Archbishop Desmond Tutu and UBUNTU
Remembrances and Reflections
Vamik Volkan, Dec. 30, 2021
The Atlanta-based Carter Center was founded in 1982 by former United States President Jimmy Carter and former First Lady Rosalyn Carter. In 1987 it established the International Negotiation Network (INN). The INN would be a flexible, informal network of eminent people from different parts of the world. During the year the INN was established, there were 111 armed conflicts in the world and only 10 percent of them could be addressed by international agencies. The rest of these conflicts were domestic struggles, such as civil wars, that did not fall within the jurisdiction of organizations like the UN. The purpose of the INN was to fill the “mediation gap.”
I came to know Desmond Tutu, chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), in the mid-1990s while we were both members of the INN. Whenever we met in Atlanta, we talked about our experiences in dealing with societal, racial and cultural conflicts. It seemed to me that in South Africa, due to shared helplessness and humiliation, black individuals had turned the frustration and rage they experienced under Apartheid onto themselves.
There were critics of the TRC at times, including some blacks, who claimed that the TRC was partial to whites. When in 1997 the TRC granted amnesty to Dirk Coetzee, a confessed Apartheid hit-squad leader, for example, some South Africans were incensed. At such points it was Archbishop Tutu’s personality that enabled the work of the TRC to continue. He possessed intelligence, compassion, integrity, honesty and humor in abundance. I came to the conclusion that the TRC’s work under Desmond Tutu’s leadership helped with large group mourning.
I had the honor to give a keynote speech at a gathering in South Africa in November 2006, reflecting on ten years of the TRC’s work and also celebrating Desmond Tutu’s 75th birthday. Driving through Cape Town or many other cities in South Africa, I saw fences, barbed wire or signs on walls in residential neighborhoods that declared “Protected by Armed Response”. A report (Cape Times editorial, “Suffer the Children,” November 22, 2006, p.10) estimated that during the previous year in South Africa, 1,200 children were murdered, 1,500 children were the victims of attempted murder, 24,000 children were assaulted and 2,200 children were raped.
I had an opportunity to make some observations in the Cape Town Township of Langa, which was separated from a very plush golf course by a super highway. What made the greatest impression on me was not the unbelievably bad physical conditions and unemployment rate in this place, but the many black students I saw singing and dancing in a classroom at the township’s school, which is also surrounded by a fence. While watching them, I remembered that one of their male teachers had been murdered only a week before, and the news had terrified the kids. I also knew that every other girl and one boy out of five, who were so beautifully and gracefully singing and dancing in front of me as if they had no worries, were rape victims. For an outsider like me, it was impossible to reconcile their traumatized selves with the personalities they were outwardly exhibiting. I had to think that they were showing an adaptation to constant trauma, the understanding of which was beyond my emotional comprehension.
It was great pleasure for me to be with Desmond Tutu again in 2006. Once more I was impressed with his personality organization. This gave me much hope that he would continue to help his people to develop more and more “basic trust.”
I do not make a habit of displaying pictures of myself with well-known men or women, but since our meetings in Atlanta, I have kept a picture of myself standing next to a smiling Desmond Tutu in my home study on a book shelf next to my desk. I never thought about why I had done this until I went to South Africa in 2006. It became clear to me in 2006 that I had chosen Desmond Tutu as a figure for inspiration, someone whose life’s work was to maintain humanness or what is known in the Nguni languages as Ubuntu.
Ford Rowan, Dec. 31, 2021
Racism has infected every area where European colonists subdued native populations and it has fueled slavery. Racist Apartheid oppressed Black people for generations in South Africa. Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a leader in addressing racism not only in his own country, but as an example of what might be done in the American South.
My memory of Archbishop Desmond Tutu will always be intertwined with my respect for the first African American Episcopal bishop of Maryland, Eugene Sutton. That is because Tutu visited Baltimore as a celebration of black progress in the US and Sutton’s election as bishop.
During his visit a dozen years ago, I asked Tutu about the Truth and Reconciliation program he had championed in South Africa. The Truth and Reconciliation process was widely viewed as preventing mass violence even though there were serious outbreaks and deaths in South Africa.
Bishop Sutton was forming an initiative here and calling it the Truth and Reconciliation process, so I was interested in lessons Tutu learned from his own efforts. We were scheduled to visit Tutu in South Africa last year, but the pandemic forced cancellation of that trip.
Truth, Tutu said in our first conversation in Baltimore, was key to avoiding massive bloodshed in South Africa. Reconciliation would take a lot longer, he acknowledged. Truth was purchased with amnesty for white officials who testified publicly about crimes against humanity. Whites had to listen to the laments of Black victims. The foundation of his efforts was built on truth.
I was interested in how Tutu approached this problem because I grew up in a racist society. I was born in Texas, grew up in New Orleans, and was educated in North Carolina. As a news reporter, I covered civil rights marches in Louisiana and Mississippi and the prosecution of white defendants accused of killing protestors. No one had made the perpetrators in the South listen to those they had tormented. Traumatic memories persisted across generations. In 2021, white politicians in the South still seek to silence the teaching of such things as Critical Race Theory.
As a young reporter, I covered the integration of the University of Mississippi and the riots that were triggered by white students when a black man, James Meredith, was admitted by a federal court order. What I did not know then, but learned much later, was that Meredith and I are related.
We were both part Choctaw. The tribe, before it was forcibly removed to Oklahoma, owned large areas of Mississippi. The tribe was matrilineal, and the women had leadership roles. There was open intermarriage between Choctaw women and the white men who settled in the area and between Choctaw men and the black women who escaped slavery in New Orleans.
Meredith will always be labeled a Black person, but he was proud of his Choctaw roots. In his autobiography, he traced his ancestry back to his great grandfather who married an African princess brought to Mississippi by the French as a slave. Meredith’s great grandfather, Sam Cobb, was a leader in the tribe. By the time of the Civil War, at least 60% were mixed with Black blood.
My Choctaw ancestors trace back to Greenwood Leflore, the chief who eventually signed the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, which forced most of the tribe onto the Trail of Tears and eventually to a reservation in Oklahoma. Cobb opposed the treaty and his son helped many of the Choctaws, including the Meredith family, hide in the woods, thereby avoiding being removed from their lands.
James Meredith grew up in a place where the color of one’s skin determined one’s status. He was a second-class citizen in the Jim Crow South. “His ancestors were the creators, benefactors, and victims of white supremacy,” Meredith Coleman McGee writes in James Meredith: Warrior and the American Society That Created Him; “His bloodline included African, Choctaw, English and Scottish Irish.”
Unfortunately, white Southerners linked identity to color. Mixed blood notwithstanding, large group Identify was based on the color of one’s skin. I remember being told by a fourth-grade teacher that one drop of black blood in a person would make him 100% black and deemed inferior by whites. Persons of mixed race, like James Meredith, were considered troublemakers by many whites. When he was a student at Ole Miss, he was regularly denounced with the N-word.
Large group identity is often bolstered by disliking and criticizing “the other,” a group deemed different. For some of my friends, this amounts to “we are not like fanatical Muslims; we are not like crafty Jews; we are not like low-life rioters; we are not like evil tycoons.” Whether the stereotypes are true or not seems irrelevant; one group’s labeling the other in these stereotyped ways serves the purpose of cementing the identity of one’s own large group. And, the need for an adversary, as Vamik Volkan has noted in his most recent book on Large Group Psychology, sometimes includes “ruin(ing) the chances of the enemy in an activity in which supremacy is being sought.”
Thirteen years ago, when I met Tutu, I was interested in how the oppressive system in South Africa was like (or different than) the oppressive system in the American South. Race was the dividing line for group identities. But Tutu shared a worldview called Ubuntu which appealed for the peaceful cohabitation of people of different identities. Ubuntu was central to Tutu’s own sense of identity and community.
What Tutu believed was that peaceful transition to end oppression required large doses of truth telling. Large group identities are so strong that communication – honest dialogue – is key to reconciliation. No progress could be made without recognizing oppression and talking about it.
In his own country, Tutu suggested that Ubuntu sought synthesis while Americans preferred analysis. Ubuntu sought stronger community while Americans craved individualism. Ubuntu recognizes when someone has wronged you, Tutu said, but “what you long for is not revenge,” but rather “a healing of relationships” (quotes are from Michael Battle’s book, Reconciliation: The Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu).
In the United States in the early 1980s, Tutu said “blood became thicker than water. You really can’t trust whites.” He feared that in a crunch, “whites will stick by their fellow whites.” What was needed in the US was a stronger sense of faith in transformation and redeemed identities. Tutu’s religious faith prompted him to have charity toward those whites who oppressed Black people.
I wanted to ask him if his views about American racism had changed, so I jumped at the opportunity to accompany Bishop Sutton to South Africa. I wrote down a question: Do you still think American whites will stick with whites and oppose racial reconciliation? Upon reflection, I realized I was asking for an analytical response. Knowing he preferred synthesis over analysis, I reframed the question: What can help American whites reconcile with those they have oppressed?
COVID-19 forced me to cancel the trip to visit Tutu in South Africa. Last night I dreamed that I was with Tutu, and Greenwood Leflore and Sam Cobb were there too. I asked my question and eagerly awaited Tutu’s response. THE ALARM CLOCK WENT OFF. Damn, I thought, I will never get an answer.
After a cup of coffee, I realized he had already given an answer. It was what he did with his whole life. Retribution was a dead end. Facing the truth was essential. He called for a harmony of different voices. Dialogue would help. Only reconciliation would lead to justice. Desmond Tutu was under no illusions that it would be easy, but he showed us the way.
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