The Long Quest for Racial Justice

I recently spent a week on Robben Island, the prison where Nelson Mandela spent the first 18 of his 27 years imprisonment. The Warehouse gathered together about 80 peace activists from around the world and South Africa to discuss, reflect, and meditate about the struggle against the apartheid system. Robben Island is now a World Heritage protected museum visited by thousands of tourists every year. It is used to teach current and future generations about lessons from this painful episode of South African history. Standing in those tiny prison cells, I travelled back in time and imagined life under apartheid: the mere injustice of the system, the dehumanizing treatment, the humiliation.

How could one come out of such a deplorable regime still with the strength to forgive, the fortitude to love, and the political foresight to seek a future together between the oppressed and their oppressors? My conclusion is that they realized, perhaps at first intuitively, that the system that kept black people captive did the same to their white jailers in that it arbitrarily determined the kind of relations and roles they could have. To live in a society in which they were really free, they also had to free their captors. For only in this shared freedom could both peoples genuinely enjoy freedom.

The historical dehumanization of black people is not unique to South Africa but to other parts of Africa. As a race, we were particularly targeted to be enslaved and colonized for cheap labor. The Transatlantic Slave Trade tore millions of Africans from their homes and sold them to America as slaves. Millions died. Even when slavery was abolished, millions more died especially in the early stage of colonization. For instance, under the Belgian King Leopold II, what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, my home, between 1885 and 1908, close to 10 million people died, as a result of forced labor to extract rubber and other gross human rights violations, like amputation.

The prevailing worldview according to which the African was non-human led to the creation of state laws and institutions that gave rise to the kind of atrocities that were committed under slavery and colonization. This ideology professed that Africans were savages. They could be owned as property. So when they were killed or abused, one felt the kind of guilt one feels losing a pet or damaging a valuable possession. To our shame, as Christians, much of the church was complicit to slavery and colonization. It provided not only biblical justifications for both slavery and colonization but also actively worked with state institutions to indoctrinate people with this ideology. It justified white supremacy and anyone who opposed it was ostracized. The church appeased the oppressors’ conscience hammering home the difference between races as proof that God intended them to live separately and unequally.

However, the Bible is a double-edged sword. Whilst it was used to oppress black people, it also became an important source of their inspiration to resist both oppressive systems, in America and Africa. Through stories like Moses and David, they heard the story of their liberation. They inspired them to act. They realized as Martin Luther King Jr. put it that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

Slavery and colonialism have long been formally abolished. But remnants of the racist ideology that gave birth to both oppressive systems still haunt us to this day. Although enormous progress has been made in race relations (otherwise we would not have the Oprahs, the Kofi Annans, the Beyoncés and the Obamas of this world) a lot still needs to be done to achieve societies in which people are truly judged on the contents of their character not the color of their skin.

Today racism is much more subtle. You would not know it if you did not pay attention. For me it comes to the fore when an incident that would normally generate an outcry fails to do so when a black person appears to be the victim. There is too often an empathy deficit when a black person is involved. Similarly, humanitarian crises happening in Africa — like in the Congo, where more than 6 million people have died since 1996 — tend to generate less public interest than those happening in other continents.

The quest for racial justice is ongoing. What made people like King or Mandela so special was their ability understand so well the system and offer an alternative vision to the world. They made a difference between the system and the people in it. They broke the spell under which society operated. In doing so, they followed Jesus’s own example, who even when dying, could make that difference and exclaim: “Father forgive them their sins, for they do not know what they are doing.”