Archbishop Tutu speaks about history, forgiveness and a 'new kind of society'

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, left, talks with Morrison Chakane, a Cornell doctoral student from South Africa, during a class at the Africana Studies and Research Center April 11. Matthew Fondeur/University Photography

By Sheezan Bakali '01

"It was a very powerful and effective message, because it was not something you really hear from leaders," said senior Kameelah Benjamin-Fuller about Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu's open address April 10 in Newman Arena of the Field House.

It wasn't the stories Tutu told about abductions, murders and lynchings during South Africa's era of apartheid that left audience members feeling shaken. It was Tutu's appeal for forgiveness for the abductors, the murderers and the lynchers.

During an introduction from President Hunter Rawlings, Tutu entered Newman Arena to a standing ovation. With accented speech and a storyteller's manner, he began to bring back memories of the final days of apartheid in his native South Africa.

"Nelson Mandela was 76 years of age before he could vote for the first time," Tutu said. "I was 63. Even the most secular of people ... used religious language to say this was nothing short of a miracle, that this thing should have taken place in [South Africa] of all countries," he said.

With Mandela's election to the presidency, Tutu was appointed to chair the newly formed Truth and Reconciliation Commission. After more than 40 years of violent oppression of the majority native African population, Tutu's commission was asked to "heal the wounds and right the hurt done by apartheid."

The commission heard gruesome testimony, some of which the archbishop retold Monday night: "'We abducted this young man," he read from testimony. "We shot him in the head ... It takes seven or eight hours to burn a human body, so while we burned his body we were having a barbecue on the side."

Although anger and bitterness had swept through the country and people were crying out for offenders and oppressors to be brought to justice, Tutu talked about the impossibility of prosecution due to political realities and economics.

"Nuremburg [trials] could happen because the Allies had won comprehensively. There was nothing the Germans could do. In our case, there was no real victory over the other side, no real loser ... and it was quite clear that the security forces would not support a process at the end of which they would have to face the possibility of prosecution." Furthermore, he added, when some criminals were brought to trial, the costs of prosecution were exorbitant, exceeding $1 million dollars in one case. "Imagine what that would do to a country still in the delicate stages of transition, seeking to deal with the legacy of apartheid, the squalor, the poverty and the homelessness," he said. The money could be better spent on education, housing and health care.

"There are people who say, but what about justice!" Tutu exclaimed. And he responded as a man of the cloth, saying that even men who had committed such awful crimes against humanity were only men. "They are ordinary people. They go to church. When they come home, their children run out to greet them, and they spread out their arms to embrace them," he said.

Amnesty was granted to those who came forward with information about their crimes, "on the basis of an individual application in exchange for the truth," Tutu said. "There was a punishment in the public humiliation. Their wives were hearing for the first time of the work their husbands were doing, and they couldn't take it. There are other kinds of justice. There is restorative justice."

"He is a great man," said Henry Bartels, the benefactor for the Henry E. and Nancy Horton Bartels World Affairs Fellowship that sponsored Tutu's appearance at Cornell. It took nearly five years to bring Tutu to campus, Bartels said, but the speech he gave was "just marvelous."

And though he had witnessed the horror of apartheid, Tutu showed no sign of hatred toward his oppressors, and he asked the audience to join him.

"We seek a healing. We want a new kind of society that is gentle and caring. Can you help me create this new kind of world? I have no one except you."

Then Tutu whispered the words "thank you" and stepped down from the podium, as the audience rose to its feet in tribute, with sustained applause.