The death of the South African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, on December 26, 2021, reminds us of the little Latin American interest in African themes. The fact deserved a reduced space in the newspapers and television news in the region.
The death of a “symbol of the fight against apartheid alongside Nelson Mandela and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize” was reported somewhat vaguely. The next day, life goes on. It didn’t look like we had lost one of the greatest fighters, thinkers, and religious leaders of our time.
We are far from understanding and being interested in Africa. This is true even in Brazil, a country with a black majority and the largest population with black African roots outside the continent. What about other countries in our region?
Relations between Brazil and Africa have been falling apart in recent years, while the contacts of other Latin American countries with that continent have never deepened – with the notable exception of Cuba.
Celebrating Tutu’s legacy would be a simple way to inform and go beyond topics such as apartheid, civil war, hunger, new variants of the coronavirus and military coups – basically what is reported about the continent in the Latin American press. In particular, it would be a way of highlighting the importance of African thought and its global impact.
Founder of African Black Theology
Tutu was much more than Mandela’s companion in the fight against apartheid. He is one of the founders of African Black Theology, inspired by North American Black Theology, whose main exponent was the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Also in Latin American Liberation Theology, initiated in 1968 at the Episcopal Conference of Medellín and developed by Gustavo Gutiérrez and Leonardo Boff, among others. The South African archbishop was another one to demonstrate that it is possible to build a church shoulder to shoulder with the oppressed.
Regarding these affiliations, Tutu stated that the church in Africa must be committed to the cause of liberation. To him, God was the great Deliverer, the God of the Exodus who led a mob of slaves out of captivity and set them free.
From this he derived his defense of the total liberation of the “children of God”, on a political, social and economic level. Emphasizing his inspiration from Latin American sources, he pointed out that black theology is the theology of the oppressed, a theology of liberation. And it was based on his theology that the archbishop took a stand against apartheid. According to him, “the Bible turned out to be the most subversive book imaginable in a situation of injustice and oppression.”
Inspirer of modern South African identity
For better or worse, Tutu was one of the founders of post-apartheid South Africa’s identity, with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission he chaired and his idea of a “Rainbow Nation”.
What he called “restorative justice” was the foundation of the South African truth commission, conceived as a central element of the country’s pacification, reconstruction and unification.
Operating from 1995 to 1998, it constituted one of the main experiences of truth commissions in the world, by conditioning the amnesty to a public statement by the applicant, in which the main requirement should be to “tell the truth” about the crimes for which it was requested. amnesty.
The most praised element in that process was its conditionality, avoiding the indiscriminate offer of amnesty (and forgetfulness) characteristic of cases like the Brazilian one. The most contested point was the limited reparation of crimes (contrary to what happened in cases such as Argentina), insofar as it emphasized the public exposure of human rights violators and the recording and construction of a collective memory.
In this context, Tutu insisted on the need for “forgiveness, but not forgetting”. To justify this, he made use of two arguments. One was based on his aforementioned left-wing reading of Christianity: the need for liberation of both the oppressor and the oppressed.
Another argument was to present restorative justice as “traditional African jurisprudence”. His concern would not be retribution or punishment, but healing violations, correcting imbalances, restoring broken relationships. It would seek to rehabilitate both the victim and the perpetrator, who must be given the opportunity to be reintegrated into the community he has injured with his offence.
To this need for reconciliation, Tutu connected his idea of South Africa as the “Rainbow Nation”, a proposal associated with the multiculturalism so in vogue at that time. This idea of a nation that would encompass all colors without the need for them to be diluted assumed an important role in the new national identity, penetrating deep into the self-image of South Africa in the early post-apartheid years.
The social and ethnic pluralism inherited by the country would not be an obstacle to its development, but its greatest asset. Tutu defended that that State could become viable as a nation.
ubuntu formulator
Another proposal defended by Tutu was ubuntu, of which he became the main global promoter – connecting it to other values he defended in recent decades alongside personalities such as the Dalai Lama, such as ecumenism and the culture of peace. Ubuntu would be a way of guaranteeing the cohesion of a deeply divided and unequal society, marked by violence and oppression, constituting the possibility of coexistence of the former oppressors and the oppressed.
As said, if one of the pillars of Tutu was liberation Christianity, the other was the African heritage in which ubuntu is inserted. For the archbishop, ubuntu is a central element of the African worldview. In this conception, the lives of all people are interconnected, as well as humanity integrates itself with nature and each generation integrates the previous and the ones that will come.
Tutu defined the concept through the proverb “a person is a person through other people”. For him, “a person with ubuntu asserts himself by others, does not feel threatened if others are capable and good; he has a guarantee that comes from knowing that he belongs to a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than what they are. What dehumanizes you inexorably dehumanizes me.”
Tutu understood ubuntu also as an expression of a universal nostalgia for a lost paradise, originated in our expulsion from the Garden of Eden. If humanity experiences a centrifugal process of alienation, there would be, on the other hand, a divine centripetal force that impels to community, to reconciliation, to justice, which would come from the “beginning of time”.
Tutu took ubuntu to the world, contributing to its transformation into a fashion concept. Ubuntu has inspired computer systems, self-help literature, coaching practice and entrepreneurship lessons. In fact, in this it comes close to another original concept of the Global South, the Latin American “good living”. But, in addition to strange reappropriations, the global success of ubuntu is yet another indication of the importance of Tutu’s thinking for contemporaneity.
