Desmond Mpilo Tutu, New York: Doubleday, 1999, 294 pp.

Reviewed by Wayne Northey

[Please Note: A version of this was first published in The Catholic New Times.]

Many Canadian (and indeed international) readers of this book well
remember the frequent radio interviews of Anglican Archbishop Tutu on
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC’s) As It Happens. The same
urbane, gentle, caring voice emerges in the pages of this book.
(Archbishop Tutu, now retired, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in
1984, and lectures throughout the world.)

In
the first democratic elections in South Africa where Blacks were
allowed to vote (Tutu was 62 years old when he first voted, April 27,
1994), Nelson Mandela, the 76-year-old ex-prisoner and head of the
African National Congress party, was swept to power. It is a true
wonder that an ex-con who had spent 27 years in prison should become
President, and subsequently the most revered statesman in the world.

Bishop Tutu was anticipating an early retirement, at least from the
activism against apartheid that had characterized his work for 20
years. It was not to be. In December 1995, he was assigned by his
church to the newly formed Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC),
and then by President Mandela appointed chairperson. He remained so for
nearly three years, when the Commission handed in its final report.

This publication is his reflection on that experience. “Reflection” is
the appropriate word. More than an account of the events, people, and
decisions of the Commission, the book is a personal memoir that will be
an enduring classic. There are eleven chapters and a postscript. The
prose is unadorned, the style elegant, and the sentiment throughout
compassionate.

Apartheid was a national policy that permeated South African life, from
1948 when the Nationalist Party first enacted it, until the first
democratic elections in 1994. After that date, no one was found ever to
have supported it of course, wryly pointed out by Tutu. (Anthropologist
René Girard underscores this universal self-deception in response to
scapegoating. He cites Jesus’s words about the Pharisees: “And you say,
‘If we had lived in the days of our forefathers, we would not have
taken part with them in shedding the blood of the [innocents].’ So you
testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who
murdered the [innocents] (Mathew 23:30-31).”)

Apartheid polity effectively turned every aspect of South African
society to the advantage of the minority white population. All major
social institutions from education to law were directly impacted.
Perhaps the major cause célèbre in the Western world, that it was at
last dismantled without a violent coup was amazing in its own right.
That a black President, and former criminal should arise from its
demise is a true wonder.

As a tract for restorative justice, it is unique due to the imaginative
experiment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The title of
Chapter Two is: “Nuremberg or National Amnesia? A Third Way”. “Victor’s
justice” as imposed by the Allies at the end of World War II left
simmering resentment, since atrocities were committed on both sides.
Simply forgetting the past, as in the case of the general amnesty
negotiated by the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile upon the transition to
civilian government, left atrocities entirely unaddressed. “Our
country’s negotiations rejected the two extremes and opted for a ‘third
way’… And that third way was granting amnesty to individuals in
exchange for a full disclosure relating to the crime for which amnesty
was being sought (p. 30).” The carrot was freedom in exchange for
truth. The stick was prison.

A further aspect of restorative justice developed in this manuscript is
“consistent with a central feature of the African Weltanschauung – what
we know in our languages as ubuntu, in the Nguni group of languages, or
botho in the Sotho languages.” “Ubuntu is very difficult to render into
a Western language. It speaks of the very essence of being human…. It
is to say, ‘My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in
yours.’ We belong in a bundle of life. We say, ‘A person is a person
through other persons.’ It is not, ‘I think therefore I am.’ It says
rather, ‘I am human because I belong. I participate, I share.’…
Harmony, friendliness, community are great goods. Social harmony is for
us the summum bonum – the greatest good… To forgive is not just to be
altruistic. It is the best form of self-interest. What dehumanizes you
inexorably dehumanizes me. It gives people resilience, enabling them to
survive and emerge still human despite all efforts to dehumanize them
(p. 31).” “One such [universal] law is that we are bound together in
what the Bible calls ‘the bundle of life.’ Our humanity is caught up in
that of all others. We are humans because we belong. We are made for
community, for togetherness, for family, to exist in a delicate network
of interdependence. Truly ‘it is not good for man to be alone,’
[Genesis 2:18] for no one can be human alone. We are sisters and
brothers of one another whether we like it or not and each one of us is
a precious individual (pp. 196 & 197).”

This is the heart of Tutu’s message, adumbrated in the book’s title, No
Future Without Forgiveness. It is telling that Tutu finds it impossible
to discover a Western language equivalent to ubuntu. Is Tutu suggesting
that perhaps Westerners do not know how to be human because our
cultural formation is so overwhelmingly individualistic, captured in
Descartes’ quintessential reductionistic “I think therefore I am”?
What, one can wonder, may have derailed Western anthropology from the
Judeo-Christian impetus to “love your neighbour as yourself” – as being
your true self? That, to punish another is to thereby make such a
brother/sister (Maimonides, a medieval Rabbinical scholar), that
failure to forgive is metaphysical suicide (Eastern Orthodox teaching)?
With ubuntu, can one ever as an end punish, especially exercise the
death penalty, or kill in war? Does not ubuntu emphatically say “Love
does no harm to its neighbour” (the Apostle Paul), “Love your enemies”
(Jesus)? I shall return to this in considering some critique of Tutu’s
book.

Tutu repeatedly masterfully articulates the book’s theme, and related
ideas. A reprise states, “We are bound up in a delicate network of
interdependence because, as we say in our African idiom, a person is a
person through other persons. To dehumanize another inexorably means
that one is dehumanized as well… Thus to forgive is indeed the best
form of self-interest since anger, resentment, and revenge are
corrosive of that summum bonum, that greatest good, communal harmony
that enhances the humanity and personhood of all in the community (p.
35).” Why, Tutu asks, did South Africa “hit upon” this? In significant
part, he answers, due to “a man regal in dignity, bubbling over with
magnanimity and a desire to dedicate himself to the reconciliation of
those whom apartheid and the injustice and pain of racism had alienated
from one another (p. 39).” Tutu argues that Nelson Mandela learned
ubuntu and forgiveness through what he suffered. “Nothing is able to
[teach ubuntu] quite so convincingly as suffering (p. 39)”, Tutu
claims. We say, “No pain, no gain”. An ancient Greek proverb goes,
“MATHEIN PATHEIN” – to learn is to suffer. This too is a virulent
Judeo-Christian theme almost universally eschewed in the West.

Tutu asks about justice, since the repeated criticism of the TRC is it
did not deliver such. The response is classic restorative justice
rhetoric: the impersonal state is not the victim; justice is not
retributive. “We contend that there is another kind of justice,
restorative justice, which was characteristic of traditional African
jurisprudence. Here the central concern is not retribution or
punishment. In the spirit of ubuntu, the central concern is the healing
of breaches, the redressing of imbalances, the restoration of broken
relationships, a seeking to rehabilitate both the victim and the
perpetrator, who should be given the opportunity to be reintegrated
into the community he has injured by his offense… Thus we would claim
that justice, restorative justice, is being served when efforts are
being made to work for healing, for forgiving, and for reconciliation
(pp. 54& 55).” There follows extensive discussion nonetheless about
victims and the TRC. Tutu argues that many indices demonstrate victim
satisfaction with the process, one that included necessarily
“reparations” – not “compensation”, which could never be achieved. An
admitted weakness nonetheless of the TRC was: whereas amnesty was
granted immediately to perpetrators upon fulfilling TRC requirements,
victims awaited a long process before receiving state reparation. About
20,000 victims were implicated by the filing of the final report,
October 29, 1998. The entire discussion in this section is exemplary
for the bedevilling victims’ critique of restorative justice processes.
The invariable criticism is, the offender is generally first and better
served.

At one point, Tutu writes: “It is important to note too, that the
amnesty provision is an ad hoc arrangement meant for this specific
purpose. This is not how justice is to be administered in South Africa
forever. It is for a limited and definite period and purpose (p. 54).”
One wonders why? Why could there not be permanently instituted the kind
of post-War Japanese justice that provides a system of confession,
repentance and absolution (as described by John Haley in “Confession,
Repentance, and Absolution” in Mediation and Criminal Justice: Victims,
Offenders, and Community, edited by Martin Wright and Burt Galaway)?
According to Haley, Japan is the only Western country that is
experiencing a spiral of success in reduction of all major crime
indices. He argues it is attributable primarily to its unique
restorative justice approach that is permanently instituted. However,
amnesty is not just granted. The repentance process includes
appropriate amends-making by which is demonstrated the offender’s
concrete contrition. This is described more theoretically in John
Braithwaite’s Crime, Shame and Reintegration. Archbishop Tutu might
have engaged both these authors in his too quick dismissal of a
longstanding amnesty process.

There is an entire chapter dedicated to victims’ and perpetrators’
stories. The “banality of evil”, as Hannah Arendt ascertained with
reference to the Nazi Holocaust, is Tutu’s discovery too. The capacity
for ordinary human beings to commit ghastly acts, and the capacity for
other ordinary human beings to become what they hate in retaliation
“made me realize that there is an awful depth of depravity to which we
all could sink, that we possess an extraordinary capacity for evil (p.
144).” On the other hand, quite ordinary people, “nearly all the
victims, black and white, possessed [a] marvellous magnanimity (p.
147)” in response to the horrors done to them or loved ones.

The remainder of the book is rich mining. Tutu provides commentary on
many ancillary considerations of justice in a political context. It
reads as a narrative “How-To” primer on restorative justice. While it
regrettably does not cite any of the growing international literature
on the topic(*), it covers all of the major considerations both
theoretically and practically in seeing its state implementation.

It includes many rich nuggets of wisdom. Tutu underscores the profound
spiritual undergirding of this kind of justice work – not the “normal
currency in political discourse (p. 80).”- he too rightly asserts. One
wonders why not? He gently introduces classic Christian theology at
several turns, saying, “As I grow older I am pleasantly surprised at
how relevant theology has become in my perception (p. 82).” It reminds
him and the TRC that no perpetrator is ever a “demon” (and therefore
discardable as a responsible moral agent); that the Good News of Jesus
has a “bias for sinners contrary to the normal standards of the world
(p. 84).”; that hope springs eternal – “No situation in this theology
is irredeemable and devoid of hope (p. 85).”; that “love is much more
demanding than law (p. 85).”; “that we inhabit a moral universe, that
good and evil are real and that they matter (p. 86).”; “that love is
stronger than hate, that life is stronger than death, that light is
stronger than darkness, that laughter and joy, and compassion and
gentleness and truth, all these are so much stronger than their ghastly
counterparts (p. 86).”

It is in reference to the former guardians of apartheid that Tutu
becomes scathingly prophetic. “The perpetrators of apartheid… were as
civilized as the Westerners they claimed to be and, what is more, they
were Christians… The Bible they read and which we read is quite
categorical – that which endowed human beings, every single human being
without exception, with worth, infinite worth, is not this or that
biological or any other extrinsic attribute. No, it is the fact that
each one of us has been created in the image of God. This is something
intrinsic. It comes, as it were, with the package. It means that each
one of us is a God-carrier, God’s viceroy, God’s representative. It is
because of this fact that to treat one such person as if he or she were
less than this is veritably blasphemous. It is like spitting in the
face of God. That is what filled some of us with such a passionate
commitment to fight for justice and freedom. We were inspired not by
political motives. No, we were fired by our biblical faith. The Bible
turned out to be the most subversive thing around in a situation of
injustice and oppression (p. 93).”

Tutu likewise decries the repeated claim, “We did not know.” “If they
‘did not know’, as many claimed, how was it that there were those
within the white community who not only knew of the baneful results of
official policies but who condemned the vicious policy and worked to
end it? (p. 217)”. In particular, Tutu singles out the judiciary for
censure, precisely because of its purported claim to uphold justice. He
also chastizes the media, even the “liberal” journalists, for
perpetuating racism. Further afield, he indicts the United States that
“enthusiastically supported any government however shabby its human
rights record as long as it declared itself to be anti-Communist (p.
237).” The white churches likewise were reprehensible, though generally
have since repented – unlike elements in the judiciary. “The former
apartheid cabinet member Leon Wessels was closer to the mark when he
said that they had not wanted to know, for there were those who tried
to alert them (p. 269).” Still, Tutu graciously states: “ ‘There but
for the grace of God go I (p. 253).’ ”

In his Chapter (Eight) of Horrors, Tutu says, “It is ultimately in our
best interest that we become forgiving, repentant, reconciling, and
reconciled people because without forgiveness, without reconciliation,
we have no future (p. 165).” This central theme and book title is fully
explicated in Chapter Eleven, “Without Forgiveness There Really is No
Future”, an outstanding contribution to world political literature. He
begins with another horrendous African atrocity: the mass slaughter of
Tutsis in Rwanda. He states baldly most of the perpetrators were
Christians. In a mass rally attended by the new government leaders, he
challenged “that the cycle of reprisal and counterreprisal… had to be
broken and that the only way to do this was to go beyond retributive
justice to restorative justice… (p. 260).” Tutu then trains his
attention on Northern Ireland, where in 1998 he reminded those working
for peace never to despair, never to give up, that “They were part of
the cosmic movement toward unity, toward reconciliation, that had
existed from the beginning of time (p. 263).” In 1989 and again in
1999, Tutu also visited and preached in Israel. He pointed out in his
talks that “true security would never be won through the barrel of a
gun (p. 268).”

He also contributed towards an update of Simon Wiesenthal’s famous
collection of essays on forgiveness, The Sunflower. He uses
Wiesenthal’s inability to forgive the Nazi soldier, the first story in
the book, as representative of modern Israel in its avowed incapacity
to forgive on behalf of others now dead. If so, Tutu asks, how can it
nonetheless accept massive reparations in their name? Given the great
legacy of morality offered the world by the Jewish people, Tutu gently
admonishes: “I hope that philosophers, theologians, and thinkers within
the Jewish community will reopen this issue and consider whether it is
possible to come to a different conclusion for the sake of the world
(p. 278).” He wonders if similarly Africans and Afro-Americans refused
to forgive Europeans for the 40 million dead, the massive people
displacements, and horrendous suffering occasioned by slavery and the
slave trade. (Tutu might at this point have helpfully drawn on the
masterful study on political forgiveness by Donald Shriver: An Ethic
for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics, especially his discussion of race
relations in America.)

In a passage reminiscent of John Lennon’s song “Imagine”, Tutu turns
his most explicitly Christian in envisioning humanity’s future with
forgiveness: “God has set in motion a centripetal process, a moving
toward the center, toward unity, harmony, goodness, peace, and justice,
a process that removes barriers. Jesus says, ‘And when I am lifted up
from the earth I shall draw everyone to myself’ [John 12:32] as he
(sic) hangs from His (sic) cross with outflung arms, thrown out to
clasp all, everyone and everything, in a cosmic embrace, so that all,
everyone, everything, belongs. None is an outsider, all are insiders,
all belong. There are no aliens, all belong in the one family, God’s
family, the human family… It was God’s intention to bring all things
in heaven and on earth to a unity in Christ, and each of us
participates in this grand movement (p. 265).”

He also says tersely what forgiveness is not. Above all, it is not
forgetting! “On the contrary, it is important to remember, so that we
should not let such atrocities happen again (p. 271).” It is also,
however, not retaliation: “Forgiving means abandoning your right to pay
back the perpetrator in his own coin, but it is a loss that liberates
the victim (p. 272).”

And while confession is not crucial, it helps! And though reparations
may not be paid, they generally show the sincerity of the contrition.
“Confession, forgiveness, and reparation, wherever feasible, form part
of a continuum (p. 273).”

Finally, in pointing to the serendipitous paragon of forgiveness that
is South Africa, he says: “This tired, disillusioned, cynical world,
hurting so frequently and so grievously, has marveled at a process that
holds out considerable hope in the midst of much that negates hope (p.
281).”

Quibbles? One hates to raise some about such a sparkling panegyric to
forgiveness. I do so reluctantly. I have three: Tutu’s vision, for all
its grandness, at times seems not radical enough, borders on naïveté,
and falls strangely silent about the greatest human rights violator on
earth today.

Tutu might have benefitted from Lee Griffith’s profound theological and
sociological study on prisons, The Fall of the Prison: Biblical
Perspectives on Prison Abolition, or the International Conference on
Penal Abolition (ICOPA), whose leaders, for example Dr. Ruth Morris,
have produced challenging tracts such as Penal Abolition: The Practical
Choice, to take us more radically towards prison abolition than he or
Nelson Mandela do. This is reminiscent of Sister Helen Prejean’s
failure to take us further, in her opposition to the death penalty,
than approving alternative life-sentences for murderers. As Ruth Morris
frequently said of early Restorative Justice initiatives and theory:
“Not enough!”

In his Chapter of Horrors, Chapter Eight, Tutu seems simply naïve in
admitting: “What was so shattering for me was that it had all been so
scientific, so calculated, so clinical (p. 182).” Yet earlier, in
commentary of those brought before the TRC from both sides of the
conflict, Tutu writes: “We stated categorically that apartheid was a
crime against humanity. Equally vehemently we asserted that the
liberation movements were conducting a just war because they had a just
cause. But the Geneva Convention and the principles of the just war are
quite clear that justice of war requires justice in war. A just cause
must be fought by just means; otherwise it may be badly vitiated (p.
107).” Tutu is not naïve because he cannot believe humanity could stoop
to such scientifically orchestrated atrocities, for he reminds us of
Nazi Germany. He is naïve in believing that any “just killing” by the
state in war or execution of a human being is other than “scientific,
calculated, and clinical”, that there is, in fact, such a thing as
(involuntary) “just killing”. “Just war” is never, and remains an
impossible oxymoron in terms of killing and ecological degradation.
“Just war” is surely the utter antithesis of ubuntu, by Tutu’s own
account! Why does Tutu not label it for what it is, in Western history:
a Christian and secular heresy? (“Heresy” can have the connotation of
“wrong choice”.) War and the death penalty are by definition
“scientific, calculated, and clinical”. So it would seem the Archbishop
in fact does not on principle oppose deliberate state killings of some,
and thereby lands us in the same soup as apartheid and all tyrannies
which ever justify state murders. To argue, “but only if it is lawful”
begs the very question of its morality, for “love is much more
demanding than law (p. 85).”, by Tutu’s own reckoning.

Here the Archbishop cops out, granted in line with majority Christendom
and world history, guilty of Mahatma Gandhi’s wry observation: “The
only people on earth who do not see Christ and His teachings as
nonviolent are Christians.” Tutu states: “The Bible turned out to be
the most subversive thing around in a situation of injustice and
oppression (p. 93).” What Tutu still needs to affirm, it seems, as
masterfully presented by for instance Richard Hays’ “Violence in
Defense of Justice” (Chapter Fourteen of The Moral Vision of the New
Testament), is the biblical subversion of the legitimacy of state
violence itself.

A similar naïveté, to the point of reprehensible silence, is shown
concerning the United States. In his depiction of Ronald Reagan’s role
and that of America in buttressing all kinds of totalitarian regimes
the world over, including apartheid South Africa, he says, “This was
the era…”, seemingly implying US foreign policy has somehow since
changed, because communism is no longer the perceived worldwide threat
it once was. This is surely betrayal of stark reality: that the
ultimate “rogue state”, the contemporary “Beast” of Revelation 13, is
the United States of America. In its Afghanistan offensive alone, it
deployed “scientific, calculated, and clinical” means to destroy many
thousands of innocent civilians (far surpassing in body count the
fatalities of September 11, 2001), tens of thousands of “combatants”,
infrastructures, environments, and peoples’ futures (who with or
without forgiveness lay dead or wounded just the same). And the
civilian deaths from the Iraq invasion are at about 10,000 by most
accounts, many thousands by U.S. military action.

Tutu himself says of terrorism: “[South Africa’s] own police officers,
meant to uphold law and order and to apprehend terrorists, had
themselves carried out a very serious act of urban terrorism. It
demonstrated so clearly the moral bankruptcy of the foul system… (p.
180).” The US-led Western “War on Terrorism” is identically morally
bankrupt and foul, as its many previous economically vested interest
interventions. Further, Tutu points to many other world trouble spots,
Rwanda, Ireland, Israel, yet is totally silent about current US
interventions around the globe, including U.S. carte blanche support of
Israel. These interventions make the American government beyond doubt
the ultimate terrorist organization of the 21st century, deploying a
gargantuan arms trade in, and weapons of mass destruction, and poised
to launch (again!) as “first strike” their ultimate nuclear arsenal.

And the Archbishop remains totally silent about this massive worldwide
sustained assault on human rights? Easily accessible are a plethora of
meticulously researched publications such as American journalist
William Blum’s Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower that
decry the United States for identical atrocities to the activities of
South African apartheid police and military.

Why is Tutu utterly silent about this? Does he not know better? Or does
he not want to know? (“…they had not wanted to know, for there were
those who tried to alert them (p. 269).” “If they ‘did not know’, as
many claimed, how was it that there were those within the white
community who not only knew of the baneful results of official policies
but who condemned the vicious policy and worked to end it? (p. 217)”.)
As one Canadian filmmaker said of Guatemala in the 1980’s, “A holocaust
of smaller proportion to that by the Nazis, but of similar ilk, is
happening in Guatemala against indigenous peoples, and the buck for its
responsibility stops at the desk of the President of the United States
of America.” Similar atrocities by or sponsored by the US have been
documented in dozens of countries the world over since World War II.

Starkly put: Why, in this profoundly searching and insightful book
about the evils of the totalitarian system called apartheid, does
Archbishop Tutu not explicate that the United States to the
(non-compliant) world is South African apartheid to Blacks? He has the
moral stature to do so. He does so with reference to Israel against
Palestine. Why is he totally silent about contemporary US worldwide
apartheid? “If you are not for us, you are against us”, declared
President Bush emphatically after September 11. That is apartheid at
its starkest, consistent with US foreign policy at least since World
War II; arguably with its doctrine of “Manifest Destiny” since its War
of Independence.

Is there any place, yet, in the world, to rest on one’s laurels in the
struggle for that cosmic “dream for humanity – when we will know that
we are indeed members of one family, bound together in a delicate
network of interdependence (p. 274).”? (Tutu has since published on
that same wonderful theme as Martin Luther King, Jr., God Has a Dream.)
Tell that “dream” to the victims of the billion-dollar-a-month bombings
in Afghanistan and Iraq that left tens of thousands dead and maimed,
the good earth wasted. And the Archbishop has nothing to say? Now that
South African apartheid has ended, has evil dominance and oppression
for economic gain been eradicated from the earth? Please, Mr.
Archbishop, please answer!

Desmond Tutu’s book is an arresting read, if one ignores the glaring
lacuna concerning the United States. To have ignored the United States
is (to borrow from Karl Barth) too much like Jean-Paul Sartre’s proud
individualistic fearless staring down of evil, so imagined, when the
real McCoy (the hubris of existentialist atheistic rugged
individualism) all the time is mockingly leering over Sartre’s shoulder
at the charade. South African apartheid in sheer numbers of victims and
ecological degradation pales before the horrors of gargantuan US
planetary imperialism. Where is Archbishop Tutu’s prophetic voice
concerning that? Perhaps it has been raised elsewhere?

It is a great, though forgivable, oversight in an otherwise outstanding classic on forgiveness.

(*)A very selective list includes: Beyond Retribution: A New Testament
Vision for Justice, Crime, and Punishment, Christopher D. Marshall,
Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2001; Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime
and Justice, Howard Zehr, Herald Press, Scottdale, 1990; Christian
Faith and Criminal Justice: Toward a Christian Response to Crime and
Punishment, Gerald Austin McHugh, Paulist Press, New York, 1978; Crime
Control as Industry: Towards GULAGS, Western Style, Nils Christie,
Routledge, London, 1995; God’s Just Vengeance: Crime, violence and the
rhetoric of salvation, Timothy Gorringe, Cambridge University Press,
1996; Restoring Justice, Daniel Van Ness and Karen Heetderks Strong,
Cincinnati: Anderson Publishing Company, 1997; Satisfying Justice: A
compendium of initiatives, programs and legislative measures, The
Church Council on Justice and Corrections, Ottawa, 1996; The Expanding
Prison: The Crisis in Crime and Punishment and the Search for
Alternatives, David Cayley, Anansi: Toronto, 1998; The Spiritual Roots
of Restorative Justice, Hadley, Michael, ed., New York, SUNY Press,
2001; A Restorative Justice Reader: texts, sources, context, edited by
Gerry Johnstone, Willan Publishing, Portland, 2003.