Rasool, Meeting Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu for the Semester at Sea
Programme
2 March 2007
Thank you very much Executive Dean, Captain, students of the Semester at Sea
but thank you also for getting Archbishop Desmond Tutu back on land. His wife
has been missing him, but she thought she'd join him because she's heard about
the reputation of sailors. That is that they get very homesick.
But it's really an amazing experience firstly to have been invited by the
office of the Archbishop to share in this and they used a bit of subtle
blackmail by saying that when we were in Puerto Rico, the Governor there met
the students. So we have a really proud history in the Western Cape and in
South Africa so that whatever the Governor in Puerto Rico can do, we can also
do. So thank you to the Governor of Puerto Rico for getting me here.
But it's an experience that I think must be one of the most amazing
experiences in the life of any young person to actually be on a floating
university. I wish there was such stuff in my days. Because when we were a
student, the best way to get out of university was to get yourself arrested by
getting involved in anti-apartheid struggles. And then you could get your books
sent to your cell and all of those things.
And the Archbishop was the chancellor of the university that supplied me
with books. I immediately enrolled in an Honours in English because that was
the only way with � I don't think that the Archbishop intended it this way, but
that was the only way you could get more reading than just the Bible, doing
English Honours. But I did read the Bible as well.
But I think that coming to Cape Town � and I am told that you're all rearing
to get onto land and to start exploring and that I should not be more than 20
minutes, but coming to Cape Town I think ought to be a great experience. This
is a place that has been residence to three of the Nobel laureates in the world
out of four that South Africa has had. You are having the absolute privilege of
travelling with one of them, Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
He became a resident of Cape Town, because it comes with promotion in his
job. The highest you can be in the Anglican Church is to be become the
Archbishop of Cape Town. And that is how important Cape Town is, that if you
want to be Archbishop you've got to live in Cape Town because the atmosphere
makes for a good Archbishop.
The other one was the last so-called apartheid President, F W de Klerk who
has to take up residence as the President of the country in Cape Town. And his
role in ensuring that there is a smooth and relatively peaceful transition from
apartheid to democracy is well-known across the world as well.
And the third one was a resident in Cape Town against his will, and that was
Nelson Mandela who was jailed, first on Robben Island, then in Pollsmoor and
then in Victor Verster. And that made him for 27 years a resident in Cape Town
and he also received the Nobel Peace Prize.
So you're coming to Cape Town, a city with a history, a city with multiple
cultures, a city struggling with itself on a daily basis, but always hoping to
be authentic and a city that we want to have become a home for all. A place in
which every culture, every religion, every ethnic group, every difference
amongst people can co-exist peacefully not in tolerance, but in mutual
acceptance. And that's the vision that we have for Cape Town.
In many ways a vision is simple. But the way to get there is often painful.
And we live every day in this city with the daily struggles of people trying to
find themselves, their own identity and trying from their own identity to find
acceptance for others and their identities.
I came across a very interesting quote, because in political terms we often
use the word 'solidarity' in such cliched ways, in such loose ways that we
often forget what it means. But Richard Rorty in his book Contingency, Irony
and Solidarity � and this is the only thing that I will read � says: "In my
Utopia human solidarity would not be seen as a fact to be recognising by
clearing away prejudice or burrowing down to previously hidden depths, but
rather as a goal to be achieved. So it doesn't necessarily exist as a
pre-condition, it has to be goal to be achieved. Because getting into
solidarity with others is a job that has to be done. It is to be achieved not
by enquiry but by imagination. The imaginative ability to see strange people as
fellow sufferers. You're not going to read up on solidarity. No-one is going to
find you a definition of solidarity. No-one is going to give you a recipe for
solidarity. You've got to first imagine the other, their suffering, and then to
be able to place yourself there in order to gain empathy. And then you begin
the process of entering into human solidarity. Solidarity is not discovered by
reflection, but it is created. You've got to make a decision to be in
solidarity with the other. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the
particular details of the pain and humiliation of other unfamiliar sorts of
people."
I thought that that was probably one of the most decisive understandings of
solidarity that I have found. I think that you have been given a blessed
opportunity that you don't have to imagine the other. You are on a ship for 100
days with a range of people who ordinarily would be the other, and out of reach
of you. You berth in foreign ports which would test your imagination to have
imagined what are the people like in Cape Town, in Puerto Rico, in every port
that you land. You have been able to get a shortcut to imagination by being
exposed to those people. And what this does for you is to make you of the most
privileged, blessed young people anywhere in the world. Because for you
solidarity is more of a goal in reach than it is for others who suffer from
stunted imaginations. And that I think is for me the key reason that I wanted
to meet with people who have been given this golden opportunity to live out a
solidarity, to confront their own identities and to embrace the differences of
the other.
This world requires it. Globalisation has many blessings, but there's a hard
edge to globalisation because globalisation with the speed of information, with
the (indistinct � sounds like tyranny of the sound byte) globalisation means
that today's people don't read volumes and volumes to understand other
civilisations, other cultures, other religions. They learn it through the
(indistinct � see above) where Islam can be presented only by a picture of
Osama bin Laden, where what happens, the entire situation in the Middle East
can be summarise by one picture of Saddam Hussein. And that's the shortcut that
stunts the imagination today because we get taught to see each other's
stereotypes, to look through the lens of our prejudice, to analyse through our
bias. And we don't do the hard work of reading, of interacting and of dealing
with people as they are.
I have found in my own reading of both the Koran and sometimes the Bible
that probably even what Richard Rorty says about what solidarity is, I found
even simpler definitions of solidarity. The Koran for example speaks, and it's
a lesson that Muslims themselves miss, where the Koran says in Arabic (speaks
in Arabic) in English it says: "God says: I have blown of my own Spirit into
you.
Into every one of us. I have blown of my own spirit into you." I discovered
John's 1st Epistle, Chapter 4, I think it's Verse 3 where he says: "Who lives
in love, lives in God, and God in them, we know that we live in God and God in
us, because God has given us of his spirit."
What a wonderful � what is it? Coincidence. Or maybe it's not. Maybe we all
have truths that coincide. But if the Koran says on the one hand that God has
blown of his spirit into each one of us and the First Epistle of John tells us
because God has given us of his spirit, what does it mean? What does it mean
for solidarity? It simply means this: That each one of us, despite our
differences, carry divinity in us. We are the carriers of a part of God's
Spirit. And therefore, before we see the stereotype, we must see the Spirit.
Before we see the hair type, we must see the divinity. Before we listen to the
language, we must listen to the spirituality in each of us. Before we judge on
culture, we must judge on the godliness that we all carry with us. And if each
human being has that divinity, that spirituality, that godliness that is spoken
about both in the Koran and in the First Epistle of John, then that is the
organic and natural basis of human solidarity. Because we are speaking to that
which is common in all of us, it makes the imagination a lot easier. It makes
the acceptance of the other a lot easier. Because to tolerate the other is to
tolerate a part of the same spirit that has been invested in me and that's
invested in each one of us.
So the point that I'm making is that this world in all its complexity, in
all its violence is a world that can be better if we strive for human
solidarity across borders and if we recognise human spirituality in each one of
us. And the tests are very simple. It's a test that I often put to Muslims when
we claim our rights in South Africa as Muslims. The question we must answer is
this: Are we willing to give to others what we claim for ourselves? And let's
do it within a Muslim context. Let's ask ourselves an even harder variation of
that question. Are we willing to give to those who are most unlike us, who are
most different from us, who we even detest in their differences, are we willing
to give to them what we claim for ourselves?
If I must practicalise it even more: Am I willing to give for example to a
gay person what I want for myself? And once you pair down human solidarity to
those levels, then the tests go right to our core. Because then we begin to
grapple with the hardness of the choices that confronts us.
And that's the wonderful thing about South Africa that you have landed in.
An active struggle, before tradition freezes over. We're a relatively new
country, we're 14 years old. We're quite iconoclastic. We have got no holy
cows. This is the period of greatest creativity, of greatest free thinking. And
people like Archbishop Tutu are helping us. Whenever we try to stunt free
thinking, whenever we try to create traditions out of things that only happened
14 years ago, he reminds us, he rattles the cages because we must prolong for
as long as possible the sense that we live in a laboratory. The sense that
everything is up for scrutiny. That we retreat only into a few truths and
values from which we build an entire new culture.
Because what globalisation does is that it creates uncertainty. It
de-traditionalises. Because it puts so much technology at our disposal, so many
facts at our disposal, so much science at our disposal that it can even make
traditions, religions and everything seem irrelevant and it creates a battle
for us to assert our relevance and to find it firstly.
But you know, the danger in that � and this is the danger of the Middle
East, this is the danger of certain administrations in the world, this is the
danger that goes across all faiths, all ideologies � the danger is found in the
words of that Canadian born American economist, J K Galbraith when he
says:
"The more uncertain people are, the more dogmatic they become." The retreat
into the few truths they have or believe they have, and assert it so viciously
sometimes. They are willing to die for it, because it's the only anchors they
believe they have in life. And that's the breeding ground of
fundamentalism.
And fundamentalism, they enter into conversations such as in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel. That's the language, when fundamentalists enter
into conversations and into discourse, that's the fields on which they
talk.
What does that mean for the rest of us? The rest of us may have to say that
we have to enter into similar conversations of mindsets and not the formal
differences that exist. It is not simply that we must create a conversation
between Muslims, Christians, Hindu's, Jews, etc. It's not simply that we must
create conversations between Black, White, Brown, Red, Orange, etc. It's not
simply that we must enter into conversations where the divisions are formal and
historical.
But fundamentalist mindsets have more in common with each other than they
sometimes have with their own fellow religionists. I have more in common with
Archbishop Tutu than I would have with any discipline of Osama bin Laden.
Because I know that Osama bin Laden is a mindset that is foreign to me and
foreign to how I understand Islam. But that Archbishop Desmond Tutu's Ministry,
what he says and how he behaves is far more of a mindset that I associate
myself with, and that's why I spend a lot of time in the cathedral. It's far
more of an association that I want to be associated with than I would with
other mindsets, even if we both speak Arabic, wear the same clothes, recite
from the same Koran and perform the same prayers at the same time of the day
facing in the same direction.
And that I think is the management of difference. That's the wonderful
laboratory that you've landed at in Cape Town, in South Africa, on the African
continent. I hope that for the seven days that you are going to be here, in
addition to the formal learning of what is here, that you will mix with as many
of our people as possible; that you will visit as many of the sights of memory
as possible. That you will be able to imbibe a free spirit of experimentation
that fires your imagination so that you achieve far quicker the goal of human
solidarity. That you will come out here able to have discovered your own
identity in solidarity with other identities.
And I'm hoping that in addition to all of that you will have what we call in
Cape Town just a jol, one big party, just a sense of enjoyment. This is the
jazz capital of the country, this is the creative capital of the country, and
this is the tourist capital of the country. So there's much to be doing, and I
should not delay you any further.
Thank you very much
Issued by: Office of the Premier, Western Cape Provincial Government
2 March 2007
