‘We Belong Together’

The installation of Desmond M. Tutu as the archbishop of Cape Town, the first black primateof the Anglican Church in South Africa, was an extraordinary occasion in many ways--none more impressive than the theme of nonviolence and reconciliation that permeated the proceedings.

In the demonology that the white-dominated government in Pretoria preaches, Tutu is portrayed as an enemy of the state and the organized opponents of apartheid as instruments of a communist conspiracy that is manipulated from Moscow. But Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, reiterated a call for nonviolent change, acknowledging with understanding the reluctance of the oligarchy to yield its privileges. And those who celebrated with him preached peace--not vengeance, not a foreign ideology.

“If we could but recognize our common humanity, that we do belong together, that our destinies are bound up with one another’s, that we can be free only together, that we can be human only together, then a glorious South Africa would come into being where all lived harmoniously as members of one family, the human family, God’s family,” the new archbishop proclaimed in his sermon.

“As no system based on brutal repression can endure, so no change achieved by violence can escape its damaging infection,” Robert A. K. Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual head of the world Anglican communion, asserted.

The words were sounded at a moment of violence tearing at four continents. So there was a relevance extending wherever injustice and brutality splinter the “human family.”