I vividly remember that day in Cape Town, South Africa, in the late 1980s. After an anti-apartheid march, the Rev Allan Boesak was addressing a big crowd of protesters. Boesak, a minister in the segregated Dutch Reformed Church, was a tremendous speaker, versed in the stirring rhetoric of African-American preachers.
As Boesak was working up the crowd, a policeman imprudently decided to walk among a section of the peaceful crowd. Unsurprisingly, that people got restless. Police were never good news, and certainly less so at a protest. At that moment, Boesak could have used his power as a speaker to command the lynching of that reckless cop. Of course he didn’t. He told the crowd to let that man be and keep the eye on the struggle.
I thought of that incident – now more than a quarter century in the past – as I listened to the Rev Al Sharpton speaking at George Floyd’s televised memorial and funeral services.
It struck me that the spirit of protest and agitation is still guided by the Rev Martin Luther King Jr (and by Nelson Mandela, I might add, whose image often is seen in the background in TV interviews with Black leaders and pundits) – and that’s a good thing, too, because men with that kind of rhetorical power can work significant harm if they are ill-intentioned.
Sharpton emphatically did condemn the violence and criminality we had already begun to see. “There have been protests all over the world,” Sharpton said. “Some have looted and done other things and none of us in this family condones looting or violence,” he continued, “but the thing I want us to be real cognizant of is there’s a difference between those calling for peace and those calling for quiet.”
At the memorial service for George Floyd, Sharpton also spoke of God, “Who looks down low and He’ll make a way out of no way.” As I recalled that day in the 1980s in my own country, it was startling to me to think of what might happen, were Black leaders to stoke the rage, rather than call for creative agitation.
Thank God for those, who preach the way of peaceful change. Thank God for those, who practice it, for this gives them moral authority.
In apartheid South Africa, President PW Botha had no moral authority when he was faced with Christian leaders like Boesak, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Rev Frank Chikane or Denis Hurley OMI, the Catholic archbishop off Durban on whose shoulders, Tutu would recall, they all stood. Botha knew it, and could respond only by showing dominion through violence.
I thought of that, when US president Donald Trump – at roughly the same time he was declaring himself the “ally” of peaceful protestors – had a group of them forcibly dispersed so he could have a photo op in front of a church near the White House.
Force and domination do not bring peace. In South Africa, it was mutual encounter, a repudiation of hatred, and an openness to reconciliation that brought peace. Much of that was underpinned by Christian leadership.
It goes without saying that there is a big difference between South Africa in the 1980s and the USA today. In South Africa, the white minority oppressed the Black majority through legislation enacted by a tyrannical government. The USA is a democracy — with all the responsibilities that entails.
Thank God for those, who preach the way of peaceful change. Thank God for those, who practice it, for this gives them moral authority.
South Africa became a democracy in 1994, after a reasonably peaceful transition. The legacy of apartheid still haunts the country, nonetheless. Here, too, Black people are more likely to die at the hands of police (of any color) than whites. The history of racism is yet to be conquered. But South Africa made a start at what Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“overcoming the past”) through the Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC), headed by Archbishop Tutu.
At the TRC, those who committed crimes against human rights during apartheid were given an opportunity to confess their trespasses which would then be forgiven by the state in the form of immunity. Catholics will easily locate the Christian principle in that concept. It is perhaps not by chance that the idea of a truth commission was adopted from Chile, a traditionally Catholic country.
The flaws in the TRC process may excite fruitful debate in a different forum, but its fundamental achievement was the official acknowledgment by the state that apartheid — a system which the country’s Catholic bishops called “inherently evil” already in the late 1950s — was a crime against humanity. From there, the country could begin to move forward on a journey that, it must be said, has yet to reach its destination of full reconciliation.
History happened differently in the US, where the abolition of slavery – which came after a bloody civil war – was followed by new ways of racial oppression.
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s made significant gains. The subsequent changes in general attitudes toward race and race relations in the wake of the Civil Rights Act have in many ways been marvelous — but, as recent events have made clear, there is some way yet to go before Rev Martin Luther King Jr’s dream of a nation where people are judged not “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” finds full realization.
As the people of the United States work through this crisis, they should not dismiss out of hand a tool like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, adapted to circumstance.
From the outside looking in, the end of segregation (apartheid by another name) in many parts of the US appears to have marked for many people the end of the struggle, rather than the beginning of radical renewal in the deep grammar of fellowship that is the only sure foundation of society.
The nationwide protests following the killing of George Floyd, and the forceful reaction to these protests, show that the US has a long way to go yet before reaching that point of that conversion, and the healing it will bring.
Günther Simmermacher is editor of South Africa’s national Catholic weekly newspaper, The Southern Cross.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.