Listening to the silent majority

[87]

I had long wondered what the Soweto Sofasonke Party was about, because lately this organisation seemed to have branched out towards other townships. I was aware of trouble in places such as Kwa Thema and Lekoa. ‘The Sofasonke at one time used to convene meetings in

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churches,’ the mayors told me,’ but they could not fill them up. Today, if Sofasonke organizes a meeting they fill up an entire stadium. Sofasonke is the opposite of UDF, Azapo and other radicals. Sofasonke aims at the very young, often even at children, and the elderly. Now, if someone told us that Desmond Tutu had filled up the Orlando stadium, we would become seriously worried. All Tutu mobilizes in Soweto is one single church. Doesn't that tell the story of the man, heralded around the world as the voice of the black people? Tutu is hardly a chosen leader of the people. He was appointed by the church and next promoted to world fame by the Nobel committee. Tutu wasn't ordained by the people of Soweto, or for that matter, the people of the Cape, his own back yard, where he resides as prelate of the Anglican Church in his palace in a white area of Cape Town. At times he lives in Soweto, when he is not crusading overseas against us.’

At this point I informed the mayors of my own experiences in Crossroads, and other Cape areas, and what black people there had told me about Tutu's behaviour in foreign lands. I told them that even now, in 1989, the churchmen of the Western Cape Council of Churches, consisting of some 160 churches in Tutu's region, remained adamantly opposed to all forms of sanctions, because they directly affect blacks at the Cape. ‘If anybody is a mentally balanced person,’ the mayors maintained, ‘he would not make irrational statements about the people being ready to suffer and undergo even more hardship through sanctions and a boycott overseas. People are too often already starving as a direct result of sanctions and disinvestment. Blacks in Cape Town, and even at Jan Smuts, have demonstrated against Tutu with banners and placards saying, “Give us jobs!”’

By mid-May 1989, Desmond Tutu and company^65. once more visited Washington to whip up support for sanctions. It is their view - and no doubt it carries a grain of truth - that sanctions are neither a good or a bad idea, but that the boycott is the only effective strategy to weaken Pretoria's persistence in ignoring the will of the black majority. Now we all are aware that human history is replete with examples of costly disasters and harrowing chapters of misery and poverty. The apartheid saga of South Africa is but one example. However, the professionalising of human intraspecific aggression - in which the super-powers are true pro-

65. Accompanied by Frank Chikane, Alan Boesak and Beyers Naudé

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fessionals - has a longer history than most human enterprises. The record of incompetence is perhaps the worst in this sphere. In the case of South Africa this pertains both to those against sanctions and to the advocates of sanctions. Tutu managed to stir up so much emotion in Washington in May 1989, again, that ‘even conservative Democratic Senator David Boren, who until now has been leaning away from a fresh round of sanctions, enthusiastically endorsed the church leaders' carefully selected financial sanctions.’^66. The travelling religious leaders also made an effort to change their tune, at least to some extent since they must have become aware that an increasing number of blacks in South Africa consider them to be engaged in unreasonably destructive activity.

Of course, most people interpret aggressive behaviour as linked to causing physical injury or harm to another individual or a group of individuals. But then, there is aggressive behaviour in the form of imposing sanctions on a weaker party, that causes hunger, poverty, deprivation and above all, psychological pain and damage on a large scale to millions of people in other lands. This brings us back to the earlier-discussed perceptions of intention and intentionality. Perhaps Desmond Tutu and his church comrades do assume that they contribute to the struggle for liberation by causing economic hardships for the government of South Africa and thus pressure it into making concessions to blacks on reform and the elimination of apartheid. Who is fooling whom? The fool is the man who embraces a far-too-simple explanation for complex phenomena he doesn't really understand. If the phenomena are unpleasant and if simple action, any action, proves to be abusive, the bloody fool reasons, ‘so much the better’.

66. David Braun from Washington, in The Star