My Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ

On 10 December 1964 Martin Luther King Jnr. received the Nobel Peace Prize for the work that he was doing through the Civil Rights Movement; work that ultimately led to the dismantling of the racial segregation laws in the USA and the beginning of justice for Afro-Americans. Almost 30 years later, in the early hours of the morning of 3 March 1991, a man was dragged from his car in Los Angeles by police and assaulted. His name, too, was King - Rodney King - and he was a black man assaulted by white policemen. When a video of his assault was screened on national television there was an eruption of pent-up anger that exploded into violence in almost all of the cities in the USA. Though laws had changed; hearts had not. The racism of the past and present had caused such deep hurts and hatreds that it took only single defining incident to trigger the explosion.

I fear that the same holds true for South Africa. The brave work done by the TRC brought to the surface much which black South Africans had always known or suspected to be true and which white South Africans had dismissed as propaganda because they neither knew nor wanted to know what was going on. But though the truth was revealed, the TRC asked neither for penitence or reparation, nor did it provide a vehicle for a necessary deep introspective examination of what the legacy of apartheid has done to all of us, with the result that, though the laws have changed, hearts have not.

This was clearly brought out in a Mail and Guardian "Thought Leader" blog by Christi van der Westhuizen in which she laments, "Reading the responses to my last blog, one can only wonder if honest introspection is at all possible in this society, rent as it is by greed and bigotry." And if that is true then, unless we face the issue, the risk of a future violent conflagration remains.

But the risk of violent conflagration is not just limited to greed and bigotry. It continues in the political turmoil in which we find ourselves today, which itself is a product of our colonial past. Ugandan scholar Prof. Mahmood Mamdani has written a great deal about the ways in which post-colonial African politics have copied and modelled themselves on the structures and patterns of colonial thinking. Of special concern to him is how our worldview is still shaped by the racialisation and ethnicisation that were activated during the colonial period. I am less concerned here about structures, than I am about the racism and ethnicity that still loom so large in our thinking and in the behaviours and attitudes shaped by our past that still seem to govern our political thinking.

Dr Ramphele has said: ".... Unfortunately, many of our leaders cast themselves in the roles of the very colonial masters they replaced. Their revolutionary fire for freedom from oppression has too often turned into a passion for emulating the same oppressors and their methods. Such emulation is both in symbolic and material terms." The divisions within the ANC are the result of systems of patronage similar to those in the past in which unswerving loyalty and obedience coupled with an absence of criticism of our leaders is rewarded and dissent punished by banishment (cf former Deputy Minister of Health, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge).

That the structures have not been able to contain and manage the dissent is both healthy and a serious cause for concern. Healthy: because democratic debate is at the heart of a healthy democracy; this is true even within each political party, and especially true when that party is the ruling party. But it is also cause for concern because of the anger and venom with which the debate has been taking place, and the degree of polarization it has caused. While all involved claim the moral high ground and accuse the other of indifference to the needs of the people, it appears to me that all have been far more obsessed with self-interest, self advancement and power than with those who live in this land.

A recent newspaper article by a Nigerian journalist drew parallels between what has happened in Nigeria and what is happening in South Africa today. He said that in Nigeria the people watched in silence as their democracy and political stability imploded, never believing that things would unravel the way they have. His message to us is simple and clear: do something before everything unravels before your own eyes. Former Cosatu leader Jayendra Naidoo is saying the same thing, "We are all responsible for what the country has become. The cardinal mistake we made as a country was thinking that, after 1994, the struggle was won and we could go on with our private lives. Now we know: the struggle is not over. It continues today."

The struggle is not over. It continues today .... in the lives of each one of us. If we are going to avoid a long-term political meltdown it is the responsibility of all of us to stand and be counted. The church must recover its prophetic voice, not just in the mouths of our leaders, but in the voice and lives of every parishioner. We must claim again the moral high ground of lives lived in obedience to the scriptures and to the glory of God. We are not called to the pursuit of self-interest, self-advancement and power, but to the building of a Kingdom in which God rather than the individual is glorified.

The struggle is not over. It continues today .... in the lives of each one of us. The worldwide economic meltdown will almost certainly take us into a recession that will affect us deeply. Over 70 000 jobs were lost in the last financial quarter, and looks set to rise. Already the banks are repossessing more than 6,000 cars each month, and with the high levels of debt, that too will probably rise. The world's economic woes are largely the result of irresponsible trading and excessive greed and are a call to re-examine our economic lifestyles, especially in a land where there is so much poverty. We are not called to accumulate wealth, but rather to live simply within our means and to use that which God has given us to so that the stranger may be welcomed in our midst and the needs of the poor met.

The struggle is not over. It continues today .... in the lives of each one of us. The work of the TRC is not yet complete. Racism and ethnicity, bigotry and prejudice still flourish and we are still wounded by our past. But we are also the people of the incarnate Christ who came to break down the walls of separation and in whom ".... there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for we are all one in Christ." It is therefore incumbent on us as a church to be God's instruments and agents of healing, reconciliation and reconstruction. I hope that over the next few years our new Diocesan Centre will become the epicenter of a wave of reconciliation and reconstruction that will sweep through our church and our land.

I end again with the words of Walter Wink with which I ended the last Ad Clerum reflection:-

"In a field of such titanic forces .... we are emboldened to ask for something bigger. The same faith that looks clear-eyed at the immensity of the forces arrayed against God is the faith that affirms God's miracle-working power. Trust in miracles is, in fact, the only rational stance in a world that is infinitely responsive to God's incessant lures. We are commissioned to pray for miracles because nothing less is sufficient. We pray to God, not because we understand these mysteries, but because we have learned from our tradition and from experience that God, indeed, is sufficient for us, whatever the Powers may do."

May the miracle of God's miraculous transformation be seen in us and in our land.

+ Brian

November 2008