David Beresford talks to Desmond Tutu and finds the former archbishop is still a believer in the power of truth and redemption
Desmond Tutu is a busy man. He has, after all, been agonising over whether to press the button which could send a former state president to prison. He is being bombarded with demands that he reject an amnesty application by the man who is going to be the next president.
And he faces a decision whether to subpoena a recalcitrant judiciary – a step which, if he took it, would almost certainly precipitate South Africa’s first, full- blown constitutional crisis. They are circumstances in which any man would have need of his God and, Tutu’s relationship with the Almighty being closer than most, he says: “Let us pray …”
Even without the prayers the cruciform paintings on the wall make it inescapably a cleric’s office on the seventh floor of the Adderley Street office block that is the headquarters of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But there is enough in the room to mark him as an unusual one, including a bust of Robert Kennedy presented by the senator’s admiring family and a commemorative set of stamps bearing his portrait as a Nobel laureate.
But most striking are the framed cartoons that have pride of place on his wall, reminding us that this man of God is a devotee of that most brutal of games and, specifically, a passionate fan of the Springboks. “I cannot help but feel that the effect is somewhat muzzled by the clatter of His Grace’s rugby boots,” observes a cartoon bishop to a caricature of a crestfallen Tutu in solemn procession down a church aisle.
It has been a rough year for the former archbishop, not only by way of difficult decisions, but through repeated confrontation with death – including the prospect of his own with the discovery in January that he was suffering from cancer of the prostate. After lengthy treatment in the United States, he appears to be beating it. But, when one considers the grinding witness he has also had to bear to man’s inhumanity to man by way of the truth commission hearings, it seems almost miraculous that he remains the ebullient little man who has for so long been the conscience and the inspiration of South Africa. He attributes his endurance to regular exercise of the body, of the soul (with the help of his confessor) and the maintenance of quality time with his family. “And if I have moments when I want to cry, well I sit with God and I cry.
“You know, I’ve had a wonderful life, really,” he says, musing that if God had given him the choice he could not have bettered the last few tumultuous years: his reintroduction of Nelson Mandela to an ecstatic world on his release from prison; his official retirement graced by the Archbishop of Canterbury and then – as he was about to depart the stage of public life – the invitation to spearhead the drive for national unity and reconciliation by heading the truth commission.
He concedes that, at times, he feels “overwhelmed by the extent of evil” emerging from the truth hearings. One story which particularly haunts him is the police murder of Siphiwe Mtimkulu in the Eastern Cape. They drugged him, shot him behind the ear and burned his body. “Which is bad enough. But while they are burning his body they are having a braai on the side,” the former archbishop says in anguish. “I can’t actually get over it !”
But then there is the other side of the coin, “the exhilaration, the incredible capacity of people, the magnanimity, the nobility of spirit …” The anecdotes come tumbling out, dating back to the first hearing when he was approached by a white woman who had been so badly injured in a Pan-Africanist Congress gun-and-grenade attack that she had to be helped by her children to dress and eat and could not pass through airport security checkpoints, because of the amount of shrapnel still buried in her body. She told the bishop she would like to meet the man responsible. “I would like to forgive him,” she said “… and I hope he forgives me.”
The commission has not been without criticism, of course, and much has been voiced at his handling of the extraordinary nine-day hearings on the Winnie Madikizela- Mandela scandal. The dramatic embrace of Madikizela-Mandela by Joyce Sepei was seen by many as grotesque. “What would you have done, would you have stopped Stompie’s mother ?” shoots back Tutu. “It was entirely the mother’s initiative. I just said I wanted to us to acknowledge those victims and we did by standing … She had said to me that she would like to meet Winnie and really talk, as a mother to mother … no, no, I don’t think I want to apologise. People are not pawns, they are not puppets. She did what she wanted to do and she did it.”
His reference to Mrs Mandela’s “greatness”? “No one who has ever lived in this country can gainsay that Winnie was tremendous in her struggle role,” says the former archbishop. “I did say something went wrong; horribly, badly wrong,” he adds defensively. And her “apology”; was that not deserving of cynicism ? The commission’s brief, he retorts, is to promote national unity and reconciliation. As a pastor he was sensitive to even a flickering ember of remorse in the hope it could be nurtured into a flame. “I believe that we all have the capacity to become saints.”
It is a curious institution that South Africa has created in the truth commission. A tribunal headed by two churchmen, it has been described as a mix of the ecclesiastical and the judicial. But judges do not claim to discover “the truth”, they merely satisfy themselves as to the discharge of an onus. And on the ecclesiastical side, confession tends to be between man and his maker – the only ones qualified to judge whether the truth has been told and forgiveness merited. The idea of man being required to confess “the truth” to man in the name of the law dressed up in the robes of the church takes one back to the Inquisition.
“If we were the Inquisition we would have had electric prods,” he chuckles. “We have to try and persuade people that ultimately their own healing is going to depend on their owning up. And the Act makes it quite clear that the truth is sought, not for the purpose of prosecution, it is sought for the purpose of healing the land.”
It is also “facile” to say confession is between a penitent and God, he adds, warming to the argument. “If I quarrel with my wife and I say to her, `It’s between me and God’, that marriage is not going to last very much longer.” The relationship is both vertical and horizontal. “The Bible is quite clear about it when it says: Love God and love thy neighbour. The two are linked together.”
But the most widespread criticism of the commission is the parade it makes of the guilty being allowed off scot-free. Tutu rationalises it was the price of peace. “Our country was on the verge of the most comprehensive catastrophe.” The security forces would not have contemplated a settlement without the prospect of amnesty. “It is a very heavy price. But what is the alternative ?”
And the perpetrators of atrocity do pay a price, he argues. “He has had to say in public, in the full glare of television lights, I killed, I tortured. And maybe his wife and children are hearing about it for the very first time. His community are hearing about it for the very first time . It is a very high price they are paying. This is a moral universe. Right and wrong matter … “
The articulation of those rights and wrongs used to be his domain. What has happened to his denunciations of the gravy train; why has he not been heard protesting at the abandonment of morality in foreign policy? “One of the worst thing about being on the commission is that one has had to shut up,” conceded Tutu, regretfully. “There are many things I would have been talking about and shouting about, maybe. There are some quite stupid errors of judgment that have been made.”
He brightens briefly at the thought of Mandela: “When you think of the fact that this guy had no experience at all of running a government – they did not have the experience even of voting – they’ve not done badly !” But, he adds, ruefully: “We were hoping that part of the purpose of the struggle was that we wanted to replace an immoral system with a new set of moral values. And we are not always seeing that.”
And the “rainbow nation”? “It is important to keep the dream. Because without the dream we could as well as shut up shop.”
But, he reflects, perhaps it is time to be more honest in recognising differences in perspective. Instead the country is sliding away from confrontation, towards cosy positions, and when they get there they are discovering that they are in different worlds. Blacks resent the failure of whites to realise how lucky they are. Whites resent the burden of guilt they carry for having benefited from the system.
“And so we are siting in our little corners and feeling angrier and angrier,” he says. “But I still think we have a great deal going for us. If we could have the courage maybe to be a little more honest …”
BLURB: `This is a moral universe. Right
and wrong matter’