Desmond Tutu and Reconciliation

 

Desmond Tutu was once invited to preach to a white congregation in South Africa. He told them that Africans were deeply grateful to them for the gift of the Bible. He added that “The only difference between us is that we believe in it.” The archbishop told this impishly humorous story in a talk at St Paul’s cathedral in the 1990s which my father-in-law and I attended. My limited experience of clergy is mostly of Anglican sermons in British churches, which somehow manage to detach Christian beliefs and morals from the personal and often avoid challenging personal behaviours. Tutu, by contrast, spoke from the heart with a simple, uncomplicated, utterly sincere belief in right and wrong, and in humans’ potential for good. At the end of his address in St Paul’s, he spoke of prayers ascending to heaven and lifted his hands and gaze upwards to the great dome with a look of joy on his face in an almost child-like manner which no learned British cleric could manage.

 

My other connection to Tutu was an indirect publishing one. In 2000 I published the international edition of The Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, which Tutu chaired. For the first time in my career, I consulted a libel lawyer who told me that the report contained multiple libels. Puzzled, I asked him what he meant. “Well, it accuses many people of murder, torture and other crimes. It could damage their reputations.” I protested that they had confessed to the crimes in public tribunals and had no reputations to damage. The lawyer was unmoved and advised against publication. Fortunately, my boss shared my opinion that this was ridiculous and we decided to publish. We did take one precaution against a lawsuit, however. The former President of South Africa, F. W. de Klerk, had attempted to sue the Commission over two references to him in the report. We decided to publish with those passages ostentatiously obscured with black ink and referred readers to the South African edition.

 

The launch of the Report at South Africa House, Trafalgar Square, London

We launched the Report at an event at the South African High Commission. One of the speakers was Dullah Omar, South Africa’s Minister of Justice, who survived an assassination attempt by the Bureau of State Security (BOSS), which substituted a placebo for his heart pills. He collapsed in the street but was saved by a doctor who happened to be nearby. Two other speakers came from South Africa, including a High Court judge. The campaigner and journalist Trevor Phillips, chaired the presentation of the Report. Behind the speakers was the banner, bearing the slogan “Truth. The road to reconciliation”, that the Commission had taken around South Africa to the places where it heard testimony.

 

The speakers: Dullah Omar second from right, Trevor Phillpis centre

After the event, the High Commissioner, who had been a young anti-Apartheid activist herself, hosted a dinner for the speakers at her residence. Those attending included three or four Labour Party members of the House of Lords who had supported the Anti-Apartheid Movement, my boss, me and Mike Terry, a secondary school physics teacher who sat next to me. Mike told me that he had been secretary of the Anti-Apartheid movement. When I asked him why he was now a teacher, he explained that campaigning was exhausting. He would come home to find Special Branch officers sitting in a car outside his home and his phone was tapped. Nevertheless, he led the campaign for 20 years. As the speakers and the High Commissioner chatted among friends, they clearly relished being in charge and able to make their own decisions, rather than being told by white people what they may or may not do.

 

As I read the Commission’s report, I was struck by the gratuitous, depraved cruelty, of the security forces of Apartheid. It was clearly not enough simply to kill and eliminate their opponents; they must be humiliated and subjected to unimaginable pain. The men (they were I think all men) who carried out these acts, presumably had families to whom they returned after a day of murder and torture. The report suggests that acts of oppression damaged not only the victims but the oppressors and torturers themselves. Thus, the Apartheid regime not only damaged its opponents but its servants also.

 

Archbishop Tutu’s sense of humour and enjoyment of dancing have been mentioned repeatedly in news coverage, but I have been thinking of him in front of the Commission’s banner listening to testimony of countless acts of state-planned human depravity. He must also have been a man of profound seriousness of purpose and of compassion for the victims of Apartheid, perhaps even for some of the perpetrators whose moral being it corrupted.