Albie Sachs
About thirty years ago I wrote that all revolutions are impossible until they happen when they become inevitable. Nobody gave South Africa a chance. After three centuries of racial domination, that included slavery, colonialism, and apartheid; how could blacks and whites live together as equals in one country? Whites owned nearly ninety percent of the land and controlled ninety-five per cent of productive capital. Black leaders were in prison, their organizations prohibited. Enmities built up over centuries seemed to be insurmountable. People like Nelson Mandela, Ahmed Kathrada and Dennis Goldberg were locked up for life because they fought for a united, non-racial democracy. They were looked upon as impossible dreamers completely out of touch with reality.
Now the changes that came to South Africa are taken for granted, as though they were inevitable.
Three hundred years of bitter conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland seemed equally destined to go on for another three hundred years. Yet now there has been a settlement in that troubled part of the world. I’m happy to say that the South African experience of converting the impossible into the inevitable played a direct role in encouraging the adversaries in Northern Ireland to find mechanisms for peace.
There are many other examples in my lifetime of what seemed to be completely intractable conflicts and eternal hatreds finding resolution where none had seemed possible. I remember reading a beautiful novel by Romaine Rolland dealing with the deep rage, built up over decades that the Germans and the French had for each other. His French character was called Germaine and his German one Franz. At that stage there had been two bitter conflicts in which millions of French and German lives had been lost. World War ii then went on to produce yet a third occupation of Paris by German troops: deportations, resistance, and vicious retaliation. Rolland’s forceful vision of brotherhood between the Germans and the French seemed to be in ruins. Yet within a decade Germany and France were to come together to create the foundation of the European Union. The impossible had become the inevitable.
Similar stories can be told about Japan and the United States of America, and Japan and its Asian neighbors. The fact is that there is no problem that humans make that humans cannot unmake. The processes and changes will be as varied as humankind itself. The conjunction of political, physical, legal and economic dimensions and intersections involved will certainly differ
The central argument in this book is that sustainable peace requires a revolution in the relationship between adversarial sides. It is not enough for warring sides to put down their weapons; they must pick up new mutually inclusive identities. ‘Transformative recognition’ is one term for this revolution in relationship. In South Africa, picking up on the rich philosophical traditions in African society, we have a similar word for transformative recognition – Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is a long-held philosophical notion based on the conception that I am a person because you are a person; that I can’t separate my humanity from an acknowledgement of your humanity. It presupposes that I don’t strengthen my personality through isolating myself from you; but on the contrary, I benefit from my association with you. My dignity rests on yours.
Our Constitution in South Africa reflects this spirit of Ubuntu. Millions of ordinary people, particularly poor people, in spite of all the insults, humiliations, injustices, and violence wreaked upon them, never lost their sense of Ubuntu, and never gave up on the notion that even the oppressors, people who were behaving so abominably, could now be encouraged to become part of that wider community of free and equal South Africans. Ubuntu, at the very least, requires listening, speaking and dialogue – it gives a voice to everybody; everybody matters.
Our experience was that peace plans that dealt strictly with laws and fences but failed to address the level of human relationship encapsulated in Ubuntu, were destined to failure. It is insufficient to produce what Peace Studies Scholar Johan Galtung described as ‘Negative Peace,’ the temporary absence of violence. Rather, ‘Positive Peace,’ the conditions for human flourishing, becomes necessary for enduring change.
Positive Peace requires that all involved in a conflict lucidly understand that their dignity is directly dependent on the dignity of others. That is why Ubuntu in South Africa went beyond the concern for fellow human beings on hard times that any decent person should have. Not only the dignity of the desperately poor was at stake. The dignity of all South Africans was assailed when millions of our fellow human beings were compelled to live as homeless wanderers in the country of their birth.
The importance of this cannot be over estimated. We drafted the South African Bill of Rights as essentially Ubuntu writ large. This meant that the Constitution not only had to speak to those who were fearful of being dispossessed by arbitrary means of what their predecessors had arbitrarily acquired. The
Calls for Ubuntu or Transformative Recognition in the midst of intractable conflict may seem like barely audible voices in a desert of alienation and rage. But even in the worst times of apartheid, there were people whose words transcended the battle lines. I find the very same spirit and thoughtfulness in documents such as the Nusseibeh-Ayalon Agreement, written in 2002 between a leading Palestinian academic and the former head of Israel’s Shin Bet Security Agency, which called for Palestinians and Jews to recognize the other’s historic rights with respect to the same land. They could be found in Peace-presaging gatherings of Catholic and Protestant women in Northern Ireland who collectively drafted a National Action Plan for the advancement of women. Today they are encountered in brave voices of Turkish intellectuals who call upon their country to face up to and understand the suffering of their Armenian brothers and sisters.
Whether you call it Ubuntu or Transformative Recognition, it is clear that it will have to be both the agency and the product of any long-lasting peace. The chapters in this volume are clarion calls for action around this essential topic. The authors pick up on what South Africans learned (and are still learning) through many hard years: that lasting sustainable change in a conflict requires something that goes beyond formal negotiations to achieve a lawfully-regulated accommodation, fundamental though that may be. It necessitates a profound alteration in the way we imagine one another and of how we imagine ourselves.
My great hope is that people involved in the struggles in the area covered by this volume not only come to understand the immediate assistance that transformative recognition can give to ending hostility, conflict and suffering. It is that they begin to imagine, even if far down the line, the enormously rich bounty, both material and spiritual, that could flow from active cooperation between the former warring groups. Instead of being at war with each other, geography and history would be aligned in integrated programs where the benefit of one would be the benefit of the other. Imagine the upsurge in cultural life, tourism and the economy in general. Indeed, transforming mutual abhorrence into mutual interactivity is precisely the impossible that can and must become the inevitable in Palestine/ Israel.