March 23, 2001

A Black South African Learns Not to Hate

By Mark Mathabane

For me, Black History Month is more than just a time to celebrate black achievements and culture. It is also a time to reflect on what I can personally do to help heal the racial divide.

Lately, I've found myself thinking a lot about forgiveness, in part because President Bush mentioned forgiveness in his inaugural speech as one of the key ingredients needed if we are to become one nation, and in part because forgiveness has been central to racial reconciliation in my homeland of South Africa.

People tend to view the racial divide as caused by others. Blacks blame whites for it, and whites blame blacks. Seldom do we see how our own attitudes and behavior may contribute to the problem. It is no secret that racial oppression teaches the oppressed to hate. Often the hating begins in childhood, as it did in my case.

I was 5 years old when I began hating white people. For a long time, I didn't even think they were human, capable of such emotions as love, caring and empathy. The only image I had of them came from repeated and brutal encounters with the police who daily raided the 1-square-mile ghetto where my family and more than 200,000 blacks were quarantined by South Africa's system of racial segregation, known as apartheid.

After breaking down the door, the police would trample on me and my 3-year old sister as we slept on pieces of cardboard. They would then march my parents half-naked out of bed and interrogate my father in the middle of our shack as we children cowered in the corner, terrified and helpless. He was often arrested for the crime of living with his family under the same roof, something that black men were forbidden to do in so-called white South Africa without a permit.

I remember vowing to myself, as I witnessed my father's emasculation and humiliation, that I would hate white people until I died. My father reinforced my hatred with his own, and the injustice and degradation of segregated schools, neighborhoods, buses, bathrooms and so on fueled it.

I would have grown up to be a hate-filled adult had I not witnessed my mother's courage to forgive. Though she also suffered racial injustices and indignities and was repeatedly denied jobs by whites because she refused to abandon her children in order to work as a sleep-in maid, she never hated them. I remember asking her why she didn't.

"No good can ever come out of hating, my son," she replied. "Hatred only corrodes your soul and blinds you to the goodness in human beings."

"But white people are not human," I retorted. "They are all policemen."

"Not all white people are policemen, my son," she said. "There's good and bad in every race. There are white people who are good people."

I didn't believe my mother until one day in my seventh year I met a white nun who intervened to get me a birth certificate, without which I couldn't be issued a permit by the local authorities to register at the local tribal school. My mother had spent nearly six months being told by the clinic that she needed a permit from the police station to get the birth certificate, and by the police station that she needed a birth certificate from the clinic to be issued the permit. If I hadn't gone to school, I would have ended up like so many of my peers, who from lack of opportunity became gang members and criminals.

What stunned and deeply touched me about the white nun was that when she heard my mother explain her struggle with a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, she wept. Hers were the first tears I'd ever seen streak a white face. Noticing my astonishment, my mother said to me, "You see, child, like I told you, not all white people are like the police. You therefore owe it to yourself to seek out and befriend those who will treat you as a human being."

I did so, despite the risk involved in befriending whites at a time when they were regarded as enemies. By giving each white person I met the benefit of the doubt — something I expected whites to give me, and which many of them did — I made valuable friends. When I was a teenager, a white family gave me books I couldn't afford, liberating my mind from mental slavery, and a tennis racket that became my passport to freedom. And had I been consumed with hatred, I wouldn't have introduced myself to Stan Smith, the 1972 Wimbledon champion, who in 1977, after hearing of my dream to study in America, helped me get a tennis scholarship to college.

It is easy to hate. All that it requires is a denial of our common humanity and an erroneous assumption that there's value in hating. On the other hand, forgiveness frees the forgiver to devote his or her energy on the important task of becoming a better person, rather than dissipating it on feeding hatred, which is insatiable and serves only to contaminate one's soul. Forgiveness is also consistent with the highest of moral ideals — that of recognizing the humanity even of those who deny yours. That's why South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings were guided by the spirit of Ubuntu, which says that one can only become human by acknowledging and affirming the humanity of others.

Forgiveness, contrary to what Nietzsche says, is not the morality of the weak, who cling to it because they lack the courage to fight back. By choosing forgiveness over hatred, my mother demonstrated a rare courage that saved not only my life, but also my soul. I later saw that same courage in Nelson Mandela, when he saved South Africa from a racial bloodbath by convincing black South Africans to make a similar choice collectively.

The courage to forgive is required if we are to break the cycle of hatred and finally bring healing to America, to the Middle East, to Bosnia, to Ireland, to Rwanda and to every corner of the world where hatred is being passed on from generation to generation, resulting in such a waste of human lives and potential.

Mark Mathabane writes and lectures about race and education issues. The author, most recently of Miriam's Song, is working on a book about South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission

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