, as the saying goes, and there were very few in the audience after Tutu spoke.”
Tutu didn’t let countless death threats deter him from public appearances. Although the security police targeted for assassination other leaders who opposed apartheid, they considered Tutu too high-profile, especially after he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. They did harass him, however, arresting him at demonstrations, bombing his office, and seizing his passport to keep him from traveling outside the country.
Eventually the white population, who controlled South Africa’s army and police, but were outnumbered almost ten to one, realized that something had to change. Out of the limelight, secret negotiations with Tutu and Mandela paved the way to Mandela’s release from prison, and, the first free elections open to all races. Appropriately, it was Tutu who introduced Mandela to cheering crowds as the first president of the new South Africa.
Whites feared, and many observers predicted, that the changeover would lead to a bloody era of revenge. Instead, Mandela sought to defuse the pattern of retribution that he had seen in so many countries, where one oppressed race or tribe took control from another. For help he turned to his friend, the Archbishop.
Thus Desmond Tutu undertook one of the most arduous and emotionally wrenching assignments of the last century. For more than three years he presided over the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings of South Africa. The rules were simple: if a white policeman or army officer voluntarily faced his accusers, confessed his crime, and fully acknowledged his guilt, he could apply for amnesty, with some restitution to the victims. Hard-liners grumbled about the injustice of letting criminals go free, but Mandela and Tutu both insisted that the country needed healing even more than it needed justice.
Day after day, Tutu heard details of deeds from hell committed in his own country. Afrikaner (white South African) agents told of abusing pregnant women, torturing prisoners with waterboarding and electric shocks, beating suspects senseless, and sometimes shooting them in cold blood. Blacks confessed to “necklacing” corroborators by hanging gasoline-soaked tires around their necks and lighting them. The horror stories knew no end. Spellbound, South Africans watched on live television as victims of violence, 22,000 in all, gave testimony.
When he accepted the assignment, Tutu braced himself for a severe test of his theology, in part because “good Christians” had carried out so many of the crimes. Apartheid was, after all, the brainchild and official doctrine of the Dutch Reformed Church there. To his surprise, his faith strengthened.
Tutu insisted on opening the days’ meetings in prayer. Then he would put on his judicial robes and take his seat before a commission that endeavored to bring truth and reconciliation to a morally polluted land. He stayed at his post even after being diagnosed with prostate cancer.
When the commission released its final report, Tutu published his personal reflections in a book titled, No Future Without Forgiveness. The hearings had confirmed his belief in forgiveness as the only way forward from a dark past:
Having looked the beast of the past in the eye, having asked and received forgiveness and having made amends, let us shut the door on the past—not in order to forget it but in order not to allow it to imprison us. Let us move into the glorious future of a new kind of society where people count, not because of biological irrelevancies or other extraneous attributes, but because they are persons of infinite worth created in the image of God.
In his remaining years, until he died at the age of 90, Tutu lived out what he had learned. He met with people on both sides of the nation’s divide—conservatives and liberals, white nationalists and Black activists, policemen and prisoners—always listening to them with civility and respect. Indeed, he emerged from the TRC hearings with renewed hope: “For us who are Christians, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is proof positive that love is stronger than hate, that life is stronger than death, that light is stronger than darkness, that laughter and joy, and compassion and gentleness and truth, all these are so much stronger than their ghastly counterparts.”
Gary Haugen, who worked as an investigator for the TRC, reflected on Archbishop Tutu’s death this way: “As a young man, I saw with my own eyes a life lived in an everyday freedom from fear that I had never seen before, nor imagined to be possible. Under the most severe test of evil and violence, he lived as if the things that Jesus taught were actually true. It was a way of living that seemed to change everything.”
*************************************
Related Posts
