Although I’ve never lived in South Africa, I experienced apartheid first hand. I was born and raised in Chile. I remember as if it were yesterday when I was 10 years old that Salvador Allende became the world’s first elected Marxist President. At that age I could not have defined “proletariat” or “dialectical materialism”, but almost every day I had to dodge stones and tear gas canisters pelted by opposing factions on my way home from school. And three years later, I will never forget that Augusto Pinochet took power and tried to “stabilize” and bring “peace” through torture, desaparecidos and other brutal violations of human rights.
When my wife Kathryn and I moved to Lima, it was at the height of the Maoist revolution and far from peaceful. We have seen bombings, assassinations and brutal terrorist attacks on a daily basis. But what amazed us most was how the Shining Path claimed it would fight for the peasants and native people of Peru, but had no qualms about brutalizing any campesino or Amazon who did not support its tactics.
Kathryn and I also remember as if it were yesterday, the day in 1992 when President Alberto Fujimori, with military backing, staged a “self-coup” by shutting down Congress and the judiciary. Our neighbors cheered and claimed: “por fin un líder se pone los pantalones!” – Finally a leader put on his pants. And they were even happier a few months later when Fujimori captured Abimael Guzmán and thus beheaded the Shining Path. But Fujimori is now spending his final decades in prison, having been convicted of appalling human rights abuses in his efforts to “stabilize” and bring “peace” to Peru.
It was clear that the pendulum swung easily from one form of dehumanization to another, to another. It was providential that Kathryn and I moved to Albuquerque with our three boys and I began taking many of the courses offered by John “Jack” Condon and other world-renowned interculturalists at UNM. And it was even happier when Karen Foss agreed to chair my dissertation committee while I conducted a rhetorical analysis of Desmond Tutu’s book, No Future Without Forgiveness.
I regret never having met Desmond Tutu face to face, but I feel I was able to be “at his feet” for many months during my dissertation. With Foss’ clever help, I found out that Tutu doesn’t just sing about forgiveness. He was actually pointing to a humanizing Ubuntu worldview that needed to replace a dehumanizing apartheid system that had existed for decades. Since his death I have heard some describe tutu as a moral compass and conscience of a nation/the world. I believe a compass not only shows us where to go, but also what we are leaving behind. And a conscience helps us determine what to accept and persist, as well as what to be repelled and rejected.
Over the past 20 years since earning my MA from UNM, I have had the deep privilege of teaching in nearly 20 countries and have heard myself channeling my inner tutu and repeating over and over again: run forward, be repelled, leave behind apartheid arrogance, the belief that human worth is determined from outside, that the universe revolves around “I/us”, that security and survival come from independence, selfishness, alienation and revenge. And I’ve heard myself repeating it over and over again: run, hug, perpetuate Ubuntu humility, the belief that we need others, including those who disagree with us, to help bring healing, that security, and survival through interdependence, focus on others, magnanimity and by respecting and upholding the human rights of all. In writing, I just want to honor and thank Desmond Tutu for what he meant to me and Foss and UNM’s communications department for all they have contributed to my life.
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