The last journey of Nelson Mandela. He is returning to the land of his ancestors.
Military honours, solemn moments.
His wife Graça Machel and his former wife Winnie salute the coffin covered with the South African flag.
On 5 December 2013, an extraordinary man, a great man died.
He was not only great in stature, but also because of what he accomplished.
His name was Nelson Mandela.
10 days later there was an magnificent funeral in his honour with huge crowds
and the President of the United States, Barack Obama, made the journey to be there.
And finally, Mandela understood the ties that bind the human spirit.
There is a word in South Africa -- Ubuntu -- (applause) -- a word that captures Mandela's greatest gift.
He pronounced the magic word "Ubuntu" and when he had pronounced this word "Ubuntu", the crowd applauded.
Why? The reason for this was that Nelson Mandela had indeed reminded the whole world of this very profound idea of Ubuntu,
which is so important for people today. But what is Ubuntu?
The concept of Ubuntu has echoed around the world in recent years thanks to Mandela,
but we must realise that this relates to all the people who make up the Bantu civilisation,
that is to say the whole of Africa south of the equator.
Ubuntu is an Ngoni term from the Bantu languages that is relatively common in all of southern Africa
and whose root, "ntu" refers to everything that is human. Ubuntu refers to humanism.
Bishop Emmanuel Lafont is the Catholic bishop of Cayenne in French Guiana.
He lived in South Africa from 1983 to 1996, mainly as a parish priest in Soweto,
a township (a suburb) of Johannesburg and symbol of black resistance to apartheid.
He met Nelson Mandela many times.
The key phrase of this humanism is, "Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu," which can be translated as,
"A person only becomes a person through other people."
In other words, it is the interpersonal dimension of a person that is key to his development and personality.
This is expressed in a very practical way in Africa through what we would call fraternity.
Ubuntu has a long history and what we have tried to do with this video is to give you an idea of how Nelson Mandela and many people have experienced
and are still experiencing it today.
Nelson Mandela had this Ubuntu, this fraternity, this fascination for people.
It was quite extraordinary.
When you met him, he made you feel important, whoever you were and he would not forget you.
He was able to meet a journalist one day and meet up again two months later and say,
"How is your father?" because he had found out that the father was in hospital or whatever. He cared about people.
Nelson Mandela was born on 18 July 1918 at Mvezo, in the Transkei province, a region in the south-east of South Africa.
He was from the Xhosa tribe, from the royal family of the Thembu people, and he belonged to the Madiba clan;
Madiba is the name by which he was frequently known.
He studied law and joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1943
to fight against the political domination of the white Afrikaans minority
and their racial segregation policy.
Once he had become a lawyer, he joined the non-violent struggle against the apartheid laws,
which had been introduced by the government of the National party from 1948.
In 1960, the ANC was banned.
Facing demands for a violent uprising following the Sharpeville massacre where the police killed 69 unarmed people,
Mandela founded the military arm of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe in 1961,
which conducted a campaign to sabotage public and military installations.
On 5 August 1962, he was arrested by the South-African police and sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour.
He was incarcerated for 27 years mainly in the prison of Robben Island.
This experience would have a profound effect on him.
What happened to this man who went to prison and whose aim was to foment a violent uprising?
At that time, he was in favour of violence in order to obtain what he felt was right.
However, after 27 years in prison, he must have reflected, prayed, meditated...
He returned to something very very profound, which, I believe, is truly the very source of the entire history of humanity,
something that subsists in all nations, in all races and this thing is Ubuntu.
What makes us people, people together?
The second aspect of Mandela in Ubuntu was his positive outlook on each human person including his adversaries.
In this regard, I would like to read you a letter he wrote when he was in prison in the 1970s.
He had been in prison for 10 years. He writes to his young daughter, Zindzi, who had an older sister, Zeni.
These were the two children that Nelson Mandela had with Winnie.
This is what he wrote: "I suppose that you and Zeni, and maybe even your mother, believe,
not without reason, that the judge who treated us without humanity and with such terrible petty-mindedness is a cruel man.
He probably has a wife and children himself and he is probably aware of the heartbreak
of separating a father and mother by force, because we are denied the right to meet.
However, I know that this man is far from being cruel.
On the contrary, within the confines of certain attitudes,
which have now become the norm in our country, he is kind and courteous and I sincerely believe that he is a gentleman."
It's astonishing because he looks at a judge who punished him harshly and excuses him, saying,
"He is like this because of the general situation. He is a member of this group of Afrikaners who think they own the country
and this, dare I say it, means that his personal responsibility is diminished."
This is how Mandela saw it. He had this ability to see everyone in a good light.
He was criticised for this, but he said,
"I know that people criticised me for this, but in the end, it's better this way
because if you respect someone, he is more likely to respect you."
Nelson Mandela and Francois Pienaar receive a standing ovation by the seventy thousand spectators at Ellis Park.
It is the image of the third World Cup.
An image perceived identically in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban or Cape Town.
That evening the South Africans forgot their racial differences to celebrate the victory of the Springboks.
You know what happened here tonight has never happened before!
This is the first time in my life that I have hugged a white person.
But look, it works, and then Nelson Mandela today with the Springbok jersey and hat, he was really cute.
A lot of people consider you to be the personification of Ubuntu. What does Ubuntu mean for you?
In the old days when we were young, a traveller through a country would stop at a village,
and he didn't have to ask for food or for water: once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him.
That is one aspect of Ubuntu, but it will have various aspects.
In our language, known as Kirundi, we do not pronounce the T, so you would say Ubun(t)u.
The values conveyed by Ubuntu, the ways you see it, are not something that can be taught at school.
It's something in the up-bringing that we receive and that we give to our children…
We will often use these Ubuntu words to describe someone and to point out that this person has Ubuntu or does not have Ubuntu.
It's a process that is not as easy as you may think.
You cannot say that someone is fully Ubuntu because we are not holy, it's more like a journey into holiness.
One often uses the word Ubuntu to describe something given completely free of charge, to describe someone who is hospitable.
A person's life is not individual but communal. And so we manifest Ubuntu in taking care of others.
Even in the Bible, in the version in our national language Kirundi,
the word Ubuntu comes up again and again to describe the gratuitous love of God;
to describe the grace of God we would say Ubuntu.
In the story of the Good Samaritan, we would say that he demonstrated Ubuntu;
he rescued one who was in need, so he expressed Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is also responsibility, to feel oneself responsible.
Ubuntu is faithfulness, Ubuntu is discretion, Ubuntu is self-giving, giving yourself for others.
I have fought ardently against white domination
and I have fought with all my strength against black domination.
I am calling for a new South Africa where all the inhabitants are equal.
Nelson Mandela always said that the two things that most stamped on him his own sense of responsibility were the Church, the Methodist Church
- he was baptized when he was seven years old, it was the pastors who arranged for him to go to school -
and the tribal leadership, that is to say, the system of governance of a tribe.
When his father died he was entrusted to a local chief, whom he loved very much.
And this chief loved Mandela very much.
He was from royal blood of the Xhosa tribe.
And there he learned what it is that makes those communities work.
The leader was a man of consensus.
He was there to make sure that everyone agreed on what was best for the tribe.
A third dimension that struck me very much about Nelson Mandela
was the way he used his time in prison to mature, but also to know his enemy.
It was the first time he had been in actual contact with Afrikaners, whether it was the guards or prison officials.
And so he began to study the Afrikaner soul, the Afrikaner culture, the Afrikaner language.
They spoke Afrikaans; he began to speak it well in order to be able to talk to the guards in their own language.
So he learned what their values were; he learnt about the wounds and hurts that their history had given them,
as the Afrikaners had also been the victims of British colonialism.
And the Afrikaner had won against the English and with pride.
So he would remind the Afrikaner saying:
"The pride you had in freeing yourself from the English, why do you now refuse this for us?"
Afrikaners who heard this were left speechless because he knew their history, their battles and their victories.
And at the same time he knew - I was going to say their weaknesses or fears.
Their great fear was of the day when they would no longer be masters, when they would be swept away.
Perhaps they would have to face a reckoning, they would be forced to leave.
They had good reason to believe that on the day when things swung the other way,
they could find themselves in a difficult situation.
We realized at the end of the 70s that we were in a situation that became more and more impossible.
White South Africans were riding a tiger and the world shouted that we come down.
If it is one thing to shout to come down from a tiger, it is another to be on his back and to have fear of being devoured
And the day he was released from prison, one of the key phrases of his speech
that night in front of the main square in Cape Town was to say,
"We shall not obtain our freedom unless we pay attention to the fears of the white people".
That was something quite extraordinary.
In other words, he said what Desmond Tutu had always said,
"The white people will be free when we are free!".
So there is something deep in him.
He wanted - and this is something that he forged in quite a fantastic way in jail -
to transform his enemy into a partner in order to ensure that his victory was also that of the other,
and that there would be no one who was vanquished.
He was not only the incarnation of Ubuntu, he taught millions of people to understand the truth about themselves.
It took a man like Madiba to free not just the prisoner, but the jailer as well;
to show that you must trust others so that they may trust you;
to teach that reconciliation is not a matter of ignoring a cruel past, but a means of confronting it with inclusion, generosity and truth.
He changed laws, but also hearts.
The doors of the penitentiary just opened. After twenty- seven years of imprisonment, Nelson Mandela ...
On February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison.
So help me God
Elected president of South Africa in 1994, the following year he created the "Truth and Reconciliation commission ",
which he entrusted to Bishop Desmond Tutu, Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town to run.
The principle of this commission was to allow victims to express their suffering,
and for the guilty to confess what they had done, in exchange for amnesty.
This opened up a real way of truth, mourning and finally reconciliation and reparation.
Choosing truth rather than justice meant that the people were able to come together.
This commission heard 15,000 people: 8,000 victims who could come and say what they had experienced,
and 7000 'criminals' so to speak, or at least people that had something to feel guilty about.
It was often very painful because they had done atrocious things, really terrible.
We went to the Truth Commission and we have seen the culprits. They were there and they confessed to killing them.
I asked them: "Why?" Because in addition to having shot my son, they stabbed him over thirty times.
They asked for forgiveness. I have forgiven them.
And why have you forgiven them?
Because they told me the truth about what happened that night.
I think it is not good for you, for your heart to keep these things that are so bad inside you.
Especially for me, that's what I always think. It's better to forgive;
I do not think they all knew what they were doing. There was someone behind it to tell them to do it.
Forgiveness must be voluntary.
It must come freely from the victim to the perpetrator.
And I remember one case where there were 7 mothers present whose 7 sons had been drawn into a trap by the police.
Boys from a township of Cape Town, who were obviously militants.
Undercover police officers made them believe they were going to take them outside the country as soldiers for the ANC
but in fact they took them from their township to be massacred, which they did.
And after having massacred them, they put Kalashnikovs next to the bodies to show everyone on TV
- I remember seeing it on the news -
that they had destroyed a terrorist cell of the ANC. They had set the whole thing up.
Ten years later, a black police officer and a white police officer
found themselves before the "Truth and Reconciliation" commission
seeking amnesty for this crime they committed there.
The seven mothers were there.
They showed the 'footage' (excerpts) on TV.
The mothers passed out when they saw those awful scenes again.
It was extremely painful!
Finally, after a break in the session, it restarted
and at one point a lady who was tall and as thin as an asparagus stood up and said to the black policeman:
"Aren't you ashamed of what you did?
In our culture, you know very well that these children are your children. You killed your own children!
This white man, he killed our children to protect his own. But you killed your own children.
I used to be beautiful and plump but now look at me. I'm all skin and bone.
And you want me to forgive you? Never!"
The second mother said the same thing, and the third, and the fourth.
It was the fifth mother who said, "How long can I keep this bitterness in my heart?
It weighs me down, this anger inside me. You know, when I think of my child, he is not going to come back.
So I prefer to forgive you and we can both start life over again."
And the woman changed the minds of the other six.
And five minutes later all the women went to embrace the black police officer.
These are the kinds of scenes that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission made possible,
but somehow it is clear that Mandela brought out the very best of the human qualities that all his people already had.
He could not do it alone. It really is a humanism that is deeply rooted in their culture and in faith.
Because the majority of these South Africans read the Bible all the time, and spend their time in church and in praying to the Lord.
We are part of the history of this country, but we are also part of the bad history of this country.
As a Church we confessed to our role during the apartheid
and we told the nation that we were sincerely sorry.
In our church at our level, we work with the white Dutch Reformed Church
and although we are still learning to trust each other, there are joint projects on which we work.
The apartheid experience has taught us to come together as a nation,
to be a people working together and working against any boundaries and anything that divides us.
Because apartheid was a policy that divided and separated people.
And so religion started to be one channel through which we started to unite people
and in uniting people we bring them together and this is still continuing today.
So the concept of community and the responsibility that we have for one another and for our neighbours
s a huge priority in the African culture and in the African way of life.
And every day we are starting to realize what this means for us
and how this actually helps us to be a united people.
And that also helps us to understand different religions, to create a space for people with different religious affiliations,
and so even marriages in South-Africa for example do not only happen across racial boundaries or cultural boundaries
but also happen across religious boundaries.
It is not unusual for a Muslim to get married to a Christian and vice versa
Sometimes it takes time to understand who we are.
Well, it's only now that I'm beginning to understand what these International Ecumenical Fraternities,
which began 15 years ago, are really all about.
Now that Net for God is distributed in some 70 countries, in many languages,
we feel that there is a lot of work being asked of us, to make it happen and to promote it.
It really is a work for unity.
Basically, our mission is Ubuntu, and this Ubuntu mission connects all of us because we are all human...
This makes me think of what the Pope has been saying,
"We must go beyond our frontiers. We must meet the other beyond our frontiers."
Desmond Tutu has also said this very fine thing,
"Someone with Ubuntu is someone who is aware of belonging to something greater,"
or he has said for example, "I am because I belong".
So I am, not because I think, as Decartes said,
but I am because I belong to this grace which is humanity, to this living- together of humanity.
When I first try to understand the culture of a country, I have to live Ubuntu.
When I evangelise, I have to live Ubuntu to make it work ...
Whether we are black or white - and it's important to work together in the same community, the same fraternity, black and white.
Whether we are male or female, it is important that reconciliation is often experienced between men and women.
Whether we are couples, married people or consecrated single people, priests or married men,
we should be in the same community, in order to live beyond the borders which the Pope speaks about so well,
then we can be useful in the world which has so much need for reconciliation.
So our mission to work for unity, to live Ubuntu makes sense and truly becomes a mission.
Our mission is Ubuntu.
An anthropologist proposed a game to the children of an African tribe.
He put a basket of ripe fruit near a tree and told the children:
"The one who gets there first - the winner - will get all of that."
At the signal, all the children rushed together to the tree ...
but with hands joined !!
Then they sat down together to enjoy their reward.
When the anthropologist asked why they had run in this way, when one of them could have had all of the fruit to themselves, they said,
"Ubuntu. How can one of us be happy if everyone else is sad? "
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.
The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you", nor again the head to the feet, "I have no need of you."
If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together.
Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.
We pray Lord for the people of South Africa in this post-apartheid, post-Mandela period.
That this South African people, once again torn apart by so much violence and inequality,
may discover the profound meaning of the word Ubuntu, in order to live in peace and with respect.
May your Holy Spirit transform us, and come to liberate this depth of humanity which lives in each one of us,
and let us see what is good in every person and make us belong to one another.
Grant us to accept together Christ's salvation,
so that we may live and announce reconciliation in the midst of our differences.
No comments:
Post a Comment