Desmond Tutu: Let spirit of forgiveness prevail

Fakir Syed Aijazuddin Anyone who makes New Year’s resolutions and believes that such promises will be kept is halfway to becoming a politician. Resolutions (like the second marriages of Winston Churchill’s definition) are the triumph of hope over experience.
Only the brave will recall the outgoing year, dying, un-mourned under a pall cast by Covid. One death, though not Covid-related, has left humanity diminished. The South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu passed away on 26 December, the day after the anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ.
Archbishop Tutu’s memory is laden with honours, amongst them the Nobel Peace Prize which he won in 1984. He had been nominated thrice before.  To its discredit, the Nobel Prize Selection Committee settled on Tutu not as its first choice but as a safe second bet. It felt Nelson Mandela (then in jail on Robben Island) would have been too controversial. Mandela would be awarded the same prize, nine years later, in 1993.
Destiny linked their names to a common cause. Desmond Tutu used every platform to rail against the repressive apartheid regime; Nelson Mandela endured incarceration for 27 years as its most prominent black victim. They met after thirty-five years in February 1990, when the white PM de Klerk released Mandela from captivity. Mandela became South Africa’s first black president, Tutu the ‘people’s archbishop.’ Mandela recognised Tutu’s powers of conciliation when in 1994, as president, he nominated Desmond Tutu on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).  ‘The TRC adopted a threefold approach: the first being confession, with those responsible for human rights abuses fully disclosing their activities, the second being forgiveness in the form of a legal amnesty from prosecution, and the third being restitution, with the perpetrators making amends to their victims.’ The TRC heard confessionals from a gamut of victims and perpetrators for over two years, between 1996 and 1998. On many occasions, Tutu broke down, moved by the accounts of brutality – by white against black, even black against black.