| Time | Summary | |
| 24:08 | We’ve had special hearings for the business sector, the legal profession, the health sector and the media. This past week our country’s religious leaders had the opportunity to examine their past roles before the Truth Commission and especially to look at the one thing religious leaders ought to be good at: reconciliation. | Full Transcript |
| 24:26 | The churches must say to those who know that they have a heavy burden of guilt. Confess it, speak the truth, because isn’t it God who says the truth shall make you free. The truth shall make you free. The truth, not so that people must be prosecuted, the truth so that people must become free, the truth so that people must be healed. Asseblief tog [Please]. God has entrusted us, to us the blessing of reconciliation. As ons dit nie doen nie, wie gaan dit doen? As ons dit nie aanpak nie, wie gaan dit doen? [If we don’t do it, who will? If we don’t tackle it, who will?] | Full Transcript |
| 25:50 | Christians of all the nominations, Jews, Muslims and Hindus asked for forgiveness as Bishops, Pastors, Rabbis, Imams and other religious leaders, one after the other confessed their sins of the past. Their passivity, even complicity, but mostly their silence over the evil system of apartheid. | Full Transcript |
| 26:20 | As pastors we delighted in preaching and teaching about the good Samaritan and pointing the finger at others while all the time we should apply the lesson to ourselves. We, the white members of the leadership of our charismatic and Pentecostal churches sincerely seek the forgiveness of our black counterparts within the church. Many of these black leaders tried to show us the error of our ways, but pride and often a sense of superiority blinded us. We seek the forgiveness of our colleagues within the larger religious community for the times when we lacked the courage and conviction to walk alongside you in your demands for justice and righteousness. | Full Transcript and References |
| 26:57 | We took too long to come to this place of a clearer, uncompromising witness. We allowed others to precede us and take the flack. Too late we conceded that they were right and we owe them an apology for our compromising and often complacent half-heartedness and sometimes for a hardness of heart that could be extremely damaging and hurtful. Archbishop, you yourself bore the brunt of this critique, not only in the nation at large, but even from the membership of your own church. May I, on behalf of the CPSA, offer to you a profound apology, ask for your forgiveness and thank you for your extraordinary graciousness and magnanimity. In a strange way I think many white Anglicans in the CPSA owe an apology to the Afrikaner community for their attitude of moral superiority. But our chief expression of apology must be to our own black membership and I’m using the work black inclusively. Chairperson, our so-called white parishes, like white businesses – I’m thinking of last week’s TRC ...more | Full Transcript and References |
| 28:29 | The exposures made by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission have filled many white people and many of us in the church of England in South Africa with shock, shame and revulsion. Looking back it is amazing that we were so naïve. Be that as it may, the fact of the matter is that we allowed ourselves to be misled into accepting a social, economic and political system that was cruel and oppressive. We should have been more aware, more vocal and more insightful, but we were not. For this we are guilty. | Full Transcript and References |
| 29:06 | We have to say in the first instance that the Catholic Church reflected indeed the divisions of the society in which it found itself. Just as apartheid divided people according to colour, so did it divide the church, our church, into a black community and a white community. There was in effect a black church and a white church. | Full Transcript and References |
| 29:31 | The TRC is the only forum with some credibility and acceptability available to us in which we can publicly apologise to all those who had been hurt by the travesties of the past. It is the most effective way available to us which we can use to offer help and healing to those who had committed unacceptable, often even gruesome deeds against fellow South Africans and that offer goes for people on all sides of the line. | Full Transcript and References |
| 30:03 | We were forbidden from burying our own without the permit of the oppressor. To minister to our own people was turned either into a criminal offence or an act for which one would be labelled as schismatic from the church catholic. Today we wish to offer an unreserved apology to those who felt that our refusal to minister in Transkei under the stringent conditions imposed by that government was to abandon them. The wounds of that blow are still fresh for us because some of our people were permanently alienated from us as a result. | Full Transcript |
| 31:00 | I want particularly to welcome and give thanks to the representatives and adherents of other faiths gathered here today. First, I want to thank you and those whom you represent for the sterling contribution that you have made to the struggle, justice, freedom and democracy in this land. | Full Transcript |
| 31:45 | In the past so-called leaders of the Hindu community, and I emphasis so-called Hindu leaders, failed hopelessly and miserably in voicing their protest against apartheid. The few who did did so passively and not actively, or for that matter even militantly. | Full Transcript and References |
| 32:11 | As far as our collaboration and resistance to the system is concerned there is the community at large. In truth, the community at large was a complacent community, feeble in its responses and going whichever way the wind was going at that particular moment. In 1979 Imam Abdullah Haron was murdered in detention, after being kept there for six months. 25 000 people attended his funeral and not a single voice in the Muslim community was raised about the nature of his death and all the injuries on his body, not a single voice in the Muslim community, from the religious leadership of the Muslim community. And this silence Mr. Chairman held for seven years nonstop at a Mosque level and in a Muslim publication level. Of course I speak with anger, by God I’ve got a damn right to be angry. | Full Transcript and References |
| 33:26 | It’s our job as religious people, if I may be bold to say so, the job of all of us to try to apply the antidotes. This TRC has become famous throughout the world because of the horror which has unfolded in the testimony so many months before you. There’s no one who’s listened in on the radio, or who very humbly has come to sit at the back and listen to the testimony, there’s no one who hasn’t been moved to tears, because we’ve had here a wreckage of inhumanity, of the worst things that human beings can do to other human beings. And what we need in our country is to now change because of that, to change to the best, to display the best that human beings can do to fellow human beings. Not the hurt and the torture and the shame, but the love and the friendship and the mutual help to lift our country off. | Full Transcript and References |
| 34:32 | Leaders of the traditionally black churches also spoke about the many injustices their churches had suffered. Some of them also apologised for not having done more to oppose the oppressive National Party government. | Full Transcript and References |
| 35:04 | Religious propaganda that emanated from the apartheid system was effective Mr. Chairperson. It made many of our members feel guilty about any form of opposition, disobedience or even criticism of the government policy. As a result the church was silent when it should actually have spoken out. Because of its silence when it should have spoken, it is guilty of collaboration with the system that caused great suffering to many innocent people. | Full Transcript and References |
| 35:39 | We knew all along that hideous things were happening and that is often why we said what we said and did what we did. We recognized that what is being revealed by your Commission will have a profound impact on future generations in the country. There are sins to be forgiven, wounds to be bound up, hatreds to be reconciled, buildings to be rebuilt, pupils to be taught; leaders to be held accountable. | Full Transcript and References |
| 36:06 | The leader of the ZCC, the Zionist Christian Church, the biggest single church in Southern Africa made a dramatic entrance with a large entourage and scores of followers wearing their trademark silver star. But to the surprise of everyone at the hearing Bishop Barnabas Lekganyane refused to speak publicly. Not even Archbishop Tutu could change his mind. Instead, the ZCC submission was read by the Bishop’s legal counsel. | Full Transcript |
| 36:49 | May God bless our country, may God bless our leaders and its people. Kgotso ayibelilina, [may peace be with you] thank you. | Full Transcript |
| 37:05 | The silent Bishop and his delegation left immediately afterwards and would not comment on why Bishop Lekganyane had not addressed the TRC personally. // ‘No reason, that’s our style. That’s how we do things.’ | Full Transcript |
| 37:36 | The hearing built up to the moment when the NG Kerk, the former white state church, that once declared apartheid to be based on the Bible, sat down before the Commission. But just before them, came their former black, coloured and Indian daughter churches. | Full Transcript |
