Hope and progress in South Africa
AS RED SOX Nation celebrated in Boston, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said it was huge for his entire nation of South Africa to celebrate its recent Rugby World Cup title in France. The sport was so synonymous with Afrikaner culture in the old South Africa that its 1980s ban from international competition is said to have helped cripple apartheid.
In a 1986 speech marking the 10-year anniversary of the bloody put-down of the Soweto uprising, Tutu said, "I hope that you, my fellow white South Africans, don't think that things are normal . . . and that you can afford to play tennis and rugby as happened in the first state of emergency, while the country burns and bleeds to death."
Twenty-one years later, Tutu laughed about rugby in a meeting with the Globe's editorial board this week. When the Springboks defeated England, the players carried President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa on their shoulders, with Mbeki holding the trophy aloft. The nation's Cabinet held a meeting with ministers decked out in Springbok green and gold.
"Very, very surprising. We still keep being surprised at rugby," he said. "You're having your parade now. . . . They started their parade on Tuesday, they started in Pretoria. Went to Soweto. Then went to Madiba [former president Nelson Mandela]. And then to Durban, Port Elizabeth, I think yesterday was Cape Town. And I've seen some of the pictures. It's in a way mind-boggling to see youngish black women ululating [howling] the Springboks.
"It's a team that had only two blacks play. If you wanted to be nasty, you could've said, 'Well, it is thoroughly untransformed.' But people didn't take that as an issue. It's just that we've got this victory and they've had huge crowds turn out. The Cabinet I gather, in their first weekly meeting after the victory, most of them were . . . out in Springbok colors. Which is very surprising. . . . We are a crazy country in many, many ways. But probably . . . deep down people are saying, 'For goodness sakes, can't we get on with it? . . . We are actually South Africans.' "
Tutu said this as he summed up where South Africa is today. It is more hopeful than the often negative headlines. He said the enduring story is a stability that so far has withstood highly publicized crime in poverty-stricken areas and Mbeki's botched response to its AIDS crisis. Tutu said the country's economic growth rate since 1994 "may not have been earth shattering but it is still a positive growth." He cited the nation's "vigorously independent media." He said his "chest swelled" with pride at South Africa being in the forefront of African peace initiatives, including Darfur, after decades of being "the world's pariah."
Tutu did not shy away from the negatives that threaten all that. He said the nation "did badly" on AIDS, but believes it now is "moving in the right direction." He said poverty is so serious that "my own fear is that we are sitting on a powder keg. I still am quite surprised at the level of patience of people. People have not on the whole gone out on the street. They have the guns to do that. . . . But it's still amazing that people can go work in an affluent, largely white suburb with all the facilities that people are used to in a developed country and at the end of that day are prepared to return to their squalor."
Tutu said it could be easy for cynics to say, " 'Nelson Mandela, Tutu talk about reconciliation. To hell with all of that.' . . . They should say, 'We're living in shacks. We live in shacks. How long are we going to live in shacks?' "
True to Tutu's patented messages of hope, he shifted back to the positives. He talked about living in a formerly pro-apartheid enclave where one could have predicted white hostility a decade ago. "It's something that shakes you to think that now we are living normally. People live where they can afford to live. And just down the street from us is a high school that used to be all white.
"Now you stop and when the kids are on the playground and you stop and you look and . . . this can't be true because you're seeing the demography of South Africa reflected there. And so far as I have been able to make out, the sky has remained firmly in place."
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.
