Surprised by Grace
Two reports Wednesday have reopened the question of the integrity of the process of South Africa's transition to democracy, culminating in 1994. First, in comments which sparked requests for clarification from the ruling ANC, Winnie Madikizela Mandela echoed the lines of continuing revolutionary sentiment that her former husband, Nelson Mandela, was a "sell-out" to white economic interests. The narrative is well-known: in exchange for their continuing economic privilege, the beneficiaries of apartheid ceded power to the Mandela-led ANC in matters political. Second, giving militant voice to such economic discontent, ANCYL president Julius Malema led strains of "Kill the Boer, Kill the farmer" at a rally on the University of Johannesburg's Doornfontein campus.
On Monday, my wife and I led a group of young adults to the recently-revamped (and stunning!) Nelson Mandela Museum in Mthatha. We were reminded again, in moving scenes, of Mandela's integrity as a reconciler. Indeed, it seems impossible to overstate his importance. Four years ago, we first arrived in South Africa with this very impression, so shared by virtually every casual observer of South Africa from afar: Mandela the man of peace--forsaking vengeance, extending forgiveness, initiating reconciliation. In fact, so ingrained was the image, so trumpeted the miracle of "the New South Africa", that we half-expected to find a nation of bliss making steady, unimpeded progress on its path toward justice for all. Surprised, therefore, were we to hear, over and over again, the frustration of South Africa's poor. "To be honest, " a pastor said to me, "it was better in the days when we were ruled by the white man". Not surprisingly to us, many whites we met gave a similar impression. "And South Africa is going the same way [as Zimbabwe]", said one, indicating a national descent into chaos.
Taken together, the two statements--one from a black man, the other from a white--are as two sides of the same human psychological coin, one not existing without the other. The minority white once- oppressor, stung by the loss of political power, needs the failing of the majority black once-oppressed in order to reinforce the teetering sense of superiority to which he still clings. Obversely, the once-oppressed fear that every public failing of their leaders is as proof that they are what the oppressor has always said they are. Fearing their sense of inferiority, the oppressed cling to the old arrangements as their best possible life. As Desmond Tutu has said, apartheid's greatest evil was "that it [could] make a child of God doubt that he is a child of God"--not dignified, not honorable, not powerful, not lovable.*
It is precisely because of this backdrop, then, that Malema's recent antics (or whatever else is like them) cut the clearest path back to slavery. "Kill the Boer" is to violence what the Israelites' cry to Moses of "take us back to Egypt" is to foreign dependence (Ex. 16:3, 17:3; Num. 11:5, 18). It is as music in Pharoah's ears--the very tune also which many South African whites, already in either fight or flight mode, expect to hear. That which they did not expect, on the contrary, is precisely what they received from Nelson Mandela.
The most moving experience of our visit to the Nelson Mandela Museum were video presentations of two key moments in Mandela's rising leadership of a new South Africa. The first moment, before his presidency, was his address to the nation in the tense days following Chris Hani's assassination in 1993.
"A white man, full of prejudice and hate, came to our country and committed a deed so foul that our whole nation now teeters on the brink of disaster. But a white woman, of Afrikaner origin, risked her life so that we may know, and bring to justice, the assassin."+
Mandela believed, and was heeded in that belief, that an act of compassion by one among the enemy could redeem the entire community. The black population saw that compassion trumped murder even in the oppressor.
The second moment was Mandela's appearance in Springbok garb and embrace of Francois Pienaar, the team's captain, before a white crowd at the final of the 1995 Rugby World Cup. At first stunned silent, the crowd erupted in the joyful chant of "NEL-SON, NEL-SON."
Both incidents were fraught with surprise--the defining mark of reconciliation. In one, never expecting the icon of struggle against white power to appear on the grand stage of white sporting culture, the white crowd watched the black president claim its life as his own. In another, prepared for war with the reminder that a white man had killed a struggle hero, the nation heard words which reclothed the enemy in the robe of a better humanity.
To remember these events is to re-live their power, to experience again the presence of love, joy, and peace. Economic justice has not yet arrived, and its delay causes us to reassess the integrity of South Africa's transition to democracy. Yet violence cannot achieve the justice we seek. We need more--not less--from all South Africans of that which Mandela embodied: patience in judgment, demonstrations of mercy, surprises of grace.
* Desmond Tutu, "Christianity and Apartheid" in John W. de Gruchy and Charles Villa-Vicencio, eds., Apartheid is a Heresy (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1983), 46.
+ Quoted in Allister Sparks, Tomorrow is Another Country: The Inside Story of South Africa's Negotiated Settlement (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1995), 147.
