The ‘Black’ Preacher and Social Transformation

Seven social sins: politics without principle, wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice

--Mohandas Gandhi in Young India, 22-10-1925

A preacher as transformer is material instance where words do make a man. As it is said, a preacher without words is mute, a handless painter. Words are a vessel of verification to that clothed speaker used to draw vectors of direction; words hanging in the air as colours seen depicting anguish, expectations, hope of kairos, and healing. They open doors to possibilities of what has been and possibly could be from canvas of what is. In them is a reflection of how life is and a shadow for hiding what is best left unsaid. A man becomes a sum total of a fuller human being when his words whisk thought into action. How people react to such words says sufficiently enough about acquired abilities and organic blessings of the proprietor of words. Reactions are most often an indication of where hearers are positioned in stations of life. For some they could hear a signpost of what has been an honoured life of privilege by dint of metonymical make-up; while for others it is a poignant reminder of their rights removed from a safety net of being a human being. A role of that preacher is immense if it is to retain its urgency for the latter and deplorable in its provocative stance for the former. In those rare breeds is a developed coherent worldview encapsulating the signpost and reminder mentioned above. A people grow and develop to richer society if life is lived courageously*, as it should be for those condemned to repression. In crucible of material welfare the dream is action. The patriotism of such a man and support of people then mobilised is compelled by conscience whose heartbeat mirrors collective liberation. Any idea of death in pursuance of that dream-as-action, is sacrifice at alter of what makes a man fuller as a human being. Most evident in struggle for political cause is a premise of principle. A wealth of freedom attained would be the result of work clear in ambition, ambition as forged from knowledge of a man in his moral deportment. Qualities of leadership delineate their purview of individual operation within radar of these Gandhian seven social sins, and more. Needless to say, they are a garden of toil and reward and require constant work of and for self-purification, valuing those scrounging in activity seemingly mundane to an outsider. In quintessence, it evokes Gramscian distinction of the ploughman and manure. Where most want to be a ploughman, on the other hand humility in leadership would deem it a higher honesty to labour as manure fertilising terra firma. On the same page, Desmond Tutu beheld us to „beat our swords into ploughshares.‟ Those so depicted, as transformers, action men, moral leaders, have a need also for possessing an intellectual discipline second to none which is not far removed from a beatific vision in the present life. In this conflationary highway of reason (logos) and conviction-in-grace, the ideological battle waged is thereby turned to be understandable not only for the leaders but most notably, those who rely on words from transformative preachers. Ideology is taken to task with rational tools sharpening consequent tactics adopted to fight the fight through liberation† theology, whose

* „Some were dreadfully insulted, and quite seriously, to have held up as a model such an immoral character as A Hero Of Our Time; others shrewdly noticed that the author had portrayed himself and his acquaintances…A Hero of Our Time, gentlemen, is in fact a portrait but not of an individual; it is the aggregate of the vices of our whole generation in the fullest expression,‟ quoted from, Mikhail Lermontov, Geroy nashego vremeni. USA: Everyman Library, 1995. † The kind of liberation Toni Morrison accords valiancy, „when all the wars are over and there will never be

another one. The people in the shadow are happy about that. At last, at last, everything‟s ahead. The smart ones say so and people listening to them and reading what they write down agree: Here come the new. Look out.

There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff…History is over, you all, and

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identification is crystallised in this offering, “He has sent me to bring glad tidings to the poor, to proclaim liberty to the captives” (Luke 4:18-19). A word of explanation on usage of theology is pinched from Theology: The Basics. “What is theology? The word has been used by Christians since the third century to mean „talking about God‟…[and] „talking about God in a Christian way‟” (2004: i). It could not be any different to be an onlooker on words coming and carrying dreams of all into heartbeat of conscience scrolled in Holy Book deliverance. A critique of the role of the black preacher operates in background of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, racism; and the tools to counter these will be specified as analysis of modernism („reason, progress and science‟), theological charity and development. What place is there to bring into play a Cartesian emphasis of separating what is known from the knower while blending individual experience to the self, beliefs held and times consumed by the individual? This paper attempts to reckon with this. The following discussion examines a role of religious responsibility in social struggle. It focuses its geographic perspective on the North American and South African contexts, in the 1960s and 1970s-80s respectively. For closer scrutiny here, is an address of importance of those figures whose robes have covered the cause for justice, truth, and love. Attention is paid on three discourses speeches by Dr. Revd. Martin Luther King (MLK) and a equally three dissertations by Archbishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu (DMT) representative of their virtue, love of truth and passion for their profession. They embrace the oratorical and written genres of biblical extemporisation. Common features take account of documents corroborating insistence on engaged narration. It is submitted, there is no claim to biography or a hidden hagiolatry of these black preacher men. In the main, it will be argued their mortalised fame stands on alignment of their destiny to shared transformation of society. Indication of their seminal influence is manifestation of their ability to frame goals and a desire of society‟s ills with their individuated gifts; cultivated endowments transcending sectional divides, merging secular humanism and spiritual grace. And precisely because they comprehended the gist of their time, its history and likely effect on the future, they acted accordingly. In consuming their times, they consumed everything essential to their strategies; it meant aligning with specific interests for particular purposes. To paraphrase Waldo Emerson, „what is good for knowledge, is good for virtue‟, their virtue as they so synthesized it with a) their religious convictions according to the Holy Book, b) the objectives of their multifarious communities, c) political movements of the time, such as the National Advancement for Coloured People in North America and the African National Congress and Pan African Congress in South Africa. As a fact then, their faith was political, standing between the „truths‟ of biblical rendition and virtue from struggle of the browbeaten. Most confidently, these individuals sway and twirl kismet of language as a means to communicate what is uppermost in their aims, with the seal of their individualism. A banner lifted aloft in their tongue and actions, expresses throughout their lives this idea from the Verdas, „in the midst of the sun is the light, in the midst of the light is truth and in the midst of truth is the imperishable being‟. In brief, engagement of these iconic figures seeks to highlight how they merely not name conscientious character as much as define wills of their respective constituencies. In their cohesive messages, tacked in sails of declaration for equality is an assemblage of wishes of millions, wretcheds of the earth. At the same instance, one notes these black preachers retained a singular identity marking their greatness. In considering the writings and speeches from MLK and DMT, we lay bare a glass darkly they intended to till over: hypocrisy of their governments to being signatories of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights while practicing segregationist policies at home; paradox of group allocation of civil liberties at wanton disregard of other social groups; immorality of placing under law exercise of l’amour relationship across supposed „racial‟ differences, which are nothing more than metonyms which Bantu Biko, to be converse on later, fervently fought against‡. The instruments they used, nonviolent

everything‟s ahead at last. In halls and offices people are sitting around thinking future thoughts.‟ Jazz. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, p. 7. ‡ As DMT, says about him, „He had a far too profound respect for persons as persons to want them under ready-

made, shop-soiled, secondhand categories‟ (1994: *).

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resistance is a form of pacifism mixed with striving for peacemaking, as hallowed to a degree in „historic peace churches‟ such as Mennonites, the Church of the Brethren and the Society of Friends. Moreover is an acknowledgment of their character revealing audacious men with disciplined calmness in a face of fatality and ominous signs of disillusionment in their communities. In essence, we pay homage to their mutual unwavering deference to righteousness. Part of the explanation is located in their familial roots. A podium in which they stood was decorated with passion for wisdom, vividness of wide-reaching understanding of the human condition (warts and all), and range of subsistence in condition of absurd apartheid – apartness, an inert exertion to fortify economic control, maintain racial separation while broadening white domination . MARTIN LUTHER KING MLK: Martin Luther King Jr. was born, nine years after Armistice, into the family of a minister in Atlanta extending a family lineage connecting him to an African–American religious tradition. Even before, his grandparents had transformed nearby Ebenezer Baptist Church from a careworn congregation in the 1890s into one of black Atlanta‟s most prominent institutions serving not only needs of the immediate congregation, but extending their generosity to all and sundry. It thus came to pass MLK saw his father and grandfather illuminated as appealing role models who combined their rhetorical endowment with social activism. It needs to be mentioned also, his family ties to the Baptist Church extended far back to the slave era. His great-grandfather, described as „an old slavery time preacher‟ and an „exhorter,‟ entered the Baptist Church during the period of religious and moral fervour which swept the nation decades before the Civil War. His birth was couched in a crib of portentous world events. A mere ten months after MLK‟s birth, the Western world succeeded in mismanaging itself into a mammoth economic depression. Most obviously, the depressions within the African–American community was always more severe where you found skilled blacks debarred from their trades and thus consign to underside of the labour pool. Like everything in America of the 1920s, broad-scale segregation meant hardship had a pecking order. As a counter-measure against this, black folks were constantly migrating, by mule and train-dance, to different parts of the United States in search of personal dignity and financially viability, it is generally estimated more than two million moved northward from 1890-1920. The benefits of American urbanization and industrialization had bypassed most black people. Material contentment was closely conjoined to racial stigma in a country where a majority had bulwark state machinery working for them against a minority. While tired black adults yearned for a better day for their children. MLK‟s dream world, coined in liberation for his people, began its steady march toward consciousness from consequences of this period. An absurd dissonance from the drumbeats of racism fairly increased this natural tempo of striving for black liberation. The contextual underpinning of MLK and the civil rights movement are stark in their emergence. They surfaced as a result of criticising everyday acts of discrimination. Reactions directed at singular indices insulting black dignity were isolated. People simply demanded assorted rights of recognition without which their selfhood could be realigned into one be-ing. It is a reason why such personal and autobiographical literary works as Notes of a Native Son, Invisible Man, Native Son, Ann Petry‟s The Street, Chester Himes and œuvres of Langston Hughes became so fetchingly popular and announced arrival of voices from the margins. Vitally important is to bear in mind that these texts by distinguished men of belles-letters of the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, namely Phyllis Wheatley‟s Poems on Various Subjects (first published book by a person of African-descent in North America, 1773), The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavas Vasa, Written by Himself (first slave autobiography in American letters in 1789§); Jacob‟s

§ „The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast [of the Nigeria], was the sea, and a slave

ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror, when I was carried on board. I was immediately handled, and tossed up to see I were sound, by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill. Their complexions, too, differing so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they

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Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. All these justified as those, in the same way possessing, indices of civilisation itself unlike the silence that isolated them from convention; „you taught me language,‟ says Caliban to Prospero, „and my profit on‟t is I know how to curse‟. In the instance there was any such manifestation of political creativity geared to a cause, was in the Harlem Renaissance of 1900-1940. At first there was no organised structure and goals driving this reactionary cauldron. Most possibly, productive means of material life for black southerners stifled by an economic depression and attendant dispossession of their goods, by banks and merchants, and coupled with legislation outrightly antagonistic to civic virtues of black Americans, an upswelling of dissidence was to be expected. One sees in a mind's eye what it meant to be expected to subsist on products of an unsubsidised piece of agricultural land of forty acres and a mule, and then being forced to uproot and trek to overcrowded industrialised settings where employment was scarce and largely reserved for specific population groups. And where social welfare and state expenditure on some social groups was disproportionate. It is a period far removed from the upswing decade of the 60s when there could be utterance of an emerging black middle class, urbanised, relatively well-educated and skillfully employed. The strongest argument for this from Cornel West in Keeping Faith, “in this regard, the civil rights movement, prefigured the fundamental concerns of the American New Left: linking private troubles to public issues, accenting the relation of cultural hegemony to political control and economic exploitation” (1993: 278).

In her book Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., Mary King offers the following comments on the importance of the church to making MLK, Forged in the fires of southern slavery, the African–American church had been the main source of sustenance and deliverance for blacks stretching back into the nineteenth, eighteenth and seventeenth centuries and was the one institution that was never controlled by white people. The theology that was shaped under slavery stressed God‟s beneficence toward all people, and the equality of all persons under a loving God. A tradition of popular civil resistance was fostered without any artificial separation of politics from religion. This mingling of resistance and faith was the tradition that had nourished King‟s grandfather and father, and then fed him. When he stood up…King brought with him the collective vocabulary of the black church and a legacy of fortitude that had been centuries in the making. (1999:98-99). Her view of a role of the black church in America is corroborated by W.E.B. Dubois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), “three things characterized this religion of the slave, the preacher, the music, and the frenzy. The preacher is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil. A leader, a politician, an orator…an intriguer, an idealist, - all these he is, and ever, too, the centre of a group of men, now twenty, now a thousand in number. The combination of a certain adroitness with deep–seated earnestness, of tact with consummate ability, gave him his preeminence, and helps him maintain it” (1990:138). Given this catholic responsibility borne on shoulders of a black preacher, we are called upon to appreciate MLK‟s core values passed down generationally to Rev. Jesse L. Jackson who was similarly able to relate the mandates of the faith to the mandates of the day” (Ebony, 1993). The setting of where he came into sight and operated is packed with earth-shaping events: ruling reversing school discrimination in Brown v. Board of Education judgment, a period of frazzled nerves caused by disunity of national psyche from aftermath of World War II and Korean War, McCarthy witch-hunts whose casualty included the renascence idol Paul Robeson, diplomatic checkmate of USSR-USA over the Bay of Pigs and industrial actions everywhere grounded by war-time high cost of living. Results were a decade of incendiary assassination, the 1960s. To champion his beliefs he promoted a stance of nonviolent resistance and used his speeches to reveal a truth of racism. Above all, he believed in Christian principles of love, hope and forgiveness, recalling, at an earlier period, his spiritual predecessor and mentor, Gandhi. His badge of honour was earned in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. A crowning achievement of his eloquence and articulate message is found in two pieces of homiletic lore, „I Have a Dream‟ and „Letter from a

spoke (which was very different from any I had ever heard), united to confirm me in this belief,‟ quoted from Arna Botemps (ed.) Great Slave Narratives. Boston: Beacon, 1869, p. 27.

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Birmingham Jail‟ which, in the main, sought to argue against an inequity of bigotry; as accentuated by Jean Toomer in Cane (1969) “O th sin white folks ‟mitted when they made the Bible lie”. In other words, from this world, the Jesuit priest E. Mveng, specifies in Valentin Yves Mudimbe‟s The Invention of Africa”. Unfortunately the West is less and less Christian; and Christianity, for a long time, has been a product of export for Western civilization, in other words, a perfect tool for domination, oppression, the annihilation of other civilizations. The Christianity preached today, not only in [apartheid] South Africa, but by the West as power and civilization, is far, very far from the gospel. The question is therefore posed radically: what can be the place of Third World peoples in such a Christianity? (172-73)

The former, „I Have a Dream‟, is now certified in annals of speech-making as a definitive moment in pronouncement on liberty and exhortation of humanness in all offsprings of Creation. The year 1963, patented by the March on Washington and passing of W.E.B Du Bois comprised centennial celebration of signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln in 1863 and signified passing of an era with the death of Pan-African midwife, Du Bois across the Atlantic Ocean in postcolonial Ghana. He delivered the speech before the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963 as a major address of the March on Washington for rights accorded to human beings. „I Have a Dream‟ unveils, as an invisible man, his blueprint for transforming American society in a language steeped in inclusivity of integration. We have here a positive epochal mania for turning hurtful laws of the state into fundamental nature of the scripture praising potential of what it means to realise „the good in each of us‟ and „law of love‟. How is this law proscribed within paradigm of this discussion? Heraclitus offers a forward path of command in Socrates to Sartre. “Because God is Reason and since God is the One, permeating all things…God is the universal Reason which holds all things in unity and orders all things to move and change in accordance with thought or principles, and these principles and thought constitute the essence of law” (1993: 14). His „Dream‟ and the „Letter‟ are a tour de force virtuoso mastering of collective intuition. His vision for transforming American society is rooted in hope and optimism which is not placed in a rearview mirror of the past or future, “I have a dream today” (1986: 104); an optimistic visioning of a society of racial harmony in recognition of a people existing peripheral in a social order. What is he dreaming from? The „Negro problem‟ is similar to that portraiture penned by poet Langston Hughes, Merry-Go-Round: Where is the Jim Crow section on this merry-go-round, Mister, cause I want to ride? Down South where I come from White and Colored can‟t sit side by side. Down South On the train. There is a Jim Crow car. On the bus we‟re Put in the back – but there ain‟t no back to a

merry-go-round! (1970: 192)

The seeds for his epochal speech in Washington do not come from nowhere, by inclination this history-making speech is not a case of ex nihilo nihil fit (out of nothing comes nothing). A path to Washington is a journey whose genesis is in Alabama. His „Letter from Birmingham Jail‟ is a patent of his purest enunciation of what is regarded as one of the most important documents in the international literature of nonviolent resistance and philosophies of Gandhi, DMT, Toyohiko Kagawa, and Albert Luthuli. At the time, this industrial coal and steel town epitomized arguably the worst the South had to offer, without pretense to gentility of more established antebellum cities el Norte or what historian E. Franklin Frazier termed „cities of destruction‟. It had a history of violence, not introduced de novo, passing muster in the eyes of authorities. From its smouldering flame, black liberation theology was born. The date is set, December 1, 1955. “„If Rosa Parks had not sat down, Martin Luther King would not have stood up.‟ I would stress…the beginning of the contemporary black liberation theology can be traced to…when Rosa Parks, tired from a day‟s work as a seamstress, sat down in a bus reserved for whites…she was arrested, a bus boycott was begun, and the…liberation movement began”(1995: 90-91). And so,

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following her arrest, a practice of civil disobedience sprung consisting of sit-ins, consumer boycotts, nonviolence or ahimsa (in Gandhian language) voluntary imprisonment. For MLK and his associates held forth, in this way they could press for social justice as a “focal point…in opposition to the patently unjust system of segregation…justice was shaped by a higher goal of love, that is, justice became the means of achieving love” (106). It is a sign of the man he was to sacrifice his being for fair dealing in hope of securing a palliative of love for his people and those denying him his right to be. In a caesuric intricate tone, We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was „well timed‟ according to the time table of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word „wait‟. It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This „wait‟ has almost always meant „never‟” (1986: 88).

Although he was foremost a disciple of benign confrontation, evidenced though sit-ins, one cannot ignore whiff of direct battle somewhere in the lines quoted above. In articulation it may not reach the levels of his contemporary and sometime rival, Malcolm X, but it is inescapable. It is not too incongruous with message suggested in Fanon‟s Les damnés de la terre (1961) which is striking in its warning of limits to fight against racism and colonialism. We may well hear what he says. “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word „tension‟. I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need for nonviolent gadflies” (op.cit.). History elucidates on this „tension‟ and necessity of tempering nonviolent resistance with confrontational instruments, when circumstances dictate. In an edited volume of Christianity and Modern Politics, is respectfully argued, “The principal criteria of the just-war tradition evolved over many centuries, beginning with Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine in the fourth and fifth centuries, and were elaborated by Saint Thomas Aquinas and other moral philosophers in the medieval and modern periods. A distinction was made between principles concerning the just resort to war (jus ad bellum) and those concerning just conduct in war (jus in bello) I. Just cause. A decision for war must vindicate justice itself in response to some serious evil, such as an aggressive attack. II. Just intent. The ends sought in a decision for war must include the restoration of peace with justice and must not seek self-aggrandizement or the total devastation of another. III. Last resort. The tradition shares with pacifism a moral presumption against going to war – but is prepared to make exceptions. Every possibility of peaceful settlement of a conflict must be tried before is begun. IV. Legitimate authority. A decision for war may be made and declared only by properly constituted authority (1993: 364-65).

DMT, in his Nobel homily would say, “there is no peace because there is no justice…The Bible knows nothing about peace without justice.” A test of limits to this tension is further elucidated by a second speech MLK gave in the same year. „Eulogy for the Martyred Children‟, delivered at a funeral for little girls killed at a Sunday school a month after the successful August Mach to the Capital city. The tenor of his thought in this tribute to loss of young life is a quest to find terms of coherent meaning to the act and what it could spell for the civil rights movement. What restrictions exist in to derail nonviolent resistance or stage for change of tactics? His voice weaves an invocation, stating the scene of his delivery, “the quiet of this sanctuary,” Shakespearean tangible allegory for birth, life and death, “the

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stage of history…in the brief years that they were privileged to act on this mortal stage, they played their parts…Now the curtain falls; they move through the exit; the drama of their earthly life comes to a close” (1986: 115). How is versification, nurtured by a bleeding heart, labelling the protagonists? “They are martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity…compromised with the undemocratic practices of southern dixiecrats.” Disheartily, what then is disputed is impartiality of life and man‟s actions, an “unmerited suffering…[based on] substitute [of an] aristocracy of character for an aristocracy of color.” Heady words for surviving family members. MLK offers a palliative soaring to empyreal summit. “But I hope you can find a little consolation from the universality of this experience. Death comes to every individual. There is an amazing democracy about death…life has its moments of drought and its moments of flood (1986: 115-17).” MLK speaks with clarified candour to anxiety expressed by his brethrens „whose eyes were watching God‟ for deliverance. He counsels to his detractors, eight clergymen and one rabbi, who issued a public statement denouncing as „unwise and untimely‟ the civil boycotts of MLK and his followers in Alabama, “[t]he answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just and there are unjust laws: I would agree with Saint Augustine that „an unjust law is no law at all‟. Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law…sin is separation. Isn‟t segregation an existential expression of man‟s tragic separation, an expression of his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? So I urge men to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong” (1986: 89). His catechism for religious tutoring stands alone for its unassuming tone, while insistent on what it holds high as lessons from Christian doctrine merged with straightforward talk. The exceptional men of letters that he is, his retort avoids dry officialese argot in favour of matter-of-fact speech terminology. We do well to quote him further, “I am in Birmingham because injustice is here…Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere…Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly” (ibid.). It is clear, thus, echo of such words boom as loud as the Nile when the tide is high since their broadcast afterwards, spurred masses into action and announced arrival of a Jeremiad prophet with a ray of sunshine in his brow. He placed civil disobedience in biblical tradition of Hebrew resistance in ancient Babylon and in context of early Christians with their violation of edicts of the Roman emperors. By dint of no exaggeration chose to associate himself with Saint Paul, like him, an „extremist in love‟. In a same political vein, he asked if former United States president, Thomas Jefferson was not an „extremist‟ when he wrote of seeing truth self evident to say „all are created equal‟ or the purpose of the First Amendment protecting religious and civic liberty. As was whispered on Rev. Jeremiah A Wright Jr in Ebony publication, the podium was an opportunity for “discourse…[as] a four-course meal: spiritual, biblical, cultural, prophetic” (Nov. 1993). Yet he wrote down with disappointment of dashed hopes in Montgomery when white ministers and rabbis refused to serve as a route through which state machinery could be challenged. Years of oppression had drained African–Americans of self–respect; blacks were smothering in cages of poverty while affluence surrounded them. However, his mission was not zealous self-motivated and centred. He presented himself as being at the centre of a long spectrum of options in the black community. He argued civil disobedience had a grace about it which endeared its practitioners to virtue. “I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer, and their amazing discipline in the midst of the most inhuman provocation…When these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian Heritage” (1986: 99). These are not sentences beaming with ironical equipage. They speak squarely in the route of frankness. After all, failing everything, what elevates discourse and action upwards is nothing more than reconciliatory tact of exactness. In both modern testaments, „I Have a Dream‟ and „Letter from a Birmingham Jail‟ MLK command people to what is so fetchingly unique and abiding in promise of the Emancipation Proclamation of

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1863. He discourses impassionedly America has defaulted on promise of the proclamation and made a nightmare of the American dream: It is obvious that America has defaulted on this promissory note so far as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked „insufficient funds‟”. We have come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy; now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice: now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood; now is the time to make justice a reality for all God‟s children…This sweltering summer of the Negro‟s discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality (1986:103).

Here the Right Reverend Doctor directs that every point has a turning, and to speak out for alteration of the dream. It is a citizenship document which advocates social commitment to “make real the promises of democracy”, to put into praxis “sunlit path of racial justice,” and gather together “autumn of freedom”. In his passing, the dream could not be palmed off. Such an image was nearly totally destroyed with MLK‟s assassination and riots that assailed urban metropoles. How possible could it then be for a dream to be slayed? Long ago, Hughes, in Lenox Avenue Mural, deemed such eventuality, a deferral of a blueprint. “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up? Like a raisin in the sun? / Maybe it sags / Like a heavy load. / Or does it explode?” It rewards to remember the dream is not all with the dreamer. A dream as majestic as a societal dream, demands multiple hands. Others readily avail themselves to burden themselves with the load; take a baton and run the racial marathon race as we will soon appreciate when we look through the eyes of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. As prescient as he was, MLK foretold his death. He anticipated our hesitation on likelihood of his departure from the scene. When a bullet coursed through his neck from an assassin‟s rifle, in 1968, he guided those who would mourn his passing indefinitely of the Gandhian social sin, „worship without sacrifice‟. “So in spite of the darkness of this hour we must not despair. We must not become bitter. Nor must we harbor the desire to retaliate with violence. We must not lose faith in our white brothers. Somehow we must believe that the misguided among them can learn to respect the dignity and worth of all human personality…I hope you can find some consolation from Christianity‟s affirmation that death is not the end. Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more significance. Death is not a blind alley that leads the human race into a state of nothingness, but an open door which leads man into life eternal. Let this daring faith, this great invincible surmise, be your sustaining power during these trying times” (1986: 116-117). Faith as unshakeable belief springs from desire to understand. As a St Anselm maxim goes - credo ut intelligam. An intonation, pained as it is, of a shepherd consoling his flock in its hour of need. He projects death as, indeed, a great leveler of things. He evokes, without doubt a strident tone resonating with courage; bald-faced scent which calls to mind a Busrayne inscription, „Be Bold, be bold, and evermore be bold‟.** On his corner he knew he had a cutman of moral resolution. His vocation he prepared him for his final moment on the earth of a beautiful truth. Alas, such gracious unassuming nature is sure to prick those wolves deeming it their proper to luxuriate in basic privileges denied others. A price of performing his political duty premised on principle, enjoying pleasure of sharing his offerings with conscience, and putting into service his knowledge with character. From a mantle inherited from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948), MLK (January 15 1929–April 1 1968), the truncheon passed on to fellow Nobel laureate, emeritus Archbishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu (MLK). As always, a distinguishing feature of such men, could either have been their self-willed disposition or an intervention of predestined from Creation. Goethe, in his Daimon pearly verse Urworte.Orphisch, identifies something else not too dissimilar. As on the day that gave you to this world

** DMT pierces with clarity, „Yes, the God Jesus came to proclaim was no neutral sitter on the fence‟.

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The sun stood in relation to the planets, So from that moment forth and forth you throve According to the law that ruled your birth. So you must be, from selfhood there’s no fleeing, So Sibyls, prophets long ago declared; And neither time nor any power can break it, The living pattern latent in all growth.

DESMOND MPILO TUTU DMT: The struggle against apartheid required men calibrate in moral fibre of steel which could stand up to police tyranny and territorial severance. Societies under its yoke had to be men whose action could only proceed from brazen qualities. Its organisation compelled from those bearing its brunt personalities that could clutch the monster of racism on its armada while retaining a sense of humour from this enormous task. DMT is one of these individuals whose words do make the man who realise the dream-as-action; a patriot to be certain. It is indication of his worth that he was labelled unfavourably by the Nationalist establishment as „public enemy number one.‟ Who is he? Where do his roots lie and where is his umbilical cord buried? The „Arch‟ as he is fondly called by friends and nemesis, was born in Klerksdorp, South Africa, two years after MLK and the same year of legislation of the Statute of Westminster of 1931 „equalising‟ dominion of the British Empire with her Commonwealth colonies. Klerksdorp was founded in 1837 when settlers based their trek in Schoonspruit („Clean stream‟) flowing through the town; furthermore, connected to Krugersdorp during the gold mining boom of the nineteenth-century. He comes from a humble environ, he is an offspring of a schoolteacher and domestic worker, unlike his cross-Atlantic-cousin, MLK, whose routes are traced to his middle-class background. At the age of twelve he first made acquaintance of Rabbouni Father Trevor Huddleston, an Anglican cleric in the Johannesburg Township of Sophiatown and an outspoken early critic of apartheid whose grand execution took shape in 1948 orthopraxis tapping into every conceivable societal aspects – the 1950 Population Registration Act grading people into three teleological streams on basis of implicit physiology, social bearing, descent, and deportment. On matriculation from the Johannesburg Bantu (sic) High School, he chose to follow in the footsteps of his father. He took a teacher‟s diploma at the Pretoria Bantu Normal College and studied for his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of South Africa. He was a teacher at the Johannesburg Bantu High School for a year and then moved to Munsieville High School, Krugersdorp for three years. In 1958, following the introduction of Bantu Education, the Archbishop decided to enter a Ministry in the Church of the Province of Southern Africa and became ordained at St. Peter‟s Theological College, Rosettenville. He says it is by „default‟ that he connected with the church. It is explained in the Business Day edition, “The Tutu family worshipped at St Paul‟s in Krugersdorp, a mission founded by the Community of Resurrection, to which Father Huddleston belonged. When [apartheid architect] Hendrik Verwoed introduced Bantu education, Tutu decided he could not be a „collaborator in this nefarious scheme‟ and resigned in 1955” (2006). We learn also that he became a first black Dean of St. Mary‟s Cathedral Johannesburg, in 1975, but shortly thereafter was elected Bishop of Lesotho. By this time South Africa was in the wake of turmoil, following epochal Soweto uprising of 1976 and opposition to four created homelands systems regulated through mocking carte d’identite passbook. It is at this stage DMT was persuaded to leave the Lesotho Diocese to take up the post of General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches (SACC). It was in this position, a post he held from 1978-1985, that Tutu became a national and international figure in the crusade against apartheid in whose racial institutionalisation is made out the 1951 Bantu Authorities Act substituting as starting point African „self-rule‟ in reserved homelands, for a population of nine million South Africans, with option for nominal independence. The SACC was committed to cause of ecumenism fulfilling the social responsibility of the church. Justice and reconciliation featured prominently among its priorities. He managed to pursue these goals with his trademark vitality while

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building up this institution into lifeblood of South African spiritual and political life. Notably, it is a commendation to disposition of the Arch to insist on political action beyond plain preaching. A snapshot inspection of what apartheid policy and implementation meant is appropriate. We register disproportionate treatment of the two main social groups in 1978 from an uncredited source: blacks number 19 million and whites 4.5 million, shared national income for blacks stands at less than 20 per cent and for whites 75 per cent; doctor/population for blacks is 1/44,000 and whites 1/400; teacher/pupil ratio for blacks is 1/60 and for whites is 1/22. He harboured no ground for neutrality when deed was needed. The Reverend Leo Duze takes us back, “But prominent in all this raging war, is the sin of neutrality, failure…to decide on whose side to fight. I am broken and deeply sorry to have learnt that the members of the Church of Christ are not exempted from this calamitous weakness. From the local church to the South African Council of Churches – there is a strong flow of this neutral blood” (reference**). Most eminently, he once held: If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will appreciate your neutrality (ref**)

We therefore note of him an itinerant black preacher in religious service to political liberation of his people. During this period, the 1970s-80s, described as a watershed in South African politics a lot of events unfolded as to require a man a of fortified resolve. By the same token as MLK a principled gentleman, DMT managed to carry over his congregation of unionists, youths, ordinary kinfolk to awakenings in service disguised as political treatises. By savvy handle of pulpit‟s potential, his message was institutionalised in popular parlance. His expressive elocution in township rallies, cathedral churches, and any old podium which could carry the weight of his words. In his spirited chant of Word of God was an allegorical linkage with experience of everyday local life functioning as exigency critique. Since well the Word from the Holy Text was as encroachable as a Fibonacci golden mean, to both authorities using it to justify oppression and as a resistance instrument for the oppressed, DMT straddle the median between the two to reach at truth††. More pointedly, for the authorities using bible reference to give explanation for racism, he would call upon praxis, as a good preacher would, to subvert this unsustainable thinking. A metrical weight of the spoken line could then assume a common-sensical feeling as it applied to just and unjust laws of everyday life. The verbal timbre would rise to the roof of a cathedral or in dusty sky of a township rally in supplication to armies of his listeners. An instance where his homily reached cold fever pitch, was witnessed at the funeral of slain founding father of Black Consciousness (geared to repeal galling chain of suppression for black pride, self-reliance) leader, Steve Bantu Biko (1946-1977), in a dirge entitled „Oh God, How Long Can We On?‟ in a location called Ginsburg, in the then-Bantustan homeland of Ciskei. His gaze looking deadpan ahead, he invokes in his trope Jeremiad forewarning. “I do want to issue a serious warning, a warning I am distressed to have to make…Please, please for God‟s sake listen to us while there is just possibility of reasonably peaceful change…let us move away form the precipice” (1994: *). His historical clarity, from other geopolitical incident is made known; his imperial vision has seen a dark, dark light ahead. It stems not from a hackneyed devotion to all who belong to South Africa. A caveat memo he was to repeat on occasion of his winning the Nobel lecture. To a distinguished audience, he took them back to where he came from. In his images, was seen a disconcord of sensibilities spotlighting wretcheds of the earth “reduced to sitting on soaking mattresses…God‟s children…called to pay for apartheid. An unacceptable price…[in what is, otherwise] a beautiful land, richly endowed…with radiant sunshine, golden sunshine.”

††

Jiddu Krishnamurti: „Truth is a pathless land. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection,‟ The First and Last Freedom, HarperCollins.

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“We too, like the disciples of Jesus, have been stunned by the death of another young man completely committed to the pursuit of justice and righteousness of peace and reconciliation. A young man completely committed to radical change in our beloved land. Even his worst enemies and detractors knew him as a person of utmost integrity and principle (1994:19). We hear a voice driven to document a plight with unbridled articulacy of what it deems truth of reality of its surroundings: surroundings recalling originators of black preaching, first ordained Minister Tiyo Soga in the nineteenth century. It is a time when the black preacher was an only conduit to a written word (on embossed ream of paper, gross of pens and bottle of ink) first printed in the Gutenberg printing press; masquerading as intermediaries between the illiterate (in „western norms‟) black mass and missionaries, colonial state officials and mercantile classes; delivering catechetical memorandums to those who have forgotten what it is to love and give of oneself. A word on the minister, translator and hymn composer Soga: Soga (1829-1871) is an out of the ordinary man of letters translated into his people‟s own understanding John Bunyan‟s The Pilgrims Progress into Xhosa language and the Bible; designed in 1856 in the Scottish Presbyterianism Church. He is someone whose sense of purpose defines itself through recreating missionary message for a local unbelieving audience and ministering to those already converted o the Holy Text. It seeks to transgress and reify a space between heathen and fundamentalism representation, poor and rich functional processes, rustic and urban settings and positively on sights across-denominations. In a ceremony attended by well over 15,000 persons, he ingratiates his assertion, “When we heard the news…we were struck numb with disbelief…numb with grief and groan with anguish.” Whence is starting place for this numbing grief? What rang in the halls of the gathering? A thud of dislocance identifies a young “struck down in the bloom of youth, a youthful bloom that someone wanted to see blighted.” His exclamation is moral in fervour. He flinches not in alternating a death of a Son of Creation with that of Bantu. The scripture offer him force of resolve, “the Lord hath anointed me to preach…unto the meek; he hath sent me up to the brokenhearted…to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness” (Isaiah 61: 1-4). His earnest effusion of what kind of society we have gone through and what future is there is a solidified cap on South African history and legend, a country whose geoclimate is said to resemble the bay area of San Francisco. Speaking on a different occasion drawn from Historical Papers from Wits University is captured his forthrightness in full glow, telling of what eventually happened with the glasnost in which the Berlin wall of segregation came down, on February 02 1990, and witnessed formation of the African Union plus the continental renascence.

Our aim is the ending of a vicious and evil system and the emergence of a more equitable dispensation, where black and white will live harmoniously together, where colour will be the irrelevance it is. It will be a non-racial, just and democratic South Africa. Won‟t that be wonderful –- when the enormous resources being invested to defend or oppose apartheid will be used for more creative enterprises. Then our land won‟t be the pariah amongst nations, for we be able to be a launching pad to propel not only our subcontinent but indeed all of Africa into the 21 century. Isn‟t that an exhilarating prospect? And it is going to happen (1989).

It is his tribute to requirements of his time. Nonetheless, as democratic regimes were to find out later, DMT has almost always availed himself to provide satirical medicine for convalescence of his people‟s turmoil. Nonetheless his sight could see far across the distance. His humility before his foresight was such that it could also hold still at the moment and observe what has gone wrong. He humbled himself before the “evil system” by choosing to note what it denied even when it was disaggregating justness, innocence, justice and love. He minded not only what his audience asked to know, a comment on the times where colour was relevance, but far more significantly, in the same breath, zeroed in on exaltation of an “equitable dispensation, where black and white will live harmoniously together”. It is example of inclusivity in simplicity of his paramount message. We note this Socratian dialectic of inclusivity symbolised in an arsenal to activism of black preacher‟s public role of a unifier. In an article in the Christian Century, is attested, “To understand the black preachers‟ lofty status among their own

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people and how they nurtured authentic participation with the majority on matters of public interest, one must understand how the black preacher has played the role of double agent or dual interpreter, easily a Manichean dualism on familiar terms with both good and bad. Simply put, black preachers are socially bilingual. Their ability to communicate across racial lines and the cultural expectation that they do so has given them social and political clout disproportionate to their numbers” (1989: 817). In accomplishing this role, there is of course threat of not fully representing one social group, more so where the skewed reward are concerned. He could not stick to the written script of the Holy Text, the present, “vicious” as it was at the instance had to reckon with the future. It is therefore an ordered and “harmonious” future we hear, but as well a cogent organisation of faith in humanity as it applies to South Africa‟s in the continent. We trace good judgment with no mechanical sentimentality. Humanity, ineffably complex as it is, is cited not ex priori. DMT is unambiguous, until blacks asserted their humanity and their personhood, there was not the remotest chance for reconciliation” (1994: *) It was thus his licence to decree in his sermons moral authority, launched at loft of historical consciousness, but a liturgical instruction; Ciceronian sapientia (or wisdom). An oratorical quartet of ancients, Saints „Golden Mouth‟ (Chrysostom), Ambrose, Augustine and Hilary would have concurred with him. What is this historical consciousness? From the proficient classicm of A Theology of Liberation, we surmise: Historical praxis as…[i]n the first place, charity…as an act of trust, a going out of one‟s self…a relationship with others…love is the nourishment and the fullness of faith, the gift of one‟s self to the Other, and invariably to others. This is the foundation of the praxis…of…active presence in history…Finally, the rediscovery of the eschatological dimension in theology has also led us to consolidate the central role of historical praxis. Indeed, if human history is above all else an opening to the future, then it is a task, a political occupation, through which we orient an open ourselves to the gift which gives history its transcendent meaning (1974: 06-08).

Gustavo Gutiérrez, founder of liberation theology in South America, is on the mark in stressing history‟s ultimate responsibility, which translates to, “if human history is above all else an opening to the future.” It partly what DMT was engaged on at Ginsberg, when he addressed those gathered to pay homage to organic intellectual, Biko. It was not simply to offer his resources, and those of the church institution, in service of a fellow traveller in perilous voyage of liberation, but to calm waters, so to speak. He would fulfill this role countlessly throughout the ensuing 70s and 80s decades. A death of Biko, certainly not a cardboard martyr, was a measure of moral bankruptcy of the apartheid government, since, as DMT affirmed in his Nobel lecture, “it is a moral universe that we inhabit, and a good and right equity mater in the universe of the God we worship.” Earlier on in the sermon, „Oh, Lord How Long Can We Go On?‟, DMT drew a topical thought of convergence between Biko and the Lord Saviour‟s predicament to show the persecution of those who stand for justice-love is nothing an old chapter. “The powers of darkness…had done their worst. They had killed the Lord of life himself. But that death was not the end. That death was the beginning of a glorious life, the resurrection life. That death was the death of death itself for…Christ lives for ever and ever (1994:19). And to be sure, this patterned regulation of what is ever-living in parametres of integrity and unjust in malevolence of political structure, arrant lies, wanton murder of righteousness fighters, is a core tenet of liberation theology. During deliverance of this dirge sermon, DMT was saying to his „flock of combatants‟, his reasoned anguished cry, was a foundation they were laying for defeating an illogic of racism. They would emerge from there at hand to carry out meaning flowing out of the Word-as-truth, this from a man „who lives in service of God and of his people.‟ In there would be a shelter in the Creator‟s embrace of protection. How would this be accomplished? In synthesis by innovative input into the Holy Book to suffering and lot of the black mass, is a consistent theme of vocal exclamatory for taking to task bondage to an evil arrangement that had lasted more than 340 years. Once again, DMT in his Nobel address is on par in epitomising reason for this suffering. “We have the capacity to feed ourselves several times over, but we are daily haunted by the spectacle of the gaunt dregs of humanity shuffling along in endless queues…[even though we

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were] created so that we should form the human family, existing together because we were made for one another.” To preach for these black gentle-men of the cloth was more than exegesis, not merely interpreting the Book for their period. It obligated of them and their listeners to have emotional investment which could be channeled appropriately to immediate action. It is this quality in them, celebrating African allegories and metaphors, which rendered them „folksy‟, like your regular old-time preacher whose endearment is all-drawing. We take home with us from the article, The Activism of Interpretation: Black Pastors & Public Life, “The roots of black preachers‟ prerogative and power are in the soils of African religion…The African reality of a wholistic as opposed to a secular and a sacred life, the place of the black church as sole as well as „soul‟ refuge during [apartheid and Jim Crow iron curtain] made the preacher the symbolic head and heart of his people” (1989: 817). The preacher is a transformer, transcend appellation of just spiritual caregiver. Therefore, MLK and DMT (and martyred Bantu Biko) would be exemplars of those black preachers who circumvent boundaries of race and its negative corollary, an inferiority complex. The other oracle they would get out of, live through would be the one metaphorically laid down on Mount Sinai; Khephra Burns phrases this lyrically in Essence magazine, to the Arch could with adequate modicum be said in him has “traditionally been the prophet of vindication for the oppressed, and our most eloquent expressions of Black…power. Rather than wait for Armageddon…[he has] led the Lord‟s advance guard –- the downtrodden and oppressed –- into the battle for freedom, justice and equality” (1992). Finding their potency in an African force of being, is conduit to a „return to the source‟, as Amilcar Cabral writes, from Manning Marable, “call for blacks involved in anti-colonial activism…to recognize the resilience and transformative power of indigenous cultural forms and practices…To appreciate the collective lessons learned, to consolidate and archive our voices and aspirations, is to construct the living the living architecture of a people‟s collective memory. From that architecture, newer, more hopeful and creative visions of freedom may flow” (website source). This is a given, at least until deliverance of parousia when the doctrine is made real with the second coming of the Son. Until this parousia or second arrival is with us, these analytically predictive words from Rev Allan Boesak in Walking on Thorns setting down indictment of Christianity in the face of its role in history remain with us. We have justified slavery, violence and war; we have sanctified racism and split our churches on the issue of the preservation of white supremacy. We have discrimination against women and kept them servile whilst we hid our fear of them behind claims of ‘masculinity’ and sanctimonious talk about Adam and Eve. We have grown rich and fat and powerful through the exploitation of the poor, which we deplored but never really tried to stop. All in the name of Jesus Christ and his gospel. Now this same gospel speaks to us, and we can no longer escape its demands. It calls us to love and justice and obedience. We would like to fulfill that calling, but we do not want to risk too much. The Reuben option. The Reuben option: Take a stand, but always cover yourself (1984: 38 italics mine).

The intended cogency of this is unassailable. We should not deny ourselves this prime memory on the Arch and his role during the liberation struggle, when leaders of major resistance movements, like the African National Congress and Pan African Congress, were either incarcerated in island prisons, on the run from hunt of apartheid huntsman, or silenced to torture and turned mute with fear, DMT, along with Reverend Allan Boesak, ascended the platform to lead their populace out of the desert for they knew deep in their conscience the Lord would not forsake. They may have altered at times, assailed as they were on all fronts by the Nationalist huntsman and their fatal trickeries, denounced even through electronic loudhailers, vilified in the print media, but they never lost track of their destination from arid landscape of separation. More than anything else that could be said about DMT, he never had room to bite his tongue since he came “from within the community and have had the community‟s trust. And…had the courage of moral conviction, the power of moral persuasion, and the inspired eloquence of the Bible‟s proverbial tongues of fire to recommend them to the highest ranks of leadership among their people” (ibid.,).

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What carried along DMT and the marginalised‟s constant faith in him during the turbulent decades of inarguably a civil war, was moral uprightness of his words and life. He did not, could not then and now, patch up for what is incongruous with his corpus for,

…what is expedient, self-serving or in the budget. Above all…confirmed our faith, to paraphrase Dr. King, that the arm of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice (ibid.,).

Then again, this is not to portray him and MLK for that matter, as angels who could do no wrong. Their physiological fibre, made of flesh and blood, could be tainted as León Felipe attest in A Liberation Theology. As we say of the Supreme One, “Christ I love you not because you descended from a Star but because you revealed to me that man has blood, tears, anguish, keys, tools to open the doors closed to light. Yes! You taught us that man is God…a poor God crucified like you and the one who is at your left on Golgotha the bad thief is God too” (1974). Seminally, Mpilo Tutu as a response to the Creator‟s call and taking forth mandate from Biko and his Black Consciousness proclamations, therein strived in his might “to awaken in the black person a sense of his intrinsic value and worth as a child of God, not needing to apologize for his existential condition as a black person” (1994:19). Many moons ago, H.I.E Dhlomo (1903-1956) in South African Outlook journal, stated: “I have an unshaken belief in the possibilities of Bantu [folks] provided the Bantu…themselves can learn to love their languages and use them as vehicles for thought, feeling and will. After all, the belief, the resulting literature, is a demonstration of [a] people's „self‟ where the cry: „Ergo sum quod sum‟ [I am what I am]. That is our pride in being black, and we cannot change creation” („African Drama and Poetry,‟ July 1, 1939). However, what about attitudes towards fatality of one‟s actions? Is worship, founded on faith in the Lord and moral virtue, a sum of will to self-sacrifice a life? Both men argued as if acting in response to the long-serving mayor of Martinique and Fanon‟s Rabbouni, Aimé Césaire in an undated Lettre à Maurice Thorez, “There are two ways of losing oneself: through fragmentation in the particular or dilution in the „universal‟”. In such a precipitous spot, where would be a succour be found? “Oh God, where are you? Oh God, do you really care? How long can we go on appealing for a move just ordering of society where all black and white count because we are human persons, human persons created in your mage? (1994:17).” Then again, perhaps is admission of a stand on a black and white mandate proficient to remove cloud from a rainbow of full human potential, cosmopolitanism of complete citizenship. In other words, his definition of a dialectical relationship to his position as „Archbishop‟ and relation to toiling masses nominates his name to echelons of unsnooty preachers. At the same time, we should not ignore his all-embracing principles, whose seed is planted in this memorable service. “We who today still advocate peaceful change and still talk about reconciliation and justice are in great danger…For whilst we speak of peace and nonviolence we have the quite inexplicable action of the authorities…Nothing, not even the most sophisticated weapon, not even the most brutally efficient police, no, just nothing will stop people once they are determined to achieve their freedom and their right to humanness. For God‟s sake let us move away from the edge of the precipice. We may, all of us, black and white, crash headlong to destruction. Oh God, help us! We cry for our beloved country which has been so wanton in wasting her precious human resources” (1994:20). The „brutally efficient police‟ he decries was a product of the 1953 Public Safety and the Criminal Law Amendment Acts empowering autonomous use of states of emergency outside purview of civilised laws. These laws were put into effect intermittently until 1989. His theology for reconciliation and peace is guided by these venerable principles borrowed from Christianity and Modern Politics.

Every person of every race in every nation is a sacred being, made in God‟s image, entitled to full participation in the shalom of God‟s good creation – to life and peace, health and freedom; Peacemaking is a sacred calling of the gospel…God, making us evangelists of shalom – peace that is overflowing with justice…God‟s gift of genuine freedom to humanity includes the possibility of humanity‟s self-destruction; government is a natural institution of human community in God‟s creation…government must be an act of justice and must be measured by its impact

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on the poor, the weak, and the oppressed – not only in our own nation but in all nation; loyalty to one‟s own government is always subject to the transcendent loyalty that belongs to the Sovereign God; the Gospel command to love enemies is more than a benevolent ideal, it is essential to our own well-being and to our survival (1993: 366-67).

Significance following this homily was to turn and focus attention of the world on the South African problem. To crown a simile image, we hear him orate wisdom as old the Kalahari expanse desert. He never made any bones about the following, from faith in the constancy of change if all else fail, “There is no doubt whatsoever that freedom is coming. / Yes, it may be a costly struggle still. / The darkest hour, they say, is before the dawn” (ibid. 21). This folksy idealism found equal favour in North American landscape. In identical peaks of biblical parables is an equivalent resonance to words coming from MKL in his „Eulogy for the Martyred Children‟. “At times, life is hard, as hard as crucible steel. It has its bleak and painful moments. Like the ever-flowing waters of a river, life has its moments of drought and its moments of flood. Like the ever-changing cycle of the seasons, life has the soothing warmth of the summers and the piercing chill of its winters. But through it all, God walks with us. Never forget that God is able to lift you from fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope, and transform dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of inner peace” (1986:117). Or else, is it a matter of sheer faith (rising and scenting to divine revelation‟) to extract St Aquinas, scribbler of Summa contra Gentiles)? An indication of what Gutiérrez referred to in liberation theology as comprised of not only solidarity and reflection but martyrdom? The scripture to a certain extent has long lead us in this. “Now faith is being sure of what we hope and certain of what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1). The sacrifice in believing in one‟s conviction is a substance of character, morality, knowledge-as-wisdom, but seminally, the boldness of standing apart, privileging integrity of footing steps alone. A degree of limits DMT will go to be a one-man band apart is denoted by an epithet of „shooting from the hip with his lip‟. Certainly he has no fear. Where did his source out his wherewithal? He recently bolstered his wife‟s confidence in him, recently in the Sunday Times Lifestyle supplement, “If I‟m doing God‟s work He should jolly well look after me!” (2006: 17). As he was fond of comforting his longstanding life-partner reassuring But he is not alone. There is something about the severity of apartheid judgment which invariably birthed a leadership impervious to threat of death. It is an annotation of its matchless harshness which inscribed in Biko his attitude towards life and his own death. In an interview he gave prior to his terminal incarceration he speaks unquiveringly. “You are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can‟t care anyway. And your method of death can itself be a politicizing thing. So you die in the riots. For a hell of a lot of them, in fact, there‟s really nothing to lose – almost literally, given the kind of situations that they come from. So if you can overcome the personal fear for death, which is a highly irrational thing, you know, then you‟re on the way (1978:153). The Stoic Epictetus offered an adage personalised by leaders since the ancient period, Socrates to Sartre, “I cannot escape death, but cannot I escape the dread of it?” in the same way, “demand not that events should happen as you wish; but wish them to happen as they do happen, and you will go on well” (1993: 114). A comprehensive inference to this avers towards a literary interpretation, memorable described by Toni Morrison, “Thank God for life and thank life for death” (1992: 101). All the same, there are other multiple voices calling for quintessence of recognising worth of our lives whilst living with other mortals, rules of governance, ethics of conducting ourselves in private and public office, and meaning of suffering. “My theological position…Good laws make human society possible. When laws are unjust, then Christian tradition teaches that they do not oblige obedience…we accept wholeheartedly St. Paul‟s teaching in Roman 13 – that we should submit ourselves to earthly rulers. Their authority however is not absolute. They themselves also stand under God‟s judgment as His servants” (1994:144–148). It is not simply the ancient war of a mutual exclusivity of religion and state laws. It is more basic, devotion to personal reference of individual gods-as-ancestors; trust in promises of a Redeemer whose core reunites believers with Creation. In African Religion and Philosophy, John Mbiti points out:

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Wherever the African is, there is his religion…African people do not know how to exist without religion…religion is their whole system of being (1992: 2-3) From MLK‟s and DMT‟s vocation and sermons are examples of, to cite Henry De Pène in Max Havelaar, arguably, “collection of excellences…no more than is strictly necessary…sufficient, for common happiness”, knowledge, character, morality and humanity (1987: 1). The model of these religious scholars (whose early brethrens were called doctores scholastici) and witty storytellers, is a strongly objection to immorality of unjustness, on religious and political grounds since they denied what every human being is endowed with. Like a considerate shepherd he is, DMT saw bounty where others were goaded by greed; enough natural resources counting fertile lands, strategic metals as gold and platinum. “There are enough of the good things that came from God‟s bounty there is enough for everyone” (1994: 85). Moreover, this bounty applied to human relations. To keep watch over these relations was an impossible misuse of ethos of self-preservation, since it was incongruous to do encroach on inalienable rights. Power as an exercise in limitation and consent is an uninclusive paradox‡‡. The rewards and penalties do not take into cognisance what nature deemed unbounded. Entrenchment of hegemony whose modus operandi is nothing else but an implementation of denied human rights is bound to cause resistance, sabotage, and „tension‟ MLK talked about. In the South African prism legislation, using clout of Christian doctrine was accordingly drawed on to foster racial purity. “Two persons who have fallen in love are prevented by race, reflecting and distorting, from consummating their love in the marriage bond. Something beautiful is made to be sordid and ugly. The Immorality Act decrees that fornication and adultery are illegal if they happen between a white and one of another race. The police are reduced to the level of peeping toms to catch couples red–handed” (1994: 89). This politicisation of women and men‟s bodies plus feelings in a name of racial wholesomeness is skillfully rendered ridiculous by Lewis Nkosi in a thesis titled „Sex and the Law in South Africa‟. A country perpetually on heat, but with no immediate prospects of relief. A country with enormous potential but a country at war with itself, self – destroying; wanting to be joyful, eager for ecstasy but trammeled by the need to keep up its myth of racial purity and to uphold its life–denying Calvinistic morals. This then is South Africa (1983:37-41).

As already postulated, DMT‟s refusal to remain detached from socio-political involvement is obedience of imperatives of the gospel speaking out against misuse of power over unprotected folks while sparing no effort to say what he means. It is his lifelong ethos not to do otherwise. We find restoration behind his centrifugal force. His utilitarian ticket is cashed in just when justice is action. Like the transcendentalism philosopher, Waldo Emerson cogently restates in his Essays and Lectures when probing the DNA of great men, He has a probity, a native reverence for justice and honor, and a humanity which makes him tender for the superstitions of the people. Add to this, he believes that prophesy, and the high insight, are from a wisdom of which man is not a master (1983: 643).

In this regards, it is reasonable to say a major aspect of Christian belief is found in the emblematic importance given to the word „freedom‟§§. Throughout history „freedom‟ has found a deep religious

‡‡

Jiddu Krishnamurti says, „the pursuit of authority only breeds fear.‟ In The First and Last Freedom, HarperCollins, p. 75. §§

„There are words like Freedom / Sweet and wonderful to say. / On my heartstrings freedom sings / All day

everyday. / There are words like Liberty / That almost make me cry. If you had known what I know / You would know why.‟ “Refugee in America,” in Selected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Knopf, 1969, p. 290.

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reverberation in the lives and hopes of those marginalised by power used for damaging ends. Depending upon the time and context, repercussion of fights for freedom are derivative from faith searching for liberation, that is, fides quarens liberationem. During slavery it meant release from bondage; after emancipation it meant the right to be educated, to gain opportunity to be employed, and to move about freely from place to place. In the twentieth century freedom meant social, political and economic justice. From the very beginning of the human experience, one criteria connoting freedom has constantly been sovereignty which might not compromise one‟s responsibility to a Creator. A notion has persisted that if God calls your discipleship, God calls you to freedom and that God wants you to be free because God made you for Himself and His image. How can it be different in bondage as it should be in freedom? Although generations of missionary zealots and exhorters developed self-benefiting complex arguments aimed at avoiding so obvious a conclusion, it was a dictum securely anchored in the humankind‟s faith and indelibly engraved on his psyche. A well–known black spiritual, in a blues refrain key affirms that: Before I‟ll be a slave I‟ll be buried in my grave and go home to my father and be free For liberalism freedom has bolstered the value of individualism; to be free to pursue one‟s destiny without political or state interference or restraint. For African-centred gnosis freedom is communal in nature. In Africa the destiny of the individual is linked to an intensely interconnected security system. Hence, the communal sense of freedom has an internal African rootage curiously reinforced by hostile social convention imposed from outside as a caste oganisational network***. Hopefully, our celebration in carnival of democracy can remember restoration accruing from usefulness of sincere testimony. Soon-to-be bestowed a laurel of national poet, Wally Serote, has apposite lexis in a verse quoted from Gordimer‟s Writing and Being (1995: 41).

What can we do for this world? Which we share and shape Whose corners you can touch if you stretch your arms Whose roof you can reach if you stand up Was and is We make and have made it Because all of us die from what we all have eaten and have done

By all means, man, even man (sic) of action, is a „measure of things.‟ What things, only of good and evil, just and unjust laws, or secular and divine trials? We mention those distilled personages who are sticklers for morality and setting great store by that morality; beholden beings to their scruples. In an era of demand for global citizenship, it is seen the importance of universal brotherhood and universal justice. From this arises a reexamination of the role of politics. Power put into effect, with integrity certitude behind it, is homage to morality. Rights of all stakeholders in society should be protected even if they challenge state sovereignty as the greatest sacrifice to the organic proviso that human rights

***

„In the African communal group, ties of family and blood, of mother and child, of group relationship, made the group leadership strong, even if not always toward the highest culture. In the case of…American Negroes, there are sources of strength in common memories of suffering in the past; in present threats of degradation and extinction; in common ambitions and ideals; in emulation and the determination to prove ability and desert. Here in subtle but real ways the communalism of the African clan can be transferred to the Negro American group, implemented by higher ideals of human accomplishment through the education and culture which have arisen and may further arise through contact of black folk with the modern world,‟ from W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race. New York: Schocken, 1968, p. 219.

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outweigh state law. Insurance of this falls in ambit of universal suffrage and ultimate responsibility of those in power to the electorate: equality and fraternity. Honourable belief is therefore tied to action or orthopraxis. This praxis bounding life and thought into material gain, is not simply dialectic. In an interview with Bishop Tshibangu of East Africa, Valentin Mudimbe (1988) alters us to the words of his honourship. “To date the question of African theology is largely one of principle. Existentially concrete problems are perceived and felt specifically by African Christian communities…life and doctrine condition one another and act one upon the other” (1988: 172). Understood differently, it articulates this notion. In Africa the destiny of an individual is linked to a communal sense as a sanctuary arrangement. For Américain blacks, has been netted treatment seeing them seldom as individuals but representatives of their pithy race. For this reason, a communal sense of freedom-liberty has African routes curiously reinforced by hostile social convention. The cry of MLK, „free at last, free at last,‟ and DMT, „Oh, God How Long‟ come back to an appreciative link with ways black folk have with a Creator whose conception of freedom matches their own.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen, J. Rabble-rouser for Peace. South Africa: Ebury Press, 2006. Boesak, A. Walking on Thorns. Grand Rapids: W.E. Edermans Publishing Company, 1984. Boff, L. When Theology Listens to the Poor. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989. Emerson, R.W. Essays and Lectures. USA: Viking Press, 1983. Gordimer, N. Writing & Being. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Gutierrez, G. A Theology of Liberation. London: SCM Press Ltd, 1974. Jones, K.B. „The Activism of Interpretation: Black Pastors and Public Life,‟ Christian Century, September 13-20, 1989. Hennelly, A.T. Liberation Theology. USA: Twenty-Third Publications, 1995. King, M. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr: the Power of Nonviolent Action. UNESCO (1999) 145-208 Magwood, M, „Timely Reminders of Greatness,‟ in Sunday Times Lifestyle, 29 October 2006. Mbiti, J. African Religion and Philosophy (2nd ed.). London: Heinemann, 1990. McGrath, A.E. Theology: The Basics. UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Mudimbe, V.Y. The Invention of Africa. USA: Indiana University Press, 1988. Multatuli. Max Havelaar. London: Penguin Classics, 1987. Nessan, C.L. Orthopraxis or Heresy? Decatur: Ga Scholars Press, 1989. Stumpf, S.E. Socrates to Sartre (5th edition). USA: McGraw-Hill International, 1993. Tutu, D.M. The Rainbow People of God. South Africa: Doubleday, 1994 Washington, J. Writings and Speeches that Changed the World. West, C. Keeping Faith. Great Britain: Routledge, 1993.