
|
Desmond Tutu
Address
delivered in Acceptance of
Nobel Peace Prize
[December 1984,
Oslo, Norway] |
Your Majesty, members of the
Royal Family, Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen:
Before I left South Africa, a land I love passionately, we had an emergency
meeting of the executive committee of the South African Council of Churches with
the leaders of our member churches. We called the meeting because of the
deepening crisis in our land, which has claimed nearly two hundred lives this
year alone. We visited some of the trouble spots on the Witwatersrand. I went
with others to the East Rand. We visited the home of an old lady. She told us
that she looked after her grandson and the children of neighbors while their
parents were at work. One day the police chased some pupils who had been
boycotting classes, but they disappeared between the township houses. The police
drove down the old lady's street. She was sitting at the back of the house in
her kitchen, while her charges were playing in the yard in front of the house.
Her daughter rushed into the house, calling out to her to come quickly. The old
lady dashed out of the kitchen into the living room. Her grandson had fallen
just inside the door, dead. He had been shot in the back by the police. He was
six years old. A few weeks later, a white mother, trying to register her black
servant for work, drove through a black township. Black rioters stoned her car
and killed her baby of a few months old, the first white casualty of the current
unrest in South Africa. Such deaths are two too many. These are part of the high
cost of apartheid.
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Every day in a squatter camp
near Cape Town called KTC, the authorities have been demolishing flimsy plastic
shelters which black mothers have erected because they were taking their
marriage vows seriously. They have been reduced to sitting on soaking mattresses,
with their household effects strewn round their feet, and whimpering babies on
their laps, in the cold Cape winter rain. Every day the authorities have carried
out these callous demolitions. What heinous crime have these women committed, to
be hounded like criminals in this manner? All they have wanted is to be with
their husbands, the fathers of their children. Everywhere else in the world they
would be highly commended, but in South Africa, a land which claims to be
Christian and which boasts a public holiday called Family Day, these gallant
women are treated so inhumanely. Yet all they want is to have a decent and
stable family life. Unfortunately, in the land of their birth it is a criminal
offense for them to live happily with their husbands and the fathers of their
children. Black family life is thus being undermined, not accidentally but by
deliberate government policy. It is part of the price human beings, God's
children, are called to pay for apartheid. An unacceptable price.
I come from a beautiful land, richly endowed by God with wonderful natural
resources, wide expanses, rolling mountains, singing, birds, bright shining
stars out of blue skies, with radiant sunshine, gold sunshine. There is enough
of the good things that come from God's bounty, there is enough for everyone,
but apartheid has confirmed some in their selfishness, causing them to grasp
readily a disproportionate share, the lion's share, because of their power. They
have taken 87 percent of the land, though being only about 20 percent of our
population. The rest have had to make do with the remaining 13 percent.
Apartheid has decreed the politics of exclusion: 73 percent of the population is
excluded from any meaningful participation in the political decision-making
processes of the land of their birth. The new constitution, making provision for
three chambers, for whites, Coloreds and Indians, mentions blacks only once and
thereafter ignores them completely. Thus this new constitution, lauded in parts
of the West as a step in the right direction, entrenches racism and ethnicity.
The constitutional committees are composed in the ratio of four whites to two
Coloreds to one Indian-zero black... Hence this constitution perpetuates by law
and entrenches white minority rule.
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Blacks are expected to exercise
their political ambitions in unviable, poverty-stricken, arid bantustan
homelands, ghettos of misery, inexhaustible reservoirs of cheap black labor,
bantustans into which South Africa is being balkanzied. Blacks are
systematically being stripped of their South African citizenship and being
turned into aliens in the land of their birth. [Connie Mulder, Minister of Bantu
Administration and Development (BAD), said in 1978: 'If our policy is taken to
its logical conclusion... there will not be one black man with South African
citizenship... Every black man in South Africa will eventually be accommodated
in some independent new state in this honorable way and there will no longer be
a moral obligation on this parliament to accommodate these people politically.'
(South African Hansard, proceedings of the South African parliament, Cape Town,
February 7, 1978, quoted by legal academic John Dugard and reproduced in The
Apartheid Handbook, by Roger Omond, Penguin 1985.)]. This is apartheid's final
solution, just as Nazism had its final solution for the Jews in Hitler's Aryan
madness. The South African government is smart. Aliens can claim but very few
rights, least of all political rights.
In pursuance of apartheid's ideological racist dream, over three million of
God's children have been uprooted from their homes, which have been demolished,
while they have been dumped in the bantustan homeland resettlement camps. I say
dumped advisedly: only rubbish or things are dumped, not human beings. Apartheid
has, however, ensured that God's children, just because they are black, should
be treated as if they were things and not as of infinite value as being created
in the image of God. These dumping grounds are far from where work and food can
be procured easily. Children starve, suffer from the often irreversible
consequences of malnutrition. This happens to them not accidentally but by
deliberate government policy. They starve in a land that could be the bread
basket of Africa, a land that normally is a net exporter of food.
The father leaves his family in the bantustan homeland, there eking out a
miserable existence, while he, if he is lucky, goes to the so-called white man's
town as a migrant, to live an unnatural life in a single-sex hostel for eleven
months, being prey there to drunkenness, prostitution and worse. This migratory
labor policy is declared government policy and has been condemned as a cancer in
our society even by the white Dutch Reformed Church-not noted for being quick to
criticize the government. This cancer, eating away at the vitals of black family
life, is deliberate government policy. It is part of the cost of apartheid,
exorbitant in terms of human suffering.
Apartheid has spawned discriminatory education such as Bantu education,
education for serfdom, ensuring that the government spends only about one-tenth
on a black child per annum for education of what it spends on a white child. It
is education that is decidedly separate and unequal. It is to be wantonly
wasteful of human resources, because so many of God's children are prevented, by
deliberate government policy, from attaining their fullest potential. South
Africa is paying a heavy price already for this iniquitous policy, because there
is a desperate shortage of skilled manpower, a direct result of the shortsighted
schemes of the racist regime. It is a moral universe that we inhabit, and good
and right and equity matter in the universe of the God we worship. And so, in
this matter, the South African government and its supporters are being properly
hoisted with their own petard.
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Apartheid is upheld by a
phalanx of iniquitous laws, such as the Population Registration Act, which
decrees that all South Africans must be classified ethnically and duly
registered according to these race categories. Many times, in the same family
one child has been classified white while another with a slightly darker hue has
been classified Colored, with all the horrible consequences for the latter of
being shut out from membership of a greatly privileged caste. There have, as a
result, been several child suicides. This is too high a price to pay for racial
purity, for it is doubtful whether any end, however desirable, can justify such
a means. There are laws, such as the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, which
regard marriages between a white and a person of another race as illegal. Race
becomes as impediment to a valid marriage. Two persons who have fallen in love
are prevented by race from consummating their love in the marriage bond.
Something beautiful is made to be sordid and ugly. The Immorality Act decrees
that fornication and adultery are illegal if they happen between a white and one
of another race. The police are reduced to the level of Peeping Toms to catch
couples red-handed. Many whites have committed suicide rather than face the
disastrous consequences that follow in the train of even just being charged
under this law. The cost is too great and intolerable.
Such an evil system, totally indefensible by normally acceptable methods, relies
on a whole phalanx of draconian laws such as the security legislation which is
almost peculiar to South Africa. There are the laws which permit the indefinite
detention of persons whom the Minister or Law and Order has decided are a threat
to the security of the state. They are detained at his pleasure, in solitary
confinement, without access to their family, their own doctor, or a lawyer. That
is severe punishment when the evidence apparently available to the minister has
not been tested in an open court-perhaps it could stand up to such rigorous
scrutiny, perhaps not; we are never to know. It is a far too convenient device
for a repressive regime. The minister would have to be extra special not to
succumb to the temptation to circumvent the awkward process of testing his
evidence in an open court; and thus he lets his power under the law be open to
the abuse where he is both judge and prosecutor. Many, too many, have died
mysteriously in detention. All this is too costly in terms of human lives. The
minister is able, too, to place people under banning orders without being
subjected to the annoyance of the checks and balances of due process. A banned
person for three or five years becomes a nonperson who cannot be quoted during
the period of her banning order. She cannot attend a gathering, which means more
than one other person. Two persons together talking to a banned person are a
gathering! She cannot attend the wedding or funeral of even her own child
without special permission. She must be at home from 6 p.m. of one day to 6 a.m.
of the next, on all public holidays and from 6 p.m. on Fridays until 6 a.m. on
Mondays. She cannot go on holiday outside the magisterial area to which she has
been confined. She cannot go to the cinema, or to a picnic. That is severe
punishment, inflicted without the evidence allegedly justifying it being made
available to the banned person, or having it scrutinized in a court of law. It
is serious erosion and violation of basic human rights, of which blacks have
precious few in the land of their birth. They do not enjoy the rights of freedom
of movement and association. They do not enjoy security of tenure, the right to
participate in the making of decisions that affect their lives. In short, this
land, richly endowed in so many ways, is sadly lacking in justice.
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Once a Zambian and a South
African, it is said, were talking. The Zambian boasted about their Minister of
Naval Affairs. The South African asked, 'But you have no navy, no access to the
sea. How then can you have a Minister of Naval Affairs?' The Zambian retorted:
'Well, in South Africa you have a Minister of Justice, don't you?'
It is against this system that our people have sought to protest peacefully
since 1912 at least, with the founding of the African National Congress. They
have used the conventional methods of peaceful protest-petitions, demonstrations,
deputations, and even a passive resistance campaign. A tribute to our people's
commitment to peaceful change is the fact that the only South Africans to win
the Nobel Peace Prize are both black. [The other South African Peace Laureate
had been Chief Albert Luthuli, President General of the African National
Congress, in 1960.] Our people are peace-loving to a fault. The response of the
authorities has been an escalating intransigence and violence, the violence of
police dogs, tear gas, detention without trial, exile, and even death. Our
people protested peacefully against the pass laws in 1960 and 69 of them were
killed on March 21, 1960, at Sharpeville, many shot in the back running away.
our children protested against inferior education, singing songs and displaying
placards and marching peacefully. Many in 1976, on June 16 and subsequent times,
were killed or imprisoned. Over 500 people died in that uprising. many children
went into exile. The whereabouts of many are unknown to their parents. At
present, to protest that selfsame discriminatory education and the exclusion of
blacks from the new constitutional dispensation, the sham local black government,
rising unemployment, increased rents and General Sales Tax, our people have
boycotted and demonstrated. They have staged a successful two-day stay-away.
Over 150 people have been killed. It is far too high a price to pay. There has
been little revulsion or outrage in the West at this wanton destruction of human
life.
In parenthesis, can somebody please explain to me something that has puzzled me?
When a priest goes missing and is subsequently found dead, the media in the West
carry his story in very extensive coverage. [A reference to the abduction and
murder of Father Jerzy Popieluszko by the Polish secret police in October 1984.]
I am glad that the death of one person can cause so much concern. But in the
selfsame week when this priest is found dead, the South African police kill 24
blacks who had been participating in a protest, 6,000 blacks are sacked for
being similarly involved, and you are lucky to get that much coverage. Are we
being told something I do not want to believe, that we blacks are expendable and
that blood is thicker than water, that when it comes to the crunch, you cannot
trust whites, that they will club together against us? I don't want to believe
that this is the message being conveyed to us.
Be that as it may, we see before us a land bereft of much justice, and therefore
without peace and security. Unrest is endemic and will remain an unchanging
feature of the South African scene until apartheid, the root cause of it all, is
finally dismantled. At this time the army is being quartered on the civilian
population. There is a civil war being waged. South Africans are on either side.
When the ANC and the PAC were banned in 1960, they declared that they had no
option but to carry out the armed struggle. We in the SACC have said that we are
opposed to all forms of violence-that of a repressive and unjust system and that
of those who seek to overthrow that system. However, we have added that we
understand those who say that they have had to adopt what is a last resort for
them. Violence is not being introduced into the South African situation de novo
from outside by those who are called terrorists or freedom fighters, depending
on whether you are oppressed or an oppressor. The South African situation is
violent already and the primary violence is that of apartheid, the violence of
forced population removals, of inferior education, of detention without trial,
of the migratory labor system, etc.
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There is a war on the border of
our country. South African faces fellow South African. South African soldiers
are fighting against Namibians who oppose the illegal occupation of their
country by South Africa, which has sought to extend its repressive systems of
apartheid, unjust and exploitative.
There is no peace in Southern Africa. There is no peace because there is no
justice. There can be no real peace and security until there be first justice
enjoyed by all the inhabitants of that beautiful land. The Bible knows nothing
about peace without justice, for that would be crying, "Peace, peace, where
there is no peace." God's shalom peace, involves inevitably righteousness,
justice, wholeness, fullness of life, participation in decision making, goodness,
laughter, joy, compassion, sharing and reconciliation.
I have spoken extensively about South Africa, first because it is the land I
know best, but because it is also a microcosm of the world and an example of
what is to be found in other lands in differing degree-when there is injustice,
invariably peace becomes a casualty. In El Salvador, in Nicaragua and elsewhere
in Latin America, there have been repressive regimes which have aroused
opposition in those countries. Fellow citizens are pitted against one another,
sometimes attracting the unhelpful attention and interest of outside powers, who
want to extend their spheres of influence. We see this in the Middle East, in
Korea, in the Philippines, in Kampuchea, in Vietnam, in Ulster, in Afghanistan,
in Mozambique, in Angola, in Zimbabwe, behind the Iron Curtain.
Because there is global insecurity, nations are engaged in a mad arms race,
spending billions of dollars wastefully on instruments of destruction, when
millions are starving. And yet, just a fraction of what is expended so obscenely
on defense budgets would make the difference in enabling God's children to fill
their stomachs, be educated and given the chance to lead fulfilled and happy
lives. We have the capacity to feed ourselves several times over but we are
daily haunted by the spectacle of the gaunt dregs of humanity shuffling along in
endless queues, with bowls to collect what the charity of the world has provided,
too little too late. When will we learn, when will the people of the world get
up and say, enough is enough? God created us for fellowship. God created us so
that we should form the human family, existing together because we were made for
one another. We are not made for an exclusive self-sufficiency but for
interdependence, and we break that law of our being at our peril. When will we
learn that an escalating arms race merely escalates global insecurity? We are
now much closer to a nuclear holocaust than when our technology and our spending
were less.
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Unless we work assiduously so
that all of God's children, our brothers and sisters, members of our one human
family, enjoy the basic human rights, the right to a fulfilled life, the right
of movement, the freedom to be fully human within a humanity measured by nothing
less than the humanity of Jesus Christ himself, then we are on the road
inexorably to self-destruction, we are not far from global suicide. And yet it
could be so different.
When will we learn that human beings are of infinite value because they have
been created in the image of God, that it is blasphemy to treat them as if they
were less than this, and to do so ultimately recoils on those who do this? In
dehumanizing others, they are themselves dehumanized. Perhaps oppression
dehumanizes the oppressor as much as, if not more than, the oppressed. They need
each other to become truly free, to become human. We can be human only in
fellowship, in community, in koinonia , in peace.
Let us work to be peacemakers, those given a wonderful share in our Lord's
ministry of reconciliation. If we want peace, so we have been told, let us work
for justice. Let us beat our swords into plowshares.
God calls us to be fellow workers with him so that we can extend his kingdom of
shalom, of justice, of goodness, of compassion, of caring, of sharing, of
laughter, joy and reconciliation, so that the kingdoms of this world will become
the Kingdom of our God and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.
Amen. Then there will be fulfillment of the wonderful vision in the Revelation
of St. John the Divine (Revelation 7:9ff).
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