The complete transcripts of interview conducted by Dr. Franklin with Desmond Tutu. Tutu was the chairman of the TRC in 1997.

Tutu and Franklin: The Present |  Tutu and Franklin: The Past   | Tutu and Franklin: The Future

DR. FRANKLIN:This place is full of memories, and memories are so important, not merely for their sake but for our sake.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Uh-huh.

DR. FRANKLIN: What we are trying to understand about our present, and our future, depends on what we know about our past, and the kind of past that we have here, of the beginning of the Middle Passage, to the establishment of the slave institution in the United States and in the New World, generally, has much to do with the way we think about ourselves, the way we think about our institutions, indeed, the way we think about our country.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Well, I was just thinking, as you spoke, about memories, and how this place is so redolent of painful memories that many of us would probably not want to recall. Just how important memory is for human beings, and so also for human society. Because without memory, do you, do you have an identity?

I mean, if, if you forgot that you were John, and I called out, John, and you didn't respond because you had forgotten that you are John, how do you know you are John, if you have forgotten?

DR. FRANKLIN:That's such an apt illustration of what we are, what we're talking about. For if we don't remember who we are, where we came from--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:--and, indeed, what the painful vici--vicissitudes were that brought us to this point, we probably are not in a position to understand what--who we are.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Absolutely.

DR. FRANKLIN:And where we ought to be going from here.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:I suppose being the kind of creatures we are, we like to censor the past, and are selective, or want to be selective about the things that we remember, and, frequently, as you, a historian, would know, if you want to destroy a people, you destroy their memory, you destroy their history.

DR. FRANKLIN:Right.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:And it is so crucial for all of us, that we don't allow that to happen, we don't do it ourselves. Perhaps--

DR. FRANKLIN:And we don't let anyone else do it.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes. We don't let somebody else do it, yes, and if memories are unpleasant memories, which we w ant to push under the carpet.

DR. FRANKLIN: Yes. I know so many people who, who simply refuse

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:--to look at any part of their past, or any part of the total past that happens to be unpleasant, or painful.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:Or unattractive. They, they want all the beautiful things, the pretty things, and, indeed, that's not the way life turns out to be--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN: --so much of the time.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN: And if we're going to pick and choose, we'll live in a world of unreality.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Absolutely.

DR. FRANKLIN: Of, of--that, that really doesn't make any sense in terms of what the human experience is.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Well, and the, and the other thing is that we might think that we have control over our memories, and that we have shut them out, but they have this uncanny habit of being able to return to haunt us. I, I remember, fairly recently, visiting Dachau, the former concentration camp, and, and there, they, they have established a museum, and they, they have Santayana's haunting words written over the top.

DR. FRANKLIN:Yes; yes.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:You remember. "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it." And, and often, and often in, in South Africa, you heard people say "Let bygones be bygones," and you say, unfortunately, they don't become bygones just because, by fiat, you declare them to be so, and, and I think, I mean, that we, we need to do all we can to help our children appropriate their history, appropriate the memory.

DR. FRANKLIN: One of the problems in the United States, today, is the refusal, on the part of our young people--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:--to, to remember--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN: --or to want to remember, or to recognize the experiences of the past as being relevant,--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:--germane, important--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN: --to the present and to the future. They simply don't want anything that's painful. They want to live in a painless society, a, a--where everything is pleasant, and everything is joyful, and the unfortunate thing about is--about that is that insisting on that, they're also insisting on a world of unreality, a world that doesn't exist, that didn't, didn't exist.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN: And so far as the past is concerned cannot exist, because the past is something else, something quite different.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:I think what they are saying is that their recollection, or whatever they have heard about what happened is for them humiliating, and possibly in your country, they are experiencing certain things that happened to them because of this past, and they are not too keen to acknowledge it because out of the past have come the justifications for racism.

You know, the past of a slave, ancestry, means somehow that because people justify, say, slavery, by saying those who are slaves were inferior, somehow this has an impact on how people still treat the descendants of those who were slaves.

DR. FRANKLIN:And of course it has the effect of causing the descendants of slaves--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN: --to feel that if they reject the institution of slavery, they somehow are rising above it.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:And are enjoying the kind of freedom and equality which, which they wish to enjoy. But that's not the way it happens. That's not the way it has happened. For underlying slavery are all of these justifications.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yeah.

DR. FRANKLIN: These defenses.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:Which had their way of surviving.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN: And in 1998, or '9, or 2000, we have people who hold on to those arguments about inferiority.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yeah.

DR. FRANKLIN:So that if descendants of slaves say that we are not inferior--that's a wonderful thing to say--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yeah.

DR. FRANKLIN: --they are not, at the same time, saying that no one else thinks us as inferior, because some of those people continue to adhere to and obey the tenets that were set forth a century or more ago.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN: Namely, that those people who are held in bondage ought to be there because they are inferior.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Absolutely; abso--

DR. FRANKLIN: And because they do not have the capacity to function as equal human beings, and so many of those people who hold those view--who held those views are still among us.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN: Or their descendants are still among us, and--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:--they have inherited those views. They've been trained in them, and if they've been--if they have learned or inherit those views, that they have inherited them, then it seems to me incumbent upon those who are--have been the descendants of slaves to hold to the view that this is a fiction created to maintain the institution of slavery.

If they don't, if they don't understand that, then they are not prepared to cope with the present--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Absolutely; absolutely.

DR. FRANKLIN:--or with people who hold other views.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes. I've, I've been reading in manuscript a book that speaks about the black church and human sexuality, and the author, who is a professor at Howard University, is holding forth that part of the way in which, what you might call "white culture," justified the treatment it gave to slaves was to attack their sexuality, to speak about the black woman slave as either a Jezebel, promiscuous, and therefore, what you did to her, if she was raped, it was her fault. Or you had the other image, the image of the mammy who was docile and obsequious in, in the master's house, and that this attack was an attack at the very humanity of black people, because it was attacking something that is so utterly central, so, so much what makes us to be human beings.

And I think there is a great deal that the black church, African American society, and American society in general, need to hear in this--it's almost a cri de coeur, a cry to say recognize what this institution did to us. But we also would recognize it. We black persons, we mustn't deny that that is something we went through.

We should, we should be able to speak about our resilience, coming through this dehumanizing thing, to emerge as we have come. I mean it's something that we ought to celebrate.

DR. FRANKLIN:Yes. Indeed, the joy of understanding where we have come from will be intensified--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Absolutely.

DR. FRANKLIN:--if we know how we survived--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN: --those dark days.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes; yes

DR. FRANKLIN:And every child, every adolescent, every man and woman should be fully acquainted with what happened in this house.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:The slave house.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes; yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:What happened in the Middle Passage. What happened on the other side of the Atlantic. Should be fully acquainted with those things so as to, as to see the distance that has--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:That you have traveled.

DR. FRANKLIN:That we have traveled.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN: And that distance will, of course, redound to the benefit of all of us. Now, if we don't know--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes; yes.

DR. FRANKLIN: --that we've traveled that distance, that we don't know how much strength and perseverance it took to make the journey--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes; yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:--then we won't even understand where we are.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and of course there's also the--as to the humanitarian thing, to say we recognize the depths from which we've come. We were able to emerge from those depths. Let us remember, in order for us not to repeat it on any other human person. Never allow such degrading circumstances, such a system as this one, ever again to happen in our world.

DR. FRANKLIN:Sure. Santayana was not only right--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN: --but he was right particularly in--if he were--had been addressing one group.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:The--I think that, say, black people would be more generous, and kindly to each other--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:--if they knew what they had gone through.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Absolutely.

DR. FRANKLIN:They couldn't possibly visit upon their own people what was visited upon them by others--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:--during the slave period.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes; yes.

DR. FRANKLIN: And, and so we, we need to learn the lesson for ourselves--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:--and for the way in which we have our relations with each other, as well as to understand what our relations have been and ought to be with other people.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Absolutely. I think, I mean, that you have struck an important note with regard to how experiences of this kind have had an impact on the self-image that people have of themselves, why we have developed so frequently--I mean, we've done it at home, in South Africa, this self-hate, this self-contempt, because of these experiences, and, and we have then tended to project the feelings that we have about ourselves on to others who look like us.

And so the horrendous things that we have tended to do to one another stem, again, from not recognizing where we come from, and what other people sought to do against us.

DR. FRANKLIN:Yes. So many of the policies which we adopt as groups, organizations, and as individuals, reflect this kind of disdain for ourselves.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN: This kind of hate for ourselves, which means we have bought into the arguments--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Absolutely..

DR. FRANKLIN:--handed down--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yeah; yeah.

DR. FRANKLIN: --by others regarding--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yeah.

DR. FRANKLIN:--our degraded position. We then take the cue, apparently,--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yeah.

DR. FRANKLIN:--and proceed to try to outdo them in degrading ourselves.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes, we, we are being penalized, their definition of who we are, when we ought to be saying this is where they tried to put us--yes--and we've gone through that particular experience. But we survived. We are survivors. We're not victims. We will, we will not allow them to have trampled us underfoot. We, we emerged, despite all of the forces that were ranged against us, and here we are, a people with this incredible legacy in our music, in our, in our faith, in, in our particular kind of preaching, that, that are so--that are tremendous gifts that have emerged out of, out of this furnace of anguish and suffering.

DR. FRANKLIN:Right; right. And one other aspect of that which is so important for us to understand ourselves, and not hate ourselves, is the stereotyping--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:--that, that comes from the generalizations that people have ta--sought to make about our character and our conduct, and our energy, or lack of energy, our will, and so forth. We--the, the, the stereotyping, which has come from the arguments--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN: --that have been offered through the decades and centuries, that we are lazy, or we are without--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Initiative.

DR. FRANKLIN:--without initiative, without capacity to acquire certain kinds of knowledge, and all the rest of it. And that has been preserved, despite everything that can happen. That, that has been preserved. It's reflected in so many other--so many different ways. Now, I said we bought into that--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes; yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:--and the result is that we continue to hate ourselves, and to act to ourselves, and to each other among us, as though we were the perpetrators--of the crime in the first place-

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes. Absolutely.

DR. FRANKLIN: --which is--which is [inaudible].

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Now this is, I think, when, perhaps, the attempt in South Africa to have a Truth And Reconciliation Commission may be something that the United States might want to look into, which is that part of that process consisted in letting people tell their story, tell the story of what happened to them.

And since most of them were the very marginalized, the anonymous ones, the ones whom the world didn't think really mattered, who were able to come and be able to tell their story in this forum, set up by a President that they loved. That assisted them in rehabilitating their dignity.

It was painful, obviously, because people were relating things that may have happened 10, 20 years ago. But it was like opening wounds that you thought had healed, but in fact had festered. You opened those wounds and in the telling you were cleansing them, and enabling the nation, as it were, to pour ointment on them.

And I think that sort of just looking at your own country from the outside, but why you will constantly seem to have these eruptions of racist incidents is that, on the whole, you have not dealt with the legacy of here, of this point of no return. But there is an ache sitting in the pit of the tummy of most black Americans.

DR. FRANKLIN:There's no question about that. I, I thi--I hope we'll have a chance to discuss, at greater length, the analogy, or the possible analogy between the South African experience and the experience in the United States.

But I think, at least for the time-being, without getting too far into it, for the time-being, I think there are examples which can be followed, and which we've sought to follow in a humble and modest way. Namely, the, the kind of effort we have made in the last year to get people to--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Talk.

DR. FRANKLIN: Talking about the past and so forth. One of the problems is that we've, we've done such a poor job--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:--so far as memory is concerned, that it is difficult for us to summon up the real experiences of slavery.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:That ended, after all, more than 140 years ago.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes; yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:We, we have all kinds of humiliating and, uh, terrible experiences since that time, but they are the product--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:--of that basic institution of slavery, that ended in nine--in 1865. So that what you say is very well-taken, and we, we certainly ought to enter into whatever it is that we can do--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:--to eliminate the kind of, of, of--I would call it almost moral rot, that is, the kind of, of--of degradation, the kind of humiliation, the kind of discrimination that has gone on and on, and at times even thrived in, in the post-Emancipation years.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes; yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:So we've got, we've got--I would say that our problem, if it's possible, is, is--is more complicated--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN: --because, first, we have just out and out slavery that--

DR. FRANKLIN:--lasted for 300 years, and that might have ended on a better note, had we had the courage, and the national courage--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN: --to, to--to really eradicate as much of the vestiges of it as possible. We did not have that courage and the result is that we sort of started over again with a kind of, of, of--of degradation that was not based on chattel slavery--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN: --but was based upon all of the views that were cherished, and held during slavery--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN: --and that now were sort of venerated by those people who were sorry that slavery ended, you see.

ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Uh-huh; uh-huh. Uh-huh.

DR. FRANKLIN:And the result is that you, you complicate the matter, almost hopelessly, by, by carrying on the, the--the way in which we lived for the last 100, 100 odd years, and by not really being true to ourself, and to our nation's history, by remembering exactly how it happened,--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Yes.

DR. FRANKLIN:--what happened, and--

ARCHBISHOP TUTU:Absolutely..

DR. FRANKLIN: --how it happened. And so, so we, we complicated our picture, hopelessly, by the way in which we, quote, saw, unquote, the problem of slavery.