Special Hearings — Faith Community Hearings — 1997-11-17

MR D K KOKA: I must here submit the truth that I tried my best to scrape the   bottom of the barrel in search of the drops of my guilt by my goals, not me   as an individual but in a collective single plurality and I failed to find one   in the course of the struggle. This puts me to a point where I say, we can remark   that the guilt of the oppressor and the oppressed shall never be the same and   shall never be faced from the same angle, for they are operating on different   levels and therefore the structuring of forums where the two sectors can express   themselves sometimes needs to be reconsidered.
Here, when I was coming to this forum here, at the airport, a little girl who   was serving me with the ticket at about 5 'o clock in the morning because I   came very early. She was serving me and a white man who was standing in front   of me and we were following each other. Then while she was serving, she remarks   to me, "Can't you stand in the queue?" and I looked, and there was   nobody, I was the last in the queue, because people had not arrived. Simply   she meant couldn't I go to the end where everybody stands, instead of going   nearer. I examined myself, I said what's wrong? I actually smelled my armpits   and though that I had forgotten to put on the deodorant! But truly I had. I   didn't forget. The white man in front of me said to her "What is the difference?"   and I smiled and though the cheek of it is that I am not just going to a forum   to plead her cause, I am actually flying to that forum in order to plead her   cause and bring about reconciliation. The only note that went deeper than I   had thought is that she does not see me or categorise me as an integral part   of her humanity. They I deserve her respect. She is a remnant of the apartheid   mentality that breeds falsehoods in the human society, the falsehoods of superiority   and inferiority and that man did not belong to the same category.
Here Chairman, let me remark that for the last 500 years, the black community,   African people in particular, have been subjected or have been fully engaged   in a programme of self defence and self preservation, guarding themselves and   their children against Europe's rape and this meaning that is Europe's encroachment   and violation of Africa's territorial sovereignty, cultural value systems, political   freedoms and autonomy, economic development, religious, philosophical thought   and ethics. Africa has been fully engaged in that category. And while engaged   in this category, Africa's genius that once created civilisations and cultures   was destroyed, numbed or frozen to nothingness.
Chairman, let me just say again, the process of Africa's advancement was folded.   Then we got all us engaged from sanctuaries in this battle of liberation. There   could be some errors and omissions but not as agreed upon from institutions,   but out of sheer human frailty. That's where I said I failed to find my guilt   and in the omissions of fully being engaged in the struggle for liberation.   Let me point out that apartheid is not in any manner a recent product, but it   is a continuity of eurocentric thinking that culminated in the murderous barbarous   acts that were committed on the African people, in particular on the Southern   parts of Africa. By so saying, this continuity, started on the very, in the   14th century, when the Italian sects laid out a doctrine where they said being   without form and nature, that is man is nothing but matter without form, and   being without form and nature, man is not constrained, feted or determined to   any particular destiny by an alien supernatural power. In this way, his distinctive   characteristic becomes his freedom. He is free to make himself in the image   of God or in the image of beast. This was said by the Italian humanists and   I, as an African adhering to an African source, if I fail to correct that hierarchy   then my Lord, I am guilty. And I, if as an African, if I did not argue my point   of the internalisation of God in the human activity, at that moment, then I   am guilty. Because that gave power to the apartheid protagonists, who had a   freedom of choice. Either to carry themselves and manifest the image of God   and his likeness in us. They had a choice and thus they chose the way of the   beast. That we are suffering from now.
What is our point at this stage of speaking? I can say, brothers and sisters,   we are unfortunately at this moment of our living that we are living in a time   of cultural disarray and moral decay. Sound social cultural ethical and spiritual   values have been destroyed by the evangelised policies of apartheid without   any replacement. As a result, we find ourselves ushered into an age filled with   the ruins and fragments of morality. Hence our intellectual landscapes are littered   with ...[indistinct] tales of deterioration in human relations, rather thank   dramatic narratives of humanness, reconciliation, justice and peace. This reality   has been brought out to us clearly in the deliberations of the Truth and Reconciliation   Commission. The most inhuman institutions and ideological hierarchies ever recorded   in the pages of human history are nothing but slavery, Nazism, apartheid and   others that to state here would make the list rather too long. [TAPE 3] ...[inaudible]   Apartheid should not be seen in isolation, but must be seen as a final product   of the Eurocentric spiritual thinking and faith that separated divinity from   man. And therefore it could not have taken any other path 
We are here today to look at the actual living products, we are here to look   at the protagonists of Nazism and fascism, the rapists and murderers of Bosnia,   the genocists of Ruanda, and the epitomes of apartheid in South Africa, these   including the third force gangsters who terrorised, maimed and slaughtered thousands   of innocent train commuters in Soweto and other places. In those who raped women   and killed innocent children, all these including the Gestapo murder squads   of Vlakplaas, the Mamaselas, De Kocks, Coetzees and those of the killing fields   of Natal. Including all that, we find that all of them "hulle is sonder   menswaardigheid". They do not have a humanness, Ubuntu, that is the problem.   Now this immediately takes me into the second part of our question what did   we do in the face of what was going on? Did we become conformists or collaborators?   What are we to do in the face or in the light of the information that has been   brought to us by the TRC? What contribution can we make to right the wrongs   and bring about a meaningful transformation of our beloved democratic South   Africa? What are our objectives and plans - practical to avoid future recurrence   of these historic tragedies? Are we to play the fiddle while Rome is burning?   Or are we to stand shivering like a hypnotised rabbit before the python of apartheid?   What are we going to do? That is the question. What practical things are we   to do? From my tradition of faith and culture I cannot have the freedom of choice   and this is based on the concept of communalism that I subscribe to. It is almost   impossible for me to isolate or distance myself from the suffering of the human   society. We have a very good saying that was written by ...[inaudible] "When   you bleed, my handkerchief is full of thy blood, when you twitch with pain,   I feel the sting in my loins for you and me, dear black brother, are but one."   That sums up our involvement. There is no way that we could not have been involved.   We believe here in the commonness of humanity that we all share, we believe   in the validity of the human person, we subscribe to the concept that we are   all an integral part of each other, we hold onto the philosophical concept of   the other for our being in the world presupposes the existence of the other.   We are therefore sharing the commonness and the intertwines of aspirations,   interests and objectives, purpose and hope. Thus the suffering of one unit of   the whole affects me for I am because you are and you are because I am. 
This puts me into now the final phase, the philosophy that we come to think   that it is inevitable for this country to resort to that philosophy. Let us   not forget this very vital point that the TRC is founded on the universal concept   of truth, justice, prudence and righteousness. These are in turn attributes   of the philosophical concept of Ubuntu, which is a modality of the divine spirit.   Here we find that we are to carry this philosophy into the next century and   centuries to come. Let me say in short after the war, the two Germanys were   divided, I mean Germany was divided into two. A wall was built, and now a wall   has been broken. For the communist Germany to mix with the capitalist Germany,   they are enjoying the same economic resources, but recently it was published   that the mixing does not work. They can not just go on smoothly, as envisaged.   Why? Let us note here that Germany, the citizens of Germany, they need a philosophy,   a philosophy that they can all subscribe to. A philosophy that can be touching   to the Jew, to the German, to the Hindu, to the Moslem, the black and white,   a philosophy that is making us to start to recognise each other as an integral   part of each other and not just to harmonise. I can harmonise with my dog, it   can lick my lips, it can jump and caress, but the fact is that I am not an integral   part of a dog, it is still a dog and therefore we need a philosophy that can   bring us together.
This is the philosophy my Lord that I wish to present at this moment in short.   It is a philosophy that comes from my faith that on the day of the creation   when the spirit of the Lord moved over the waters, it disseminated the waters   and disseminated a consciousness in the waters and there was life. And the same   spirit came up when God created man when he said let us make man in our own   image and likeness, he modelled him from the slime of the earth, from the dust   of the earth, and made a statue and what did he do? He breathed into the nostrils   and as soon as that breath entered the nostrils, man became a living soul..   Therefore he shared something, something in common with God, for he carried   the God head in him. And which is when we asked is a human, is a person there   a human man, a statue, a mud, a slime of the earth but as soon as God came "ntu"   in our language, that "ntu" meaning God and which is you would say   Jehovah, the same as you would say Nata in Egyptian, the same as you would say   in all the various languages.