When it gets tough laugh!

‘We had to laugh in order not to cry.’by teacher Jean Ramsey

Last Monday, 10th May a colleague and I went to listen to Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu giving a lecture at the Sheldonian in Oxford. There was a huge waiting list for this event and we were lucky to get tickets.

He was every bit as inspirational as we thought he would be. He is a tiny man in stature with quite a small voice so we had to strain a little to catch what he was saying. What struck me immediately was his enormous presence and delightful sense of humour: he laughs easily. As he got into his address it soon became apparent why he laughs so readily…if you did not laugh in the apartheid regime as a non white you would cry…or worse.

He told us that when he became Bishop of Johannesburg it was actually illegal for him and his family to move into the Bishop’s palace as it was in a whites only part of town. He was not permitted a passport but had to rely on travel documents provided by the regime and in the space for nationality it said: Nationality undeterminable at present. He has since had his genome analysed, and on his mother’s side, he is descended from the San people or the Bushmen the oldest inhabitants of Southern Africa they have lived there for over 20,000 years.

The test to see what category or racial group you belonged to was simply to run a comb through your hair. If it got tangled you were the lowest of the low: a Bantu, if the comb ran fairly smoothly: a coloured, if the comb passed through easily: no problem white. People committed suicide if they discovered they were to be classed as a Bantu. There were whites only ambulances and if they came across native involved in a road traffic accident they would drive away.

In 1962 he came to Britain to further his theological studies. He and his wife kept accosting British bobbies to ask for directions simply for the pleasure of being addressed by a person in uniform as ‘sir’ and ‘madam’. They would go round a corner and ask again just to experience the being regarded as a person. They had had ‘their dignity and humanity carelessly trodden underfoot’ so often at home in South Africa. He made lots of jokes one about road signs saying: Drive carefully natives cross here. One wag inserted: Drive carefully natives VERY cross here.

His great inspiration was Trevor Huddleston who was an anti apartheid activist and became his role model. Bishop Tutu constantly preached reconciliation between the races because ‘we are all children of God.’ On 27th April, 1994 ‘the world watched with awe’ as years of injustice and oppression were replaced by freedom and democracy and South Africa elected its first black president, Nelson Mandela. He promptly appointed his friend as Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. What happened then was truly miraculous. People who had been deadly enemies had to apologise in front of the whole word and they did. People were quiet as they realised that they were in the presence of something holy. He stressed that we live in a moral universe where right and wrong matter; that human beings can be extraordinarily magnanimous.

He brought his address right up to date by discussing the situation in the Middle East and especially what is happening between the Israelis and the Palestinians in Gaza. What is happening there is illegal. He explained that the best kind of security comes when the inalienable rights of all are respected. Why are we so blind and so stupid not to see this?

We must take courage though, as Arch Bishop Tutu explained, after what they have achieved in South Africa, nothing can ever be seen as intractable.

‘We must remember the past, the better to forget it.’

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