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 1 and Part 2)
Part 3 of “Brave, Just Men” – Luthuli, Mandela, and South Africa’s Jericho Road
by Allan Aubrey Boesak
We need to dig deeper. Luthuli, in insisting that Mandela and the others remained “brave, just men”, even in their decision for the use of violence, compels us, in following his logic, to ask a different question, all the more important because, besides being a political question, is also a moral question, namely: who created this dilemma? Who is really to blame for the decision to turn to violence? Certainly not the leaders of the ANC, whose patience, after years of nonviolent struggle, had finally worn out? And Luthuli knows where the blame lies: with the white government who refuses to abandon a policy of racist oppression, especially in the light of decades of extraordinary patience and endurance: “How easy it would have been,” Luthuli makes plain in his Nobel Lecture, “for the natural feelings of resentment at white domination to have been turned into feelings of hatred and a desire for revenge against the white community…”[i] But that did not happen.
And the reason why it did not happen was not accidental. Nor was it simply because of the pressures of white power. It was because, “deliberately and advisedly, African leadership for the past fifty years… had set itself steadfastly against racial vaingloriousness.”[ii] This is a strong choice of words. The African leadership, in Luthuli’s view, resisted the temptation to see in violence a proof of their dedication to freedom, a vindication of the validity and quality of their leadership, a measurement of the integrity of their struggle. They refused to have their response to oppression dictated to by the immorality of the apartheid mindset. Neither was turning the violence of the white oppressors against them evidence of some kind of muscular African “manhood”. That, Luthuli argues, is all vainglory: it is no achievement, he is saying, to ape the mindless destructiveness of one’s oppressor.
So Luthuli’s words here are not uttered to justify violence. They are meant to put into perspective the historical circumstances, to expose the hubris and hardheartedness that forced South Africa’s oppressed people into decisions they, given a choice, would rather not have taken. They are meant to raise the issue of ultimate moral responsibility. Indeed, keeping the brutality of apartheid rule in mind, Luthuli argues, those who take such decisions against such odds, laying their lives on the line for the sake of justice, are indeed “brave” and “just.” It is the South African government and its immoral legal system that had brought new, and greater, risks to the South African situation: “They [the apartheid regime and its beneficiaries] have put the highest morality and ethics in the liberation struggle in a prison where it might not survive.”
Luthuli was not referring to the decision by Mandela and the ANC to ultimately turn to violence I think. He was referring to those high and impeccable moral standards, embodied by Mandela and the others, in fact by the oppressed people of South Africa as a whole that have kept the struggle nonviolent for so long, that have honoured the noblest goals of the struggle for decades in the face of the immorality of unspeakable oppression. It was those high moral standards which were now punished with imprisonment, where “it might not survive.” If Mandela and the others would now turn as bitter, as filled with racist hate as their oppressors, convinced of the justness of revenge and retribution, and if that would be the message sent to their people, who would have to take ultimate responsibility?
If understood thus, what Couper calls “even more difficult to explain,” might not be so difficult to explain after all. He refers to the words in the statement that describe Mandela and the others as possessing “the highest morals and ethics within the liberation struggle.” This is how I understand Luthuli: If black leadership had done all they could, if they had led their people with all deliberateness on a path of nonviolent resistance despite the odds, the unbearable provocation, the harshness and the brutality of the regime; nonetheless all the time working towards a vision “of a non-racial, democratic South Africa which upholds the rights of all who live in our country to remain there as full citizens, with equal rights and responsibilities with all others…”[iii] – who would now point the finger of blame?
Who would call them immoral? Certainly it cannot be the representatives of one of the most brutally racist regimes of the twentieth century, perpetrators of a system declared a crime against humanity? It cannot be the supporters and beneficiaries of apartheid who grew fat and comfortable feeding on the violence of apartheid and the exploitation and oppression of South Africa’s black masses. Their immorality in creating, maintaining and supporting the immorality of an evil system precludes them from ethical judgment. And certainly not Albert Luthuli, who understood that not everyone in the struggle who did not share his views had therefore become “immoral”? He would rather honour them than belittle them as “immoral” in the eyes of an evil regime who had no claim on honour, and of a world who through its complicity and complacency with apartheid had together caused the fateful decision to be taken.
But there is a still deeper reason for Luthuli’s words, I think, and this brings us back to our question whether this whole argument is merely about (some form of) pacifism, and it returns us to our parable. I think Luthuli understood that at the very heart of the issue lies not the question of pacifism, or who exhibits the higher morality. Rather, Luthuli understood that it was about the question Cardonnel called our attention to: What happens if this (revolutionary, combative) love is expressed during the struggle, not after?[iv] It is the question Jesus raises in the parable: how combative is your love, and how revolutionary is your neighborliness? At its essence it was love for the oppressed people of South Africa, and the love for justice that made them join the struggle despite the dangers, the risks and the sacrifices. It was for love of a country where at that moment, Luthuli lamented,
The brotherhood of man is an illegal doctrine, outlawed, banned, censured, proscribed and prohibited; where to work, talk, or campaign for the realization in fact and deed of the brotherhood of man is hazardous, punished with banishment, or confinement without trial, or imprisonment; where effective democratic channels to peaceful settlement of the race problem have never existed these three hundred years; and where white minority power rests on the most heavily armed and equipped military machine in Africa.[v]
In his address to the Court from the dock, Mandela was at pains to point out the long road of what he called “anxious assessment” that preceded the decision to turn to violence.[vi] He and his comrades spoke of the need of “responsible leadership to canalize and control the feelings of the people;” (p.2) how, if left unaddressed, those feelings would explode into “outbreaks of terrorism” that would produce an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the races “which is not produced even by war.”(p2) He recounted the long litany of state violence as response to nonviolent resistance, how “all lawful modes of expressing opposition” had been closed by legislation. He told the Court that the “volunteers,” mendaciously described by the apartheid prosecutors as “soldiers of a black army pledged to fight a civil war against the whites” were in fact called volunteers “because they volunteer to face the penalties of imprisonment and whipping which are now prescribed by legislature for such acts.”(p.2) They volunteered not to kill and rape and pillage, but to sacrifice and serve.
He repeatedly made the case against the dangerous and ultimately fatal intransigence of the apartheid regime, and again and again stated how difficult it was for them to make this decision. “This conclusion was not easily arrived at. It was only when all else had failed, when all channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of political struggle… We did so, not because we desired such a cause, but solely because the Government had left us with no other choice.” (p.3) Then Mandela uttered words weighted with historical portent and responsibility: “There comes a time in the life of any nation”, Mandela said, “when there remain only two choices – submit or fight.” (p3) Their love for the people and their love for freedom, their dignity and their concern for South Africa’s future left them no choice: they decided to fight. Luthuli’s hope that this fight would remain nonviolent was set aside for the moment. It would take a new generation to rekindle that hope.
Like Bonhoeffer, both Mandela and Luthuli were driven not by hatred or vengeance or the desire for retribution or murder, or what Luthuli called “vainglory”, but by the fundamental question: what is the quality of my love for the neighbor? What does love, politically interpreted, mean in this situation? What does it mean “to grab the wheel” and put a spoke in it? What is the dictate of love while the robbers are still doing harm to the victim on the road? For Jesus in occupied Judea, for Bonhoeffer in Nazi Germany, and for Albert Luthuli and Nelson Mandela in apartheid South Africa, this was the ultimate question. For Mandela, it meant a turn to violence in response to the violence of the oppressor. Luthuli could not make that choice.
But if the crucial issue here is the issue of combative, revolutionary love rather that a debate about pacifism, there is no contradiction between the Mandela of 1961 and the Mandela of 1990. It was this love for all the people of South Africa, white and black, that made Mandela make the choice for forgiveness and reconciliation. And for him that love was a legitimate political expression.
I remain convinced that Luthuli, in 1961, made the wiser choice. Even love can make one make choices that one later, when love meets greater wisdom, sees differently or even regrets. For far too many across the world, Mandela is the hero he was because of his choice for violent struggle. That is far too simplistic, I think. Mandela took that step only after much debate, intense, and intensely honest internal struggle, and critical, agonizing hesitation. It was not ideological recklessness, the gratification of retribution, or superficial desires for heroism that drove him. That would be what Luthuli called “vaingloriousness”. The “cherished ideal” for which he was prepared to die, was not “military struggle.” The ideal was the continuing fight against white domination and black domination, the dream of “a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.”
The argument has been put to me that the fact that Mandela refused to renounce violence when it was set as condition for his release by the National Party government in the 1980s, is proof of his life-long commitment to violence. It is another reason for his iconic status. But they have it wrong. If that were true, Mandela’s politics of reconciliation as at the heart of the struggle “all along”, would have been hypocritical and cynical in the extreme. If Mandela had accepted that condition, he would have denied the historical circumstances that drove him to that decision. Such denial would have removed the blame from the apartheid government, cleansed the historical record of the truth that the deepest reason for it all was not a desire for violence on the side of the oppressed, but the ruthless use of violence as means of domination and the worship of violence as salvific power by white South Africa.
Acceptance of such a condition would have meant sanctifying the hypocrisy of a regime which was still, at that very moment, unleashing unrelenting violence against nonviolent protesters in the streets of South Africa whilst daring to speak of nonviolence to Mandela. Acceptance would have been vainglorious: putting one’s own freedom above the freedom of one’s people, blessing the apartheid regime with legitimacy when one’s spiritual children, their struggles and their courage have called into question the regime’s very right to even dictate terms of freedom to their leader and to themselves, and were paying the highest price for that refusal.
And now, looking back at 1990, with Mandela emerging from prison, recognizing the impact and nonviolent militancy of the internal struggle since 1976 and especially 1983 that finally and ultimately broke the back of apartheid oppression, reminding the ANC and the world that the militant, nonviolent tradition of the struggle was indeed never abandoned but embodied in and embraced by a new, nonracial generation; Mandela calling for all violence to cease and for his people to respond not with hatred or retribution but with forgiveness and reconciliation, proclaiming that reconciliation has “always been” at the heart of our struggle for justice and freedom, is it not the wisdom of Luthuli and the deepest traditions of the struggle that have ultimately triumphed? I think it is.
[i] Couper, op. cit., 230
[ii] Idem
[iii] Idem.
[iv] See Cardonnel, op. cit., 120
[v] Couper, op. cit., 225
[vi] See Nelson Mandela, “I am Prepared to Die”, http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/mandela.htm, accessed January 30, 2014