Compelled to act, even against the voice of reason

In this edited version of a speech given at the launch of 'Made for Goodness', a book by Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and his daughter, the Rev Mpho Tutu, Antjie Krog says we can learn from the cleric's style of constructive criticism

Over the years Tutu has formed and provided this country, consistently and with immense integrity, with a language which took us from defiant outspokenness against injustice, to righteousness, freedom, caring and forgiveness.

It was he who single-handedly had to respond to most of the 2000 Truth and Reconciliation Commission's testimonies in efforts to comfort or make sense. It was he who coined many of the terms for a young and divided democracy to think and talk about itself alongside human rights and a new constitution. Not for nothing are the terms such as "rainbow nation", "miracle", and "special people" being critically discussed up until today. The combination of the well-crafted speeches of Nelson Mandela and the inspired ones of the archbishop brought a vision into which we could think ourselves as a country capable of remarkable things.

In the meantime, many things have fallen by the wayside, so I want to pay tribute to the man who has and still is giving us, from different backgrounds, vocabularies, grades of literacy, religions and political persuasions, a language in which we can reach one another, a language that has become for many of us the only surviving new South African home in which we can hear and tend to one another. Tutu has created a language of us-ness. This language becomes clear when one reads his contribution to the funeral of Chris Hani (which is not in the book) against the philosophy explained in Made for Goodness.

We all remember that the crowd was beyond anger. The anger of the speakers was palpable and one felt one was watching the slow ignition of a bomb. Then it was the archbishop's turn. He stretched out his arms into the air and asked this swirling, aggressive crowd to say with him: "We are all God's people" - swaying their hands. After a while of working the crowd one could see a massive sea of hands flowing open and heard clearly: "We are all God's people."

Then I heard Desmond Tutu say: "We are all God's people - black and white." The word "white" fell like a stone into the ether and I felt myself turn ice-cold. One could literally see a wavering in the hands of the crowd, and I thought this was the end, the real end of us all. But then, after what felt like a slight hesitation, the crowd repeated en masse: "Black and White." It was a terrifying moment, looking down into the abyss and then being pulled back by someone.

I interviewed the archbishop about it many years later. How come he was prepared to risk his reputation at that moment in front of millions of people? If the crowd had rejected him, booed him, broken into a furious rampage, it would have been the end of him and many other things as well. He gave two explanations: the one was that people prayed for him; the second was that he believed that when one was with and among the people through one's life, they would remember you so that even when you took them where they didn't necessarily think they wanted to go, they would trust you.

Made for Goodness provides a much broader landscape to this incident. First, the anger of the crowd. The book asks: "Why do we get so outraged by wrong?" Not because we know what is right, but because "we are tuned to the key of goodness".

Second, there was an acute absence at the funeral. Whites were responsible for the assassination of Chris Hani, yet everybody refrained from broaching the subject. The archbishop, however, spoke directly into this absence. In the book he clarifies such speaking with the term "God-pressure", or a feeling of being compelled to act, even against the voice of reason. He did it that day. He named whites against the voice of reason and consolidated a formula of how to speak the unpopular legitimately and effectively to those who at that moment had power.

This was a breakthrough for everybody trying to find a legitimate entry point to our moral debate. For it has become a problem. How come suddenly everybody talks on behalf of the poor while living lives of uncaring luxury or without being with the poor? How does one make one's criticism of the treatment of the poor legitimate and effective? Recently, criticism began to validate precisely that which was being criticised. People with skewed values became heroes because newspapers criticised them.

Many South Africans are being credited for speaking truth to power, but one often feels that what is being said is only half the truth, and if we continue to believe half-truths to be the full truth, we are not only lying to ourselves, but give the powerful credible room to disregard criticism.

So how did Tutu name whites in an effective and legitimate way at the funeral?

They were not singled out for criticism, or put forward simply to distance himself or the crowd from them. Although whites had killed Mandela's successor (and who knows what kind of country we would have been today if Chris Hani had become president), whites were not singled out for failure, scorn or criticism; on the contrary, in their badness and destruction, Tutu linked them solidly to black.

More importantly, he did not focus on the terrible thing they had done, but made an appeal to the goodness that was supposed to be in them. In the book, "solidarity with goodness; an appeal to goodness", forms the basis from which the archbishop is working.

Over the years one has wondered how on earth Tutu knows what the "right" thing is to say or how to be so clear and unambiguous. When asked, he would probably say: "It is the result of God and prayer," but this book explains what part of God-ness informs his actions.

It is therefore not a question, as one has always assumed, of doing the "right" thing, nor is it about "doing good" or even "being good".

In an impressive chapter entitled "Stop 'Being Good'" the difference is explored between driving oneself to make a difference and acting in response to the goodness one comes across. The opposite of wrong is not "right", but "solidarity with goodness".

Goodness suggests a moral universe, a possibility of wholeness, which is also an invitation to the beauty of the world.

Whatever we do, based on goodness, may be a drop in a bucket, but it contributes to an evolvement of human agency that could reshape the course of history. Being on the side of goodness means to tap in to and to be connected with a powerful force that already exists.

One forgives, not because one is performing a miracle or driven by Christ's forgiveness, but because one has surrendered to goodness.

Even more unexpectedly, Tutu says, one sees the good God standing over there as goodness with the sinner; in solidarity, on the side of the sinner. Feeling the appeal of goodness in oneself, one reaches out while at the same time appealing to the goodness in the sinner himself.

Does this mean that one pleads for impunity, that one allows people to get away with what is wrong and unjust?

No, says Tutu, because of goodness.

Note that it is not because of rightness - because it is in debating or accessing this "right"ness through courts that we so often stumble - but it is with goodness as a compass that we refuse to accept impunity or an unjust society.

Goodness, God, forgiveness and an ubuntu-interconnectedness are brought together in one powerful sweep.

• Krog is an author whose most recent book is 'Begging to be Black'