To choose forgiveness is outrageous ?- as is the finest imagination. Forgiveness
flies beyond logical reaction. It's a kind of reckoning; a robust response
to bleeding. It runs a course on lines far deeper than conventional, worldly
mores. Its path is jagged. The journey to it enfolds the torture of self-purification,
even as it beckons towards the light.
In Australia the chasm between Aboriginal peoples and colonisers has yet to
be broached. In South Africa, by contrast, the political has become uniquely
personal. Forgiveness is the alchemy that has transformed South Africa from
a time bomb to a byword for new hope. From one of the century's bleakest conflicts,
the ambition to forgive is reborn of both secular and spiritual
parents. It's the fruit of insight wrenched from the pain of a leadership that escaped brutality by refusing to be brutalised. When I visited South Africa I had the chance to discuss these issues with Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and other leading figures.
On a crisp blue morning we sailed across an azure harbour from Cape Town to Robben Island, the world's most infamous high-security prison. Here a regime was engineered around the peculiar obsessions of apartheid. Conditions were devised to break the spirits of the strongest political prisoners. I had read stories of men buried up to their necks in hot sand while warders urinated on their heads; of prisoners sent to
break stone in the lime quarry where the glare caused many to go blind.
Lionel Davis, a 'coloured' man imprisoned on Robben Island between 1964 and
1978, welcomed us through the razor wire and watchtowers. His one-time neighbours
now sound like a role call of South Africa's new aristocracy -? Mbeki, Sisulu,
Kathrada, Mandela and many more. The degradation of prison life followed the
logic of apartheid. 'They wanted to divide us,' Lionel said. 'Coloureds and
Indians were given a quarter loaf of bread with margarine, blacks were not
given bread. Blacks were forced to wear shorts, continuing the idea that an
adult black male was a boy, while we wore long trousers. Beatings were