Ethical Challenges of the Present (1)

Carl Niehaus

South African Ambassador to the Netherlands

[Niehaus’s contribution takes the form of personal reflections in public. He chose this approach in part because of his desire to speak out about the meaning of the death (from cancer) of his personal friend Marius Schoon, whose funeral he had come to South Africa to attend; in part because his work in the political arena and his dashed hopes for a religious contribution there raise serious personal questions for him about the efficacy of religious claims to truth, justice and love in the public realm. It is in fact a kind of testimony, but one with a biting edge and a sharp twist in the tail. As such, it occasioned much informal discussion at the ME99 and, to a considerable degree, it provoked personal responses as well. —Editor]

I would like to dedicate this speech to Marius Schoon, who very recently died of cancer. Let me explain why. He was a man who challenged Apartheid’s structures; in his personal life he also fought against racism. He struggled with his Afrikaner heritage while trying to challenge an evil system. There was a powerful tension between his deeply loved identity as an Afrikaner and the evil of the Apartheid system. He lived a very moral life, but he asked not to have a religious funeral, and he felt no need to preface morals with a religious perspective.

My own journey began at sixteen. Several people helped me on my way, and some of them were religious (Beyers Naudé and Helen Joseph, for example, who were both very spiritual people). I was imprisoned at age twenty-one, and there met Dennis Goldberg. He had already been in prison for twenty years! During the first few weeks of my time in prison, I was constantly attacked by wardens who tried to break down my identity. In the midst of this, Dennis asked me to explain what beliefs had brought me to this place, what were ‘the essentials’. I explained my religious beliefs, and then he told me never to allow them to take this away from me. Dennis himself is an atheist, but a very moral person.

In the process of leading up to the election, one of the strongest persons in defining the compromise that needed to be made in order to achieve a government of national unity and avoid chaos, a person who also played a key role in the compromise which produced the mandate of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was Joe Slovo. Joe, too, was not a ‘religious’ man.

In citing the above examples, I am not meaning to suggest that religion does not have a role to play in public life. Religion has been central to my own life, and to my struggle /end p. 18/ against Apartheid. Many other people have also expressed their religious beliefs in this way. But none of us can say that where we are in South Africa today is only, in the first instance, because of the positive role or contribution of religious people. All we can say is that religious people have made a contribution. There is also a large group of religious people who have not made a contribution, and there are those who made a very negative contribution. I am referring to those people who used religion to smooth over the fundamental contradictions we faced in South Africa, who allowed the evil system of apartheid to survive longer than it should have. If it were left up to the formal structures of religion to end apartheid, we would still have it. However there were religious leaders, prophets, who made a vital contribution to ending apartheid.

What does this basic contradiction mean for us today in respect of the role of religion in public life? We could easily have a situation in which the church smoothes over the problems we are facing. It could become self-satisfied with what has been achieved thus far. But I do not believe that in South Africa we can have a church that says, for example, that South Africa does not need a continuation of deep, fundamental transformation which needs to challenge those pockets and pillars of privilege that have survived the last few years.

What are some of the challenges then? Religious people should be concerned about the gap between rich and poor, globalisation and indebtedness, unemployment, AIDS and safe sex. For example, the Roman Catholic Church cannot continue to ‘theorise’ about the issue of handing out of condoms, because the issue is about human lives. We are faced with the reality that women and children are the worst off in South African society. The African National Congress has taken steps to bring more women into parliament, but in rural areas women are still the worst off. Women are abused on an hourly basis; we have some of the highest figures of rape and child abuse in the world.

The challenges we face won’t be easily solved, and we must not look for easy solutions. It is important in this respect not to deal merely with the broad structures of society, but to integrate structural concerns into one’s thinking and to link this to one’s personal life (which has to do with how we relate to one another and to our own selves). We all need to go through a process of healing in our personal lives, because of having lived through the abnormality of Apartheid. How do we relate on a normal basis after we have come out of such an abnormal situation? We need to become normal people again who can relate to our families and friends; and we need to do so in a context of the deep and complicated challenges of AIDS, abuse, poverty, etcetera.

Let us turn for a moment to the big challenges. In South Africa, in the past few years, the economic policies followed by the government have been dictated by the IMF and World Bank. The order was to control inflation and encourage foreign investment. It is not the result of a fault of government or inconsistencies in policy, yet we have been hit very hard by the fall of the Rand currency and the drop in economic growth (when we should have had a six per cent growth and five per cent was the minimum needed). Hence we will continue to face problems of poverty which may well get worse.

But are we challenging the wealthy and privileged? We need to look at the rich and powerful, especially those who have managed to hold onto wealth acquired under Apartheid. This means that sacrifices will have to be made in white society in the first instance. Many whites have not yet understood the evil of Apartheid, nor dealt with their guilt. Nor have they understood the commitment and the sacrifice they need to bring to change South Africa. Religion has dismally failed to bring this message to the white community. Unless /end p. 20/ we move faster and challenge deeper, the gap between rich and poor in South Africa will become worse. There is a need to challenge corporate structures to prevent them from creating more poverty. Perhaps it is time to push harder and deeper at some of the ‘globalisation norms’ of economics.

These are big challenges that religious people cannot face alone. We must work in a world community, in solidarity with other moral and concerned people. We must be careful about thinking that we (religious people) need to play a central role. Perhaps this is part of the legacy for religious people from the ‘old era’—the assumption that religious people should play a ‘leadership role’. Religious organisations may have only a small contribution to make, and that may be nothing more than being part of the process.

We don’t need to provide answers, but rather we need to look at what kind of analysis of society is needed in order to move ahead. The church (or religion generally) does not need to formulate answers. In a post-modern society there is a plurality of perspectives that can help us to move forward. In this context we should not think that we hold all the knowledge in our hands. We must play a modest and careful role, while expressing our beliefs in our own lives in terms of our own forms of religious expression.

I would like to go back to the matter of Marius Schoon. He lost his wife and child in a bomb attack during liberation struggle.² In the last days of his life he tried to prevent the amnesty committee from giving amnesty to the person who sent the bomb. He struggled to resolve this issue, but said that he had done what he could to honour the memory of his wife and child. I think he did this by teaching us how careful we have to be with quick forgiveness in situations of severe human rights violations, where the issues are complex. He taught us to understand the broader context of the compromise that society asks us to make, while being able to say, ‘I personally cannot forgive this’.

This is an example of the complexity of the time we live in and the challenges we face. It reminds us that we must be careful as we try to understand the challenge of forgiveness in a context of human rights violations. We must understand the broader social necessity of forgiveness and also the personal inability to forgive. We must deal with our own sense of moral outrage, in this context of political compromise. It is a challenge not to place oneself above this and not try to suspend the personal when dealing with broad issues of social justice. I am afraid, despite my personal convictions and theological training, that I cannot think that religion will necessarily help us do this. /end p. 21/

1. This occured in Botswana, when his wife, Jeanette, opened a parcel intended for him -- Editor.