Peter Storey
There is a difference between being “broken” and being “broken-open.” The one has to do with deep damage and the other is about healing. Nelson Mandela recognised post-apartheid South Africa’s brokenness and called for “an RDP of the soul.”
He set about the reconstruction of our national zeitgeist with an acute discernment of what was needed to make us whole. It involved an empathy not only with those he had fought for, but with those he had fought against.
He also helped us see that we were all in this together, that no single group could flourish unless all had equal opportunity to grow. When our new flag was raised, most South Africans were ready to work with him toward our mutual healing. We shared a remarkable sense of freedom and hope. Mandela’s uniting and winning spirit spurred us on.
But none of this was enough. We needed also to be “broken-open,” and the Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) process was designed to give us that opportunity. It had to deal with great evil, but it did so in a way that encouraged great good. It invited us into the pain we had caused each other, but it also made space for us to discover, in the midst of that pain, the gift of compassion.
That is what I mean by being “broken-open.” It is only when the brittle carapace of hate, or un-forgiveness, or indifference, that we grow over our souls is shattered, that newness can happen. The TRC not only confronted us with who we had been, but by giving us a glimpse into each other’s souls, it offered us a way to be different – to become “human-hearted” as Confucius would put it – and to chart a different future.
Today it is fashionable to dismiss the TRC and even to blame it for some of our present troubles, but that is a mistake only disillusioned South Africans make. The rest of the world is still awestruck that we even tried it, and it remains the high-water mark of societal attempts to heal past evil.
The TRC did not fail South Africa, but South Africa may have failed the TRC. This is because those most responsible for the horrors of our past were the ones least willing to accept the TRC’s gift of painful healing. PW Botha refused to appear; FW de Klerk appeared only to prevaricate on the most important issues of culpability. The SA Defence Force, whose actions led to more than a million dead and the creation of four million refugees, was left virtually immune.
The judges stayed away. These stubborn refusals to be “broken-open” reflected a more general attitude among whites, and evoked deep disillusionment among black South Africans. Desmond Tutu places first among his regrets that the TRC “failed to attract the bulk of the white community to participate enthusiastically in the process.” This white absence was, I believe, much more significant than we have acknowledged.
Yes, I know about the other stuff: we face apparently insurmountable economic chasms. We witness the venality of political leaders and civil servants and the cynicism of the corporations that corrupt them. We see the hardship of service delivery failures. We shrink from the gratuitous cruelty that routinely accompanies crime, especially against women and children. We sense the rise in racial and ethnic chauvinism and the coarsening of the national discourse. It’s all a massive challenge.
Yet I believe that much of this societal brokenness can be traced back to the time when the “broken-openness” offered by the TRC process was met with indifference or defensiveness. That was when the moral tide bringing us together suffered its first reverse, and the hope in many black hearts for a more compassionate, convergent society began to falter. Why open ourselves up? Why work together? Why share? Why not take instead?
Our ubuntu, the notion that I can only be fully myself when you are fully yourself, is not being reciprocated. Perhaps it doesn’t work for us either? Unfortunately, that moment coincided with the transition to a different president, who rightly called whites out for their ongoing racism, but who had his own demons and none of Mandela’s genius for inclusion. Black and white South Africans settled into an uncomfortable, arms-length, co-existence. The great experiment that promised to show the world a different way of overcoming difference was shelved, and the rainbow quietly faded.
And here we are: today, the contrast between Mandela’s vision and what we live with could not be more stark. Mandela inspired us to be better persons; President Zuma’s behaviour gives permission to our less worthy instincts: self-preservation at the expense of integrity, self-enrichment at the expense of the people, self-love at the expense of ubuntu. Instead of a compassionate, sharing society, we have an amoral elite competing for the spoils while the masses of the people continue to suffer.
Consequently we are becoming a society where the basic norms of what it means to be human are regularly infringed in ways that are bizarre and profoundly self-destructive. The surest sign of this is that those who feel least cared about join with those who care nothing, in grasping at whatever they can.
Think at one extreme, of a gold mine stripped and literally sold off over the heads of thousands of employees, and at the other, of a building collapsing on its occupants because they themselves have stolen its reinforcing steel. Or textbooks dumped in a ditch by van drivers with school-going children, or parents denying their children schooling so they can get a road built?
These are ultimately acts of self-harm and what they have in common is that both exploiters and exploited have lost their sense of belonging to a larger humanity. They speak to a deep alienation – a breakdown of connectedness with each other.
The phrase that comes to my mind these days is one now used for the psychological and spiritual damage soldiers suffer when they have “done, witnessed, or failed to prevent acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.”
It is now understood as something deeper than Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It is called moral injury and among the symptoms are “demoralisation, self-harming, and self-handicapping behaviours” and withdrawal from others. This moral injury is a “lost sense of humanity” requiring what they call “Soul Repair”
What will it take to heal our moral injury and repair South Africa’s soul?
Such repair is not the work of government alone, but a work of all of us who are determined to reclaim our humanity.
Whatever else is required, an absolute essential is to bring back the spirit of ubuntu and compassion from exile – back to the centre of our national discourse. His Holiness the Dalai Lama declares that “compassion and love are not mere luxuries. As a source of both inner and external peace, they are fundamental to the continual survival of our species.”
So, let us not sentimentalise compassion. It is not “the religious soft option” – it is the only option. It may be the ultimate realpolitik because without a return to compassion, all other attempts to deal with our moral injury will fail…
So, what is this thing called compassion?
It begins with the awareness that we are all connected in what Martin Luther King jr called an “inescapable web of mutuality”. Matthew Fox put it this way: “Compassion is not about pity or feeling sorry for the other. It is born of a shared interdependence, an intuition of a sense of awe for the wondrous fact that we all live and swim in one primordial divine womb, we live in foetal waters of cosmic grace.”
When we internalise the truth that we are all of one womb (and of course DNA research has proven that we all do descend from one tiny group of ancestors) then we see each other differently and compassion can be born.
Fox’s distinction between pity and compassion is also important. Pity is a static emotion, but compassion is an energy that moves us to action... The difference between pity and compassion is that compassion always ends as a verb. It is something you do. Like anything else, it has to be worked at, and the more we practise compassion, the better we become at being compassionate people...
William Sloane Coffin says, “to love effectively we must act collectively.” An outstanding example of this was Zackie Achmat’s Treatment Action Campaign, which combined compassion with well-organised collective action to expose the callous indifference of the government’s Aids policy and pressure them into reversing it.
Am I right that compared to the days of the anti-apartheid struggle, collective action by faith communities has become relatively scarce and timid? Some of the things religious people get upset about tend to be sadly self-serving, and some of the injustices we ignore are scandalous. Do secular movements for justice speak more clearly than do we? Has the “passion” gone out of our compassion?
Has the time not come when leaders of the major faiths in our land should act together to address our moral injury? To confront the visionless, corrupt leadership our nation suffers, to remind political parties, whether national or provincial, that they are not ruling parties, but serving parties, to challenge the loss of compassion and ubuntu in our discourse, to speak a clear, unmistakable word into this void? The broken victims of our nation wait for that word – a word that rises from authentic, informed compassion for their situation, not pious religiosity.
A crucial arena for our faiths to practise compassionate action together is the Compassionate Cities’ Campaign. Many cities across the world have signed the Charter for Compassion, pledging to bend their policymaking toward “a culture of compassion”.
I am grateful that our own city is having exploratory conversations about this possibility, as long as we are clear that there are serious implications. Former nun Karen Armstrong said, “A compassionate city is an uncomfortable city! A city that is uncomfortable when anyone is homeless or hungry… uncomfortable when as a community we don’t treat our neighbours as we would wish to be treated.”
Can Cape Town hear the uncomfortable cries? Every South African city is a tragic tale of two cities. In the past we turned our racial obsessions into town planning and lines drawn that have been reinforced over the decades by habit and economics. Our children grow up with spatial deformities that have not only persisted, but got worse. Their lives are still shaped, from cradle to grave, by where they live – or don’t live.
The task of undoing these spatial and economic inequities is bigger than any political party or city administration. Economic privilege is always the last to yield, especially when the privileged live in denial. Desmond Tutu used to say, “The most difficult people to wake up are those who are pretending to be asleep.”
The primary task of leadership in this city is to inspire enough people of all parties to come together, in the words of the Charter for Compassion, “in a principled determination to transcend selfishness,” to make inroads into our separateness (see www.charterforcompassion.org). Our options have narrowed: either we mobilise Capetonians toward one another, connecting them in ways that facilitate empathy and compassionate action for justice, or we will call down upon ourselves an intensifying struggle between the anger of the dispossesed and the fears of the comfortable…
Nor may we comfort ourselves with claims that our challenges are unique. More than a century ago these exact problems of mass urbanisation, poverty, housing, sanitation and education were the scandal of cities like London and so was the indifference of the rich.
It was people of faith then – the “Clapham sect,” Lord Shaftesbury, and others, whose God discomforted them into action and to say: “… the conditions of the dwellings of many of our people lie at the root of two thirds of the disorders that afflict our land,” and, “Never again shall people pretend that open sewers and the absence of lavatories are things that do not matter!” Those words have a very contemporary ring for today’s Cape Town! In Shaftesbury’s England almost every act of government that brought more dignity into people’s lives was instigated by passionate volunteer organisations, most of them faith-based.
Therefore, faith communities cannot be neutral on such matters because compassion is not neutral; it stands with those who are hurting and invites those who are not, to at least make some sacrifice to transform that hurt. Transformation requires every sector of the city’s life to ask the question,” How would I act if I acted out of compassion, rather than fear and self-interest? Surely that is the question we need to place before our people?
Healing for our moral injury is not impossible. Between our different faiths, between the people of Cape Town, between our 50 million South Africans, between us and the other African people who live among us, ubuntu, solidarity, compassion need not die.
What’s taking us so long?
l Rev Dr Peter Storey is the former president of the Methodist Church of South Africa and of the South African Council of Churches. This is an edited extract from the First John Oliver Memorial Lecture titled “Breaking Open the Soul of South Africa”. Father John Oliver, the former Rector of St Mark’s, District Six, was the founder of the Cape Town Interfaith Initiative and facilitator of Cape Town’s entree to the Compassionate Cities Network. He died on July 4, 2013 at the age of 65.