The University of KwaZulu-Natal has launched an initiative to foster good governance through the memory and works of fervent liberation icons. Rev. Dr Allan Boesak recently spoke at the University’s annual Mzwandile Memorial Lecture, and The CIHA Blog is honored to post the text of his talk, in three parts. (Read Part 2 and Part 3)
“Brave, Just Men” – Luthuli, Mandela, and South Africa’s Jericho Road
by Allan Aubrey Boesak
This talk is taken from a chapter in a book I am in the final stages of finishing. The larger argument is concerned with the meaning of Jesus’ parable in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 10, the story we universally know as the parable of the Good Samaritan. Pivotal to the story are three questions. Two from the lawyer: “What shall I do to inherit eternal life,” and: “Who is my neighbor?”; and Jesus’ counter question: “Who is the neighbor to the one…?” What could Jesus mean by telling this story? Jesus means, I believe, to tell us the true meaning of what I would call radical, combative love; of true, radical, revolutionary neighborliness. But what would that mean if applied to the situation in South Africa, specifically for the purposes of our discussion, that crucial period after Sharpeville when the ANC, a banned organization with a banned leader (Albert John Mvumbi Luthuli) took decisions that would have such momentous consequences for the struggle, the people, and the country. So in this paper (like I did with “reconciliation” elsewhere, I will speak of love as a political force for good.
Way back in 1974, in a then startlingly fresh approach, French theologian Jean Cardonnel raised a question, as disturbing and challenging now as it was then, the question I believe Jesus was trying to get the lawyer to ask. It is a question that at once reveals the real-life situation Jesus was recalling and the revolutionary nature of what is called for in such a situation. What would have happened, Cardonnel asks, if the Samaritan had come upon the scene while the robbers were still attacking their victim? What would then be the act of true love toward the neighbor? Should he have waited, hung back, until they have finished and departed for him to then perform his act of mercy? Or would the true act of love have been to intervene and stop the bandits from causing harm to their victim?[i] That, I submit, is the question. It is a question that immediately exposes the total inadequacy of all spiritualizing, all generalized allegorizing, and all fantasized sermonizing, because it raises another, even deeper question: if love intervenes, what form would this intervention take? In any case, that is the question both driven by love and expressive of love.
Cardonnel argues that true love of neighbor is not just a healing love, a love that tends the wounds but fails to ask where the wounds come from, and who made them. It certainly is not a sentimentalized love that speaks vaguely of “setting a good example”; it is a “combatant love, which needs to be transformed into an inventive, prophetic, pioneering, creative love.” That is the love of the Jericho Road. It is a love not lured into safe, distant deeds of charity, a love not afraid to engage the situation as one finds it, a love that seeks to understand the causes of suffering and seeks to engage these causes, not just their consequences. It is a love that not only seeks to understand who caused the wounds, but also why? A love that asks not only how to stop the bleeding, but how to stop the wounding.
Let us turn to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, theologian of the resistance against Hitler, the Nazi’s and the complicity of the Christian church. Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw with prophetic clarity what was at stake as the church grappled with what the Nazi’s called “the Jewish question.” Bonhoeffer knew, as all true prophets would discover in other times, that at heart this had nothing to do with “the Jewish question”, as for us today it has nothing to do with the “race problem”, the “gender problem” or the “queer problem”. Fundamentally and principally the question then was as it would always be: “How radical is your love? How revolutionary is your neighborliness?”
At the time when he decided to join the resistance, Bonhoeffer reflected on the realities of the German situation. He did not philosophize about the general ruinous condition of humankind; he did not spiritualize the kingdom of God. He did not flee into academic theological vagueness or eschatological escapism, even though that would have been safer. With our parable in mind, we return to Bonhoeffer as he pondered “three possibilities” open to the church in life and death situations where fundamental choices must be taken on behalf of the victims of oppression. Having established that the church challenges the state as to its actions towards the people; and that the church has an obligation towards the victims of any societal order (whether they are Christian or not), Bonhoeffer comes to the only possibility proper for the church in such a situation:
The third possibility is not just to bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel, but to seize the wheel itself.[ii]
In light of our parable, what Bonhoeffer was asking, in effect, of the church and of himself was this: what is the calling of love and neighborliness in this situation in which we come upon the Jericho Road scene while the robbers were still attacking? Hitler was still very much present, in control of the machine that was crushing his victims. The third option was really the only option left, if one were not, like the priest and the Levite, to turn away and walk away. For Bonhoeffer the call of love in his situation was to join the resistance and, as a consequence the plot to take Hitler’s life.
I will argue that not merely incidentally, facing the same historic decision with consequences of the same significance, this is also the question that confronted Albert Luthuli and Nelson Mandela in South Africa’s struggle for freedom after that crucial moment in our history, the Sharpeville massacre. And even though the two men came to radically different conclusions, I contend that the fundamental question that drove them was the same.
In December 1961, after the Sharpeville massacre in March of the year before, the African National Congress made the decision to embark on a military strategy and formed its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, meaning “the spear of the nation” (MK). On 12 June 1964, Mandela, Walter Sisulu and six others were sentenced to life imprisonment. At that time Luthuli proceeded to issue a statement, much quoted since, fiercely debated and according to UKZN historian Scott Couper, “frequently used to support the claim that he supported the initiation and the formation of MK.”[iii]
Luthuli began his statement by stating that the ANC had “never abandoned” its method of what he called a “militant, non-violent struggle, and of creating a spirit of militancy in the people.” That underscored at least two things. First, that even though a decision was taken to form a military wing, for Luthuli militant, non-violent action was still an option, in fact remained foundational for the liberation movement. Second, and crucially, Luthuli states that the claim on “militancy” with all the richness of its attendant symbolism for any revolutionary movement should not be restricted to the choices for violent struggle only. There is such a thing as “a spirit of nonviolent militancy” that could be instilled in people, and for him it should always remain a real, live option.[iv] Despite his own convictions, however, he did not openly criticize the move toward armed tactics. Indeed he insisted that no one could blame those “brave, just men” who resorted to a military option given the circumstances. They were, in Luthuli’s eyes, still “seeking justice” albeit by the use of violent methods, and still represented “the highest in morality and ethics in the South African political struggle.” By sending them to prison, he added in a remarkably perceptive sentence, the South African courts have in fact “sentenced this morality and ethics to an imprisonment it may never survive.”[v]
The statement as a whole reveals an immense generosity of spirit which is more than merely democratic. One must not underestimate the serious tensions the pro-military decision created between Luthuli and proponents in the ANC, including Mandela. But Luthuli’s love for Christ led him not only into the struggle but to radical love for his people, black and white, including those like Mandela who differed from him on this crucial matter and derided him for it.
These words have caused a great and continuing debate on the question of violence, the ANC’s decision and Luthuli’s attitude toward it. Even though, Scott Couper remarks, “nationalistic commentaries rarely state categorically” that Luthuli supported the initiation of violence, they “frequently imply it,” because, they argue, Luthuli’s own words – “no one can blame brave just men [for choosing violence]” – pave the way for that understanding. This interpretation and its rationalization are not always honest,[vi] but I think that from an ANC viewpoint it is nonetheless understandable. Because of this decision the ANC had invested almost all of its years and energy in exile in the armed struggle, the defense and the justification thereof. It was vitally important for the credibility of the liberation movement in their view, to claim that the struggle for freedom had therefore been won by military means. The almost ritualistic glorification of violence and the constant characterization of the violent struggle as the heart of the “National Democratic Revolution” – which in turn is at the heart of the ANC’s vision – made that stance not only unavoidable but an absolute necessity.
The fact that it did not happen that way, and that the ANC guerilla forces, without in any way belittling their fervor, commitment and sacrifices they believed were for a good cause, nevertheless never stood a realistic chance against the best equipped and trained military force on the continent, did not really matter. What also did not seem to matter is that the struggle was ultimately and finally won by the internal forces and their persistent, sacrificial nonviolent resistance rather than by the sporadic acts of violence done by MK or APLA, or for that matter, by the “Self-Defence Committees” the ANC had set up in the townships during the states of emergency in South Africa half-way through the eighties. For them, what matters are the romanticized revolution and the sacrifices of MK soldiers. It is almost as if the sacrifices of those who stayed home and fought the daily battles on apartheid’s killing fields in a nonviolent revolution for almost two decades did not count.[vii]
But let us further examine Couper’s discussion of this matter. Couper makes the point that Luthuli “could not and did not support the formation and launch of MK because his domestic and international constituency bound him to never countenance the loss of moral high ground.”[viii] That is strongly plausible, but if that were the only “smoking gun evidence” for Luthuli’s nonviolent stance, one would perhaps be right in describing him as more opportunistic than principled. In this same vein follows the suggestion that in deference to Martin Luther King Jr., Luthuli took seriously King’s reading of Reinhold Niebuhr that helped King to be cautious about humanity’s “potential for evil” which many pacifists, wrote King, “fail to see.” “All too many had an unwarranted optimism concerning man and leaned unconsciously toward self-righteousness.”[ix] Scott Couper concludes, “Luthuli was, in King’s words, wary of perceiving himself as ‘self-righteous’ and ‘not free of the moral dilemmas’ faced by Mandela and the others who also had lost patience.”[x] So, by Couper’s reckoning, at least part of Luthuli’s ambiguity should be understood in light of the ambiguity of Martin Luther King Jr. on this point. Luthuli, like King, was a “strategic pacifist” rather than an “ideological” one.
Check back tomorrow for Part 2 of the talk.
[i] See J. Cardonnel, “Van konservatieve erfenis naar revolutionaire traditie”, Tijdschrift voor Theologie, special number, Religie van de Toekomst, Toekomst der Religie, University of Nijmegen,1974, 116.
[ii] Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Geffrey B. Kelley (ed.), (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 12, II/13.
[iii] Much of the following rests on the excellent work of Scott Couper, Albert Luthuli, Bound by Faith, (Scottsville: UKZN Press, 2010), 152-184. The full text of the statement can be found in Couper, op. cit., 235-236.
[iv] This distinction would prove to be crucially important when we, in the process of the formation of the United Democratic Front more than thirty years later, would debate the question of violence and nonviolence, especially since those devoted to ANC politics would very much see violence as a live option, perhaps an inevitable one, seeing as this was still official ANC policy, unchanged since 1961. We chose for Luthuli’s nonviolent militancy.
[v] Couper, op, cit., 175
[vi] See Couper, op. cit., 204-206
[vii] It is remarkable that those who choose the way of violence never have to defend their decision as “unrealistic”, even though violence rarely “works” and its consequences remain devastating for those who engage in it as well as for those who are its victims. Contrarily, the defenders of nonviolence are almost always automatically seen as “unrealistic.” Hence the necessity for even Luthuli and Martin Luther King to point out that they were “realists”, not “pacifists.”
[viii] Couper, op. cit., 168
[ix] Couper op. cit., 170, quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., from The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Junior, found at http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/autobiography/chp_3.htm
[x] Op. cit., 177