David Beresford
another country
The defeat of the recent initiative to have Cape Town’s cathedral corner Adderley and Wale streets named after former presidents Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk comes as a great relief.
Attempts to memorialise the living always smack of self-interest. Such tributes are also tainted by an appearance of indecent haste, giving rise to suspicions that those responsible fear the reputations of those they seek to honour are unlikely to outlast mortality.
One would, anyway, have had to indulge in some form of civil disobedience if such a proposal had gone ahead, because the corner on which St George’s Cathedral is situated is clearly Desmond Tutu’s by right.
Certainly he is due all honours. Like Mandela with the presidency, the little cleric brought distinction to his former office, rather than vice versa; others must needs wear the tinsel hat of title lest they be mistaken for lesser men. If his fans desire it, the bend in the road should be his for their asking … once he gets around to dying.
The imminence, or otherwise, of an individual’s death is considered an indelicate subject for public debate. As John Cleese put it, admittedly in another context, “don’t mention the war”. In the case of a senior, respected and much-loved churchman, who might be presumed by some to have privileged access to the Almighty’s ear, the matter is perhaps well-treated as somehow “sub judice” in our society.
The insensitivity of foreigners can therefore be blamed for the confusion arising from the crassness of Britain’s Sunday Telegraph in recently billing a feature on the “cancer-stricken archbishop” as “his last interview”. Only on the anxious reading of the small print were his fans reassured. Tutu had said it “could be” his last interview which merely reflects an astute appreciation of the unpredictability of both fate and fame. The hack responsible for the piece in fact found him “remarkably robust”, “full of beans” and “a bundle of joy”. In other words, vintage Tutu.
The interview itself is full of typically irreverent fun, Tutu offering a personal vision of heaven in which he hopes rum and coke will remain on tap, but sadly expects rugby and cricket to be unavailable.
One is tempted to protest it is difficult to believe in a heaven in which Breyton Paulse is not eternally on the wing and Lance Klusener not on the drive. But, such reservations aside, it must be said that Tutu’s brand of spirituality is almost enough to tempt the most hardened cynic into a reappraisal of “that old-time religion”.
At the very least it gives reason to welcome a new line of scientific investigation being pursued by researchers into the biological origins of spirituality.
According to a report in the Boston Globe last week a United States neurologist, Professor Andrew Newberg, has been busy conducting brain scans on Buddhists and Franciscan nuns meditating and praying. Exactly how he carried out this feat is not explained, but he is said to have zapped them with “a tracer that travels to the brain and reveals its activity at the moment of transcendence”.
As a result of these intrusive investigations Newberg claims to have discovered that, at the height of their devotions, a small section of the brain usually busy calculating the body’s spatial orientation relative to its immediate physical surrounds seems to shut down operations.
“It creates a blurring of the self-other relationship,” Newberg, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is quoted as saying by the Boston Globe. “If they go far enough, they have a complete dissolving of the self, a sense of union, a sense of infinite spacelessness.”
The same might be said of rum-and-coke, of course a point the goodly professor might take into account before coming to any final conclusions about the spiritual significance of his work.
But he does seem to be heading in the general direction being taken by science, away from what might be described as the atomic, or particle-based, approach to one in which there is more emphasis on relationships and in which properties are recognised as interdependent.
That would seem to lead us to the concept of “holism” first articulated by Jan Smuts in a fit of post-Einstein enthusiasm, the genius of which seems to have been obscured by apartheid and later appropriated by environmentalists, practitioners of “alternative medicine” and others peddling a spiritual explanation for the heavenly properties of rum and coke.
Sadly South Africa withdrew its national tribute to one of its most brilliant sons by renaming its major airport as “Johannesburg International” in 1995. Fortunately there are other reminders of the great man’s passing, including the impressive statue of him at the bottom of Cape Town’s botanical gardens, at the junction of Adderley and Wale.
The extraordinary strength of the foundations for the new South Africa will be recognised, I suspect, when everyone takes their due place. When Smuts is seen to be brooding in Tutu’s Corner.