Apartheid

In 1806 the British gained control over the Cape colony; in 1833 they abolished slavery.Footnote ⁶ The early Dutch settlers that followed, disenchanted with the British government, moved into the interior of the colony. Because of the richness of the territory's resources, however, the British contended with natives and the Dutch. Britain created the Union of South Africa in 1910, shortly after which whites monopolised political and economic power, building a legal system based on racial segregation and discrimination.

Far more than the aggregate of interpersonal racist episodes, apartheid was ‘an enormously complex, sophisticated, and modern system of racial and economic domination . . . [that] employ[ed] the most advanced technology, much of it obtained from the West, to regulate the life and work of millions of people’.Footnote ⁷ It evolved from a segregationist mentality of mastery, laments Tutu, that involved three distinctly evil characteristics.Footnote ⁸ First, it determined the value or worth of a human being by a biological quality, which is totally irrelevant to the task. Second, by negating the reconciliatory work of Jesus Christ, apartheid said that human beings are made for separateness, disunity, enmity and alienation. Third, it manipulated a group of human beings as a means to the end of another group's will.

In its South African context, apartheid had two major expressions. First, apartheid forced nearly four million non-white, non-European persons out of their homes and homelands and into regulated territories. As the central institution of apartheid, the Bantustan system divided South Africans among ten territories, which Tutu called resettlement camps. These ghettos of injustice constituted only 13 per cent of the total country. Blacks were forced to live in them; their right to live on or own land anywhere else was negated. Tutu sharply criticised the cycle of injustice and oppression that the Bantustan system created:

Such policy was poison to the South African natives. It soured not only the well of present life but also the spring of future opportunity. It fabricated inferiority, created ignorance and made ignominious the uncontrollable detail of black skin. Out of the Bantustan system's segregation arose violence and hatred. Ethnic groups were divided from each other in order to perpetuate the differences that existed among them.Footnote ¹⁰ The result of this strict regulation of life for blacks was one of the world's highest capital punishment rates. Typical years, such as 1980, witnessed the execution of 130 people, almost all of whom were black.Footnote ¹¹

Second, apartheid withheld education from South Africans in order to protect its authority. The educational equivalent of the Bantustan system was the Bantu programme, an equally systematic but perhaps more sinister form of oppression. South African students understood Bantu education as a way ‘to thwart their efforts to learn, to teach them only the simple skills that they would need to perform inferior jobs, and to promote divisions among the various ethnic groups’.Footnote ¹² These sentiments were based on a comment made by Hendrik Verwoerd, the system's architect:

Such pretentious language exemplifies the oppression that white settlers unabashedly imposed upon the South African natives.

South Africa's government passed a number of legislative acts that further made apartheid official.Footnote ¹⁴ The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and the Immorality Act (1950) forbade marriage and sexual relations between citizens of different races. All South Africans were required to be classified by race at birth by the Population Registration Act (1950). The Group Areas Act (1950) extended the Bantustan system's segregation to South Africa's urban areas by disallowing neighbourhoods of mixed racial groups. The Suppression of Communism Act (1950) permitted governmental censoring of a wide range of opposition. The Bantu Education Act (1953) legalised the unjust system described above. The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953) segregated most public areas, for example, cinemas, hotels, restaurants, restrooms, hospitals, buses and trains.

It is no wonder that groups like the ANC, the PAC and the black consciousness movement arose and lashed back at the white community with fierce violence. ‘Blackness prompted a state of emergency’, Battle notes, ‘because it threaten[ed] to spill into or seduce white superiority’.Footnote ¹⁵ When whites attempted to suppress blacks in order to protect their privileged position, blacks responded with resistance. While Tutu has rejected the title of pacifist, he employs a similar ethic that, at every step, renounces violence. This is because he interprets Christ's witness as a profoundly unbound form of reconciliation to which violence is counterproductive.

Reconciliation and ubuntu theology

It is Tutu's courageous, reconciliatory ethic that marks his uniqueness. Indeed, ‘Whites were never his enemy, only the system of apartheid’.Footnote ¹⁶ Despite the systematic atrocities that whites levelled against Tutu's black heritage, he always sought reconciliation. Tutu's hope was to reunite the people of South Africa and he wanted the church to initiate that goal.Footnote ¹⁷ Just as Martin Luther King Jr. expressed grave dissatisfaction at the silence of the white American church during his career, so too Tutu decried the complicity of the white South African church in the matter of apartheid.Footnote ¹⁸ Such complicity reflected heavily upon the church's theological convictions, Tutu believed. It proclaimed God's indifference at, if not affirmation of, segregation and oppression. Tutu countered by proclaiming that ‘the central work of Jesus was to effect reconciliation between God and us and also between man and man’.Footnote ¹⁹

Tutu maintained that if one part of the body suffers, then the whole suffers with it. Instead of asserting the rights of blacks over whites and reversing the direction of oppression, Tutu's vision is non-racial. If there is not freedom for all – whites included – then there will be freedom for none. Indeed, even though they stand atop the system of apartheid and therefore benefit from privilege, power and position, whites are not free when bondage exists. ‘[A]t present’, Tutu argues, ‘nobody is really free; nobody will be really free until Blacks are free. Freedom is indivisible.’Footnote ²⁰

Because freedom is indivisible, impartiality is inexcusable. While the Bantustan system made blacks into ‘aliens in their own land’, Tutu bemoaned the impartiality of foreign nations, especially the US.Footnote ²¹ ‘To be impartial and not to take sides’, Tutu declared, ‘is indeed to have taken sides already.’ He continued: ‘It is small comfort to a mouse, if an elephant is standing on its tail, to say, “I am impartial”’.Footnote ²² True Christian worship cannot occur if it is indifferent ‘to the needs of others, to the cries of the hungry, of the naked and the homeless, of the sick and the prisoner, of the oppressed and the disadvantaged’.Footnote ²³

Tutu believed that Jesus demonstrates such an attitude toward impartiality. He healed the sick, fed the hungry, and forgave sins. He relieved the burden of God's children who were overwhelmed by the cruelty of the world. Jesus ultimately crosses all racial and cultural borders to live out the original call of God: to witness to the love of God for all nations. Indeed, ‘True Christian worship’, Tutu avers, ‘includes the love of God and the love of neighbour’. He adds, ‘The two must go together or your Christianity is false’.Footnote ²⁴ Known as ubuntu and central to Tutu's theology is this notion of interconnectedness, which Jesus’ life aptly epitomises.Footnote ²⁵

Ubuntu is a corrective hermeneutic to the individualism of the West. While Western theology perceives human beings as individuals accountable before God for their own shortcomings, the African theology of ubuntu defines human life in terms of relationship. The proverbial Xhosa expression ubuntu ungamntu ngabanye abantu translates as ‘each individual's humanity is ideally expressed in relationship with others’.Footnote ²⁶ There is no solitary human being, in other words, for all are human in relationship. As Tutu explains:

In the midst of a broken and alienated world, interdependence precipitates from a deliberate ethic of reconciliation.

Ubuntu enables genuine community because it confesses a universal vulnerability.Footnote ²⁸ Since individuals remain incomplete apart from community, they are vulnerably dependent upon other human beings. Apartheid reconfigures the natural diversity of human life into God-ordained segregation. It stops short of a hopeful, reconciliatory vision, emphasising the differences among human beings without perceiving their fundamental interconnectedness. Of course, human life is marred by separation, which Tutu understands as the basic definition of sin.Footnote ²⁹ The reality of alienation, however, is a testimony to the validity of ubuntu. Because alienation operates by oppression, by a privileged class over a subdued class that exists for the benefit of the privileged, it confesses its inherent sinfulness. That is, alienation plainly demonstrates its own poisonous proclivity.

The poison of apartheid seeks to universalise an attitude of mastery for the sake of a few. Instead of affirming the variegated particularity of all humanity, apartheid claims the inherent right of only a certain particularity. One group stands above all others; such hierarchical oppression does not exist for the good of all but rather for the good of the few. Tutu notices this tendency in the history of Western theology, the individualism of which negates relationship and the importance of ethics. Western theology, in conjunction with the history of philosophy in the West, affirms the individual self as autonomous and standalone. Consequently, it produces a miasmatic milieu of separation and competition. The problem with this system is that it asserts the universality of a particularity – that it affirms only a certain kind of human life and negates the value of all human life.

‘Theology can never properly claim a universality’, Battle reminds us; ‘this the church claims as belonging only to Jesus Christ’.Footnote ³⁰ All persons must accept the scandal of their own particularity, which is another way of saying that all persons must acknowledge their incompleteness apart from the whole of humanity. God in Jesus Christ reconciles humanity to the divine, affirming human particularity in the particularity of Jesus Christ while also connecting humanity to the universal goodness of God. While human diversity announces the manifold glory of God, it cannot be a reason for alienation or elitism. It must be fulfilled in the unity of Christian community, which is possible because ‘we are all reflecting on the one divine activity that sets us free from the slavery of sin’.Footnote ³¹

According to Battle, Tutu understands Christian community to exhibit three characteristics in light of ubuntu.Footnote ³² First, although the church is purposefully in the world, it is never of the world. It stands against the alienating proclivities of the world in order to witness to the divine mission, which is ‘to restore the world into a primal flourishing through the enigmatic suffering of the incarnation of God and humanity’.Footnote ³³ Second, the church is always service-ready, on call, one might say, to wash dirty feet and feed hungry stomachs. Tutu's church is never triumphalist but works in favour of the powerless, who are gripped by sin's cyclical power. Third, like its head Jesus Christ, the church crosses boundaries of race, gender, ethnicity and class, seeking to dissolve these idolatrous distinctions in its witness. The life of Jesus Christ is the divine activity on which the church reflects, and this activity is akin to ubuntu, for it loves, forgives and reconciles in the understanding of human interdependence.

No future without forgiveness

It is from its emphasis on the munificent love of God and purposeful interconnectedness of human life that Tutu's theology of ubuntu generates an ethic of forgiveness. There is no future without forgiveness, Tutu saysFootnote ³⁴ – an idea that parallels McClendon's understanding of forgiveness. McClendon frames forgiveness as an intelligible and foundational component of Christian community because it is a major theme in the narrative of God's interaction with humanity. God forgives in order to make community possible, and humanity must do no less. Forgiveness is only understood, furthermore, within the historical narrative of one's life as lived.Footnote ³⁵ Individual narratives are lived in the context of other narratives, which makes forgiveness a matter of grasping another's narrative precisely where it intersects one's own, namely, at the place of injury. Forgiveness actually remembers and embraces hurt as the reality of a broken world in order to overcome ‘the power of the injury, healing it in a new bond of union between [offender and offended]’.Footnote ³⁶

Christian community founds itself upon this ultimate aporia – ultimate forgiveness. Beyond the power of evil to so thoroughly captivate a person that it renders her unable to move past it is the power of forgiveness, which when fully actualised precludes the inexpiability of radical evil, including the systematic and deliberate evil of apartheid. Forgiveness establishes community beyond the efforts of anything to destroy that community; it trumps the history-halting reality of radical evil with the hope of constructively re-forming community.Footnote ³⁷ Forgiveness restores equilibrium, heals brokenness, restores community and indeed anticipates salvation.Footnote ³⁸ Forgiveness does not accomplish these goals by forgetting painful offences, for if one forgets the offence, one permits the offence as if it were not wrong. Only by remembering and owning the offence is one able to destroy ‘forever its power to divide forgiver and forgiven’.Footnote ³⁹

Again, the balance of Tutu's gospel is this fact: that while he sought reconciliation, he called for change, for correction of the problem of injustice. The radical forgiveness explained above, however, seems counter-intuitive to practical progress toward justice. How, then, does such an understanding of forgiveness effect the reconciliation of ubuntu, which, in Tutu's theology, is incomplete without justice? This question is most challenging to Tutu's theology. It is so because of how thoroughly economical the predominant understanding of justice is. Most often, justice is correlated to vengeance. The scales of justice are imbalanced by a cruel injustice. The only way for the scales to be balanced is through an equal act of cruelty, which is considered justified because of its unjust cause. It is cruel because the punitive measure would be understood apart from the cause as itself an injustice.

Tutu's theology, however, is antithetical to this economical understanding of forgiveness and justice.Footnote ⁴⁰ Ubuntu expresses an original interconnectedness, a structure of reciprocity that predates individual accountability and meritorious action. In other words, the forgiveness that Tutu believes in is unmerited; it stems from the gracious heart of the victim, who, realising the impossibility before her, chooses reconciliation instead of retribution. Instead of perpetuating the cycle of bondage, this magnanimous action leads to true justice and allows the fulfilment of ubuntu.

Because of the many ‘crimes against humanity’ of the twentieth century, furthermore, forgiveness has been the subject of recent debate. Jews rightfully question the place of forgiveness in their lives because of Shoah. Even American Christians must decide what forgiveness means in light of September 11, 2001.Footnote ⁴¹ Jacques Derrida sheds some light on the problem that forgiveness poses when he entertains the claim of Jankelevitch, who claims that:

In response, Derrida explains that, even if forgiveness is impossible, it would be constructive for the Jews and for history itself. Nothing will change the atrocities of the past, and forgetting is antithetical to forgiveness and reconciliation.Footnote ⁴³ If humanity is in any way to move forward from these atrocities, if any positive or constructive activity should be possible, if any hope should be claimed, then only forgiveness – since it ‘is forgiveness only in the face of the unforgivable’ – can clear the path towards reconciliation.Footnote ⁴⁴

Even though Derrida claims he is atheistic, he cites the presence of a third party, an other in the midst of the process of forgiveness, which he says produces the forgiveness or the good in him. And although Derrida would certainly not make this claim himself, the Christian faith affirms that all things are possible with God, which turns the humanly impossible into the divinely possible. No one has the legitimate right to say to the Jews in the wake of Shoah that their remorse, brokenness and anger at the atrocities of the twentieth century are outdated or over-emphasised. Forgiveness is not past-due for the Jew, nor for the South African victims of apartheid.Footnote ⁴⁵

Human forgiveness is, especially for these victims, almost certainly an impossibility. Yet, the story does not end there. History does continue, as Derrida concludes, but it does so in an abyss. What is the path through the abyss? It is not forgetting the past; not superficially seeking therapeutic forgiveness that smoothes over the consciences of perpetrators; and not harbouring resentment and animosity.Footnote ⁴⁶ ‘Radical evil’ in the world is truly an aporia for forgiveness, ‘an insoluble contradiction or paradox’, truly inexpiable in its magnitude.Footnote ⁴⁷ Therefore, when speaking of forgiveness, if such is even possible, one experiences an unavoidable tension that threatens to destroy the foundation of identity, community, even goodness itself.

However, in light of the claims of Christian community, Tutu asserts, evil is not the last word. Because evil has become ‘radical evil’ in light of recent events such as Shoah, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, genocide in Darfur, and South African apartheid – because the possibility of forgiveness has become an impossibility – therefore it is critical, even essential to the endurance of the human race.Footnote ⁴⁸ If such atrocities – and they are nothing less – are allowed to be named ‘absolute evils’, even though they threaten to destroy the very foundations of goodness, then evil has the final word. Such is a possibility, an ever-growing possibility in the world today. But such fatalism is hopeless; it is nothing but despair. To use the language of Derrida, forgiveness, ‘if there is such a thing’, must show itself most profoundly when all hope is lost. Perhaps with this understanding, which grows from the soil of ubuntu, might the world proceed hopefully instead of hopelessly.

Ubuntu hoping

Indeed, hope is the desire of Desmond Tutu. In the foreword to Tutu's Hope and Suffering, Trevor Huddleston states that the Anglican bishop's vision is couched ‘always in hope: always in love: always in the certainty that God is present within the situation and that therefore His purposes must prevail.’Footnote ⁴⁹ Forgiveness is the working out of hope, the instantiation of an impossible dream, the demonstration of a yearning for reconciliation. With this non-economical understanding, Tutu agreed to head the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was established in 1995 by the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the effort to express forgiveness through reconciliatory remembrance, the commission heard testimony from victims of apartheid and offered amnesty to some human rights violators. As a compromise between ‘the punitive Nuremberg-style option and blanket amnesty’, the South African choice offered amnesty to those who fully confessed their human rights violations; those who were granted amnesty could not be prosecuted or sued for their past actions.

There is no economical justice, no balancing of the scales, in this model. It does not begin with retribution as a means to forgiveness. It begins with forgiveness, rather, and allows forgiveness to do its work. Indeed, in the words of John Reuben, ‘There is no justice or no peace. There's only forgiveness.’Footnote ⁵¹ Tutu understood that while ‘[n]othing short of moves towards dismantling apartheid will bring true security and peace to this land’, forgiveness is the only means to justice that respects the human interconnectedness of ubuntu.Footnote ⁵² Unfortunately, many human rights violators, including former South African presidents P. W. Botha and F. W. de Klerk, neither admitted their culpability nor expressed remorse nor a desire for forgiveness. Tutu realised that the commission, indeed, that forgiveness, would not bring perfect results. He also realised, however, that without striving for the ideal of gracious forgiveness, one does not truly express the boundless love of God or permit the actualisation of ubuntu.

Tutu's theology of ubuntu is challenging to the dominant understanding of Western theology. Since no person is truly human apart from other persons and since freedom is indivisible in ubuntu, alienation and oppression are ubuntu's greatest threat. Apartheid represented both of these evils and, Tutu believed, could only be corrected by a suffering hope in the grace of God. Because forgiveness is not perfect and does not establish immediate justice, one must suffer through the reality of persistent evil. Yet, because God has created humanity as indissolubly interconnected, one always suffers with the motivating hope of reconciliation. It is for this reconciliation, this restorative justice, this notion of ubuntu that Tutu has given his all. Ubuntu is the prophetic balance of the divine gift that enunciates a transformative hope for deplorable realities. As such, it represents Tutu's attempt to realise the way of God in his context, an attempt from which all theologising can benefit.