Lessons in justice and peace from South Africa

The most important lessons we learn in life almost always come from the people we encounter along the way. Forty years ago, I met a man who opened my mind to vistas I had never seen before.

We met in Richmond, Va., at a theological school of the Presbyterian Church that trained people for educational ministry, where he was a classmate. At the time, we knew him as Jonathan Masango, although later, when he returned to his native South Africa, he reclaimed Maake as his given name. He had a power and presence well out of proportion to his slight stature. From him, I and my other sheltered white American classmates learned about a culture we could not imagine and the meaning of justice.

Those were the years of apartheid, a systematic policy of racial separation and marginalization, enforced by detentions, beatings and death. Like millions of his fellow Black South Africans, he and his family had suffered under the white regime. In a 2014 interview, he recalled how his family was forcibly relocated six times during his childhood, the result of a policy to regulate urban areas.

“The trucks would come in the morning and bulldoze our houses, then took us and our furnishings to our new digs by the end of the day,” he said.

There was a fierce resolve in Maake to return to South Africa and work for the end of apartheid, and although you could tell he was bitter about the way his people were treated, he was fully committed to achieving justice with peace, and he never spoke with hatred. His very presence each day was a lesson to us of events happening half a world away.

Maake Masango did return to South Africa and held positions as a pastor and an executive in the Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa. It would be 12 years before his hopes and those of his countrymen were realized and apartheid was swept away. In a fitting note of justice, he became a professor in the theological faculty of the previously all-white University of Pretoria.

I thought of Maake last week because it was the 90th birthday of another South African religious leader, Desmond Tutu. A Nobel Peace laureate and the emeritus archbishop of the Anglican Church in South Africa, Tutu was the spiritual and moral counterpart to Nelson Mandela’s political leadership. Like Gandhi of India and Martin Luther King Jr., of America, Tutu forcefully and successfully advocated the way of political change through nonviolent means.

When apartheid ended, whites were fearful of violent retribution for the long years of oppression to which they had been party, but Mandela rejected that path. He created a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, at which the crimes against Blacks would be made public but with the olive branch of forgiveness extended to those who confessed. There was only one man who could lead such an effort, Desmond Tutu.

As Maake said in the 2014 interview, it was the only way a peaceful transition could have come to South Africa.

“The future at the time was very clouded,” he said. “Blacks were impatient, the military was fearful, extreme parties wanted more punishment of those affiliated with the apartheid regime. It was Mandela’s dream and Tutu gave it the theological framework.”

Tutu is now retired and a revered figure. Maake Masango is also retired and was granted emeritus status from the University of Pretoria. South Africa’s democracy, in which whites and Blacks live together, has endured. Yet challenges remain.

A mural of Tutu in Cape Town was defaced with racist graffiti just before his 90th birthday was observed. The mural was restored, but clearly the racial impasse caused by apartheid has not been restored after almost 30 years. That is a sobering thought for us in a nation in which even the phrase Black Lives Matter can result in bitter political and cultural divides.

But if Maake and his people can find a better way than violence, even after all they endured, it must be possible for us as well. As he told his interviewer, “I had to learn to love the people I hated in order to witness to the gospel and live into the new future.”

Cary McMullen is a retired journalist. He is the former religion editor of The Ledger.