"They had gathered again that October Monday morning in 1999, as they regularly did, for the latest episode of a long, somber national catharsis. Elsewhere, in the nation's major population centers, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) had finished its work. Earlier that fall it had released its final report. Its purpose, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu said in his book No Future Without Forgiveness, was not to 'let bygones be bygones' but to ensure, through eighteen months of sometimes excruciating testimony, that 'no one in South Africa would ever again be able to say, 'I did not know' and hope to be believed."
"As in Chile and other countries drained by decades of tyranny, in South Africa the TRC's method was courageous. There was to be no general amnesty either for whites from the apartheid government or for blacks from the resistance movements. But anyone who came forward and told all the truth — down to the details of where bodies could be found and returned to the families — would be granted individual amnesty. By seeking facts rather that meting out retribution, the TRC had made sure that the truth would finally come out.
"And out it came, in agonizing accounts of murders, rapes, kidnappings, torture, mindless brutality, and shockingly intelligent hatred. "This was the kind of testimony that made me realize that there is an awful depth of depravity to which we can all sink," wrote Archbishop Tutu. "We have supplied God with enough evidence for Him to want to dispatch us all, to wipe the slate clear as He did before with the Flood, and try to make a fresh start."
"The phrasing is vintage Tutu. As a man of the cloth and a man of color, he language moves so fluidly between the human and the divine — between the grisly realities of carnage and mayhem and the illuminations of grace and peace — as to suggest that they are somehow one. I remember noticing that use of language in a meeting with him five years earlier at Bishopscourt, the official residence of the Archbishop of Cape Town. I visited him several months before the 1994 election — one of the world's most widely televised, producing the unforgettable images of mile-long lines of black and white voters snaking amicably toward the ballot box to elect Nelson Mandela as their president. When our small delegation was seated in Tutu's salon and the conversation had turned (as it so effortlessly does in South Africa) to politics, I asked him how he could account for what everyone foresaw would be a remarkably peaceful election. Why, after years of intense struggle, was South Africa apparently not going to go the way of Northern Ireland, or the Middle East, or Sri Lanka, or the rest of the world's fiery and vengeance-soaked trouble spots?
"He had two answers. First, he replied, every South African household has a Bible — a contention that, if not wholly true, is probably not far from it. Second, the tribes across the nation share a common commitment to ubuntu, a Zulu word roughly meaning compassion or respect for others. Traced back to the Zulu maxim, 'a person is a person through other persons,' it meant, Tutu said, that I am not complete until you are complete, nor happy until you are happy. Revenge, he confidently predicted, would not consume South African blacks once they were in power. They would, instead, forgive.
"And forgive they did, although even the TRC — branded by some scoffers as the Kleenex Commission for all the tears it engendered — could interview only a sliver of the afflicted. So every week that fall, in so many of the Evatons across so many Vaals in South Africa, the unheard voices of the overlooked were speaking to one another. We were invited to that church by members of the Khulumani Support Group, a nongovernmental organization with deep ties to this community. That day, they told us, there were four languages being spoken. I sat beside one of the organizers, Traggy Maepa, who whispered translations into my ear as best he could as the tales unfolded. . . .
" 'There's always the argument that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is there as a compromise,' Dr. Randera admitted. By awarding amnesty to those who told all, he added, the TRC had been accused of 'trading justice for truth.' And while he recognized that feelings still ran deep and that 'the forgiveness part is a long ways away,' he credited the TRC with moving the country away from retribution and revenge and toward 'the new moral society we all want to see.'
"There's a straight line, it would seem, from morality through courage to forgiveness. It may be, in fact, that one of the highest forms of moral courage is expressed in the ability to forgive those who have brutalized you — to forgive 'but not forget.' Of the four ways to combine those two terms, I suspect that only the last really makes moral sense:
"1. Forgive and forget. This common phrase marks a position that, for many, is the easiest way out. But as Archbishop Tutu writes, 'the past, far from disappearing or lying down and being quiet, is embarrassingly persistent, and will return and haunt us unless it has been dealt with adequately. Unless we look the beast in the eye we will find that it returns to hold us hostage.'
"2. Neither forget nor forgive. This is the stuff or revenge — and of tragedy. Shakespeare and his fellow Elizabethan playwrights peopled the stage with characters howling for vengeance and bearing their hatreds to untimely graves. The problem with revenge, of course, is that it is never satisfied: there is always someone else ready to avenge the latest murder that was supposed to square the circle and end the violence.
"3. Forget, but don't forgive. This curious formulation fits those who nurse grudges to such monumental proportions that the animosity outlasts the incident that provoked it. Perhaps the sorriest ethical void is that inhabited by people who can't remember why they hate someone but still feel the malice.
"4. Forgive, but don't forget. This, the South African response, is the most difficult. Where amnesty is not allowed to turn into amnesia, the challenge is to honor the memories of those whose blood, as Khumalo put it, 'will nourish the freedom of this country.' It also demands, as Tutu and the TRC insisted, something from those seeking forgiveness: they must first come forward and ask for it. . . .
"Talking about ethics is what, in the end, determines a culture's moral momentum. Does the rule of law depend, to some degree, on the willingness to set aside eye-for-an-eye formulas about personal retribution, replacing them with forgiveness and compassion? Can that set-aside happen in the absence of moral courage? Without such courage — among sobbing black women and sober TRC commissioners, among fiery young reformers and former death-row inmates — can justice itself survive? The lesson from South Africa may be that there can be no justice without forgiveness and no forgiveness without moral courage — and that forgiveness may be the only way to secure peace in the coming century. In shorthand, that reads: collective moral courage is essential for world peace."
