Quote of the Day (Desmond Tutu, on ‘Apartheid's Final Solution’)

“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, golden 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 greedily a disproportionate share, the lion's share, because of their power. They have taken 87 of the land, though being only about 20 of our population. The rest have had to make do with the remaining 13. Apartheid has decreed the politics of exclusion. 73 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 of 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 4 whites to 2 coloreds and 1 Indian. 0 black. 2 + 1 can never equal, let alone be more than, 4. Hence this constitution perpetuates by law and entrenches white minority rule. Blacks are expected to exercise their political ambitions in unviable, poverty-stricken, arid, bantustan homelands, ghettoes of misery, inexhaustible reservoirs of cheap black labor, bantustans into which South Africa is being balkanized. Blacks are systematically being stripped of their South African citizenship and being turned into aliens in the land of their birth. 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.”—Desmond Tutu, Nobel Lecture, delivered December 11, 1984

On this date in 1985—less than two months after his searing indictment of the apartheid regime of South Africa that I quoted above—Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu was appointed the first black Anglican bishop of Johannesburg. A year later, he was chosen Archbishop of Cape Town. It would not be until almost a decade later that the system of apartheid that he had opposed, with all his moral fervor and eloquence, finally came to an end.

In May 1982, at my commencement exercises at Columbia University, an empty chair was left to signify the South African white government’s refusal to allow Tutu to accept an honorary degree from the school. The regime’s fear of granting a passport to one of its most prominent critics became a huge cause celebre, until he was finally allowed a temporary passport later in the year.

(Photo of Archbishop Tutu taken by Elke Wetzig at the Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchentag in Cologne 2007.)

Quote of the Day (Nelson Mandela, on ‘What Counts in Life’)

“What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.”—The late South African President Nelson Mandela, “Address on the 90th Birthday Celebration of Walter Sisulu,” Johannesburg, South Africa, May 18, 2002

(The image accompanying this post was taken of Mandela at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on July 4, 1993.)

Quote of the Day (F.W. de Klerk, on Ending Apartheid)

“How would South Africa have looked today if we had not signed the agreements which were reached? We would not have exported one case of wine this year. [Wine is now one of South Africa’s healthiest export sectors.] We would have been totally isolated. South Africa would have been on a downward slope towards calamity and catastrophe. So the new South Africa, warts and all, is a much better place.”—F.W. de Klerk, quoted in Alec Russell, “Lunch With the FT: F.W. de Klerk,” The Financial Times, January 23, 2010

F.W. deKlerk, former President of South Africa, states in the Financial Times interview what would seem obvious to many in the West, but not to those in the unrelentingly racist state he once headed. That’s why his release on this date 20 years ago of Nelson Mandela is rightly celebrated as a major historical event.

Mandela might be the most widely admired leader of the past several decades—a civil-rights figure who, unlike Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was not only able to see the destruction of apartheid in his country but also to participate in his land’s new power arrangements.

Mandela endured 27 years in prison, but his patience had limits, as deKlerk bluntly admits. Once outside, the African National Congress leader pressed the man who freed him for further concessions to South Africa’s black majority.

Several times, Mandela called deKlerk out publicly for his go-slow, halfway measures. Though friends today, the two men—who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 “for their work for the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime, and for laying the foundations for a new democratic South Africa"—had a testy relationship for quite a while in the mid-1990s.

The tenor of that relationship recalls a similar one between a human-rights icon and an ambivalent transformational agent in a rights-abusing state: Soviet scientist Andrei Sakharov and the last leader of the old Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. From 1986, when he was released from prison, to his death in 1989, Sakharov acted as a burr in the side of the Communist Party’s General Secretary in urging greater democratization.

DeKlerk is scorned by Afrikaners who feel disenfranchised in the new South Africa born from the agreements with Mandela referred to in his quote, and Gorbachev is a non-person as far as most of the Russian electorate is concerned. (The nation’s loss of influence in Eastern Europe, along with the economic vertigo that ensued when Gorbachev tried to reform the government, remained in voters’ minds in the 1996 Russian Presidential election, when he received less than 2% of the vote.)

Both leaders will surely be judged more positively by historians, for actions that were not only morally right but—their internal hard-line critics to the contrary—were also absolutely necessary if their country desired legitimacy in the community of nations.