WE KNOW it instinctively. We feel in our bones that what was taken can never be restored. And there is no payment that is an adequate price for even a single human life. On each side of our great divide we misconstrue the goal.
The white people pull out their spreadsheets trying to tally a total of misery minus the years between. What, they wonder, is the discount for that half step towards equality, that gesture at recompense?
Affirmative action, set asides, preferential admissions that are handed out wrapped in resentment. In a documentary, the white girl sits next to the pool, the black servants gliding silently in and out of the frame to minister to her needs. “I wasn’t even alive in apartheid,” she says. “I didn’t do anything. It wasn’t my fault. Why must I pay?”
The irony of her circumstance slides past her eyes. The older generation of white people is suspicious: “This ‘reparation’ is like a bribe. We pay now and for a moment you are silent. But you will be back. You or your children will come claiming it wasn’t enough.
“We know you are right. How could it ever be enough? And because we know we can never pay enough we refuse to begin to pay.”
People of colour of every shade pull out catalogues of woe. Scrapbooks filled with unnamed ancestors and unborn children. They tell the family stories that never got written. They speak of demolished homes, demolished communities, and displaced people.
They speak of stolen youth, and stolen work. They speak of stolen land, and stolen hope. They speak of stolen lives. They speak of stolen voices. They speak of being silent or being silenced. They speak into the wind. And they create their own charts of resentment that no payment will erase.
“What about us?” the young man asked. It was early days yet. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was still unchallenged as a miracle of human healing both around the world and inside South Africa. “What about me and people like me? My mother was an anti-apartheid activist, a freedom fighter.
“She was jailed, tortured, eventually killed. I was young. I didn’t understand. I didn’t know where my mother had gone. My grandmother raised me. When the Commission was set up she went there. She told her story about the daughter she lost.
“She faced the perpetrator. She forgave him. But what about me? I never told my story. Nobody ever heard me say how much I missed my mom. No one asked for my forgiveness. My grandmother told her story and granted her forgiveness. The perpetrator got amnesty and he was gone. I never even met him. I got nothing.”
LET’S begin with the word, reparations. We read reparations. But we don’t hear repair. One side hears the loud angry demand to return what was stolen. They hear the rancorous noise of protest before they see the faces in the crowd.
They read reparations, but it sounds like retribution and recompense, an ounce of gold for every ounce of flesh that was bought or sold; a salary, with compound interest for every unpaid or underpaid minute; an acre with interest for every acre taken.
We read reparations, but for each of us, wherever we stand, the meaning of the word shifts like sand. We stand for one moment solidly certain of what reparations mean and what they must achieve, and the next moment the ground slips away from under us as the wind of a new opinion blows.
What seemed clear and simple is suddenly cloudy and complicated. Complicated by all the people involved. Complicated by the lack of clarity about what reparations are designed to accomplish. Complicated by which of the raft of wrongs reparations are supposed to address.
Because we disagree about the goal, we disagree about the way to achieve the desired outcome. We wrestle with the idea of reparations sometimes in good faith, sometimes in bad faith. But we wrestle. And we bring all of our hopes, fears, worries, and resentments to our wrestling.
Our experience of the word now has everything to do with what we know and what we imagine of our ancestor’s experience of life then. So let us begin with the word. Let us turn our ears to hear it aright.
Let us resolve to hearken to the music of it. Let us listen for multi-tonal melody of reparations. Let us listen for the jarring note of what is broken. And let us listen for the bright sound of what rings true.
Maybe we can hear reparations aright only if embedded in the heart of reparations is love. The apostle Paul reminds us: “If I speak in the tongue of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. . .”
Reparations without love clang. The point and purpose of reparations can be only healing and love, because what creation strains towards, what all that is yearns towards, what salvation bends towards, is God, and God is love. Love is the point and the purpose of every life, and is all of the meaning of life. As Paul says, “If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body . . . but do not have love, I gain nothing.”
SO, REPARATIONS begin with a spiritual posture: the posture of love. And reparations must begin with a mental posture: the posture of humility. Reparations are their own healing liturgical dance. A dance in seven steps: the prelude in humility, setting aside the arrogance that has corseted us, stiffened our necks, and held our heads aloft in pride, we acknowledge the burden of wrong that bows our shoulders and bends our backs.
AlamyExhibition entrance at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg
The first step would speak the words “I’m sorry”, and in so saying open a door for the dance to begin. The next steps flow one into another, movement and stillness answering stillness and movement. Through the open door, the dancer enters, leaning heavily on humility and remorse.
Resting in their lap, a perpetrator who is penitent could listen long to the stories of victims and their descendants and dare to hear the hurt that their actions and the actions of their ancestors have caused. When the story is told and the hurt is named, reparations are the thread offered that might make repair.
Ask forgiveness, it will make the repair stronger: remorseful apology and reparation twined with gracious forgiveness, strands of hope woven together to make a better future than the one that the past promised us. Our future is learning together how better to love. We must learn how better to live love and how better to live in love. We must study how better to be love and how to embody love.
I hear the music of prelude. Come, let us dance. If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land (2 Chronicles 7.14).
Arrogance is a cage and a corset. Its bones and stays hold a body erect and unyielding. Rigid thinness in place of soft generosity. There is something dignified about genuine humility. Maybe because genuine humility is born of an honest self-assessment and true self-acceptance.
“For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgement, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned” (Romans 12.3).
“WE WANT to forgive them . . . and perhaps they can forgive us.” She had to learn to walk again. Her body was no longer the lean lithe body that had walked into the golf club that fateful day. She was broken in places that do not heal. For months, she could not feed, or bathe or clothe herself, and her children had to help her with the most intimate tasks.
She could have been bitter or bowed. Her voice could have dripped venom toxic enough to destroy the bodies of the young men who threw the hand grenades and fired the guns that brought her there. But, instead of the twisted poverty of anger and despair, she radiated the dignity of humility. And, in time, with dignity and humility, she met the men whose attack ended her holiday party. With dignity and humility, they met her.
Maybe it is the lack of humility that victims hear when the politicians say, “I’m sorry.” The politicians say, “I’m sorry on behalf of cities and nations.” The response of the victims may be stony suspicion, open hostility, or cold indifference.
The victims and their descendants say, “We have heard this ‘sorry’ so many times in so many ways and there is no remorse in it and it tastes of so much nothing that our appetite for the political ‘sorry’ is dull. Over the years this ‘sorry’ has broken so many promises that it has been emptied of hope. It rings hollow.”
They turn away, their bodies etched with disdain. “But we are sorry”: different people stand up to repeat the refrain. Those hungry for a different relationship with the past and a different relationship between the descendants of the former masters and the descendants of subjected people snatch the words from the politicians’ lips and examine them.
They turn them over on their tongues. They bring to the words a teaspoonful of recognition. . . There is a past that we have chosen not to know. There are stories we have stifled or chosen not to hear. After the recognition comes an ounce of knowledge, then enough daring to stare down denial.
We are sorry, we will unbury the history we have hidden. We will unearth the harms inflicted in our name. And we will face the truths that don’t need to be unearthed for they are hidden in plain sight.
Systemic evil, Richard Rohr calls these truths: the evil considered necessary to sustain the “common good”. The systems of racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, and nativism that are woven into the fabric of society to secure life as we know it.
The common good is clearly not good for everyone: it is only good for a vanishingly small some. Humility speaks: “We are sorry.” This “we are sorry” will not stand on the dais dictating the terms of its own surrender. This “we are sorry” will not try to define for the victims the edges of their experience. This “we are sorry” will not lay upon those wronged the weight of expectation. You are not required to be gracious in response. We hope that you will hear that we are genuinely sorry. The door is open. The dance begins.
This is an edited extract from Forgiveness and Reparation, The Healing Journey by Mpho Tutu van Furth, in the My Theology series published by Darton, Longman & Todd at £8.99 (Church Times Bookshop £7.19); 978-1-913657-84-0.