Forgiveness and
Reconciliation are Embedded in Our Ancestral Cultures
Whether she knew it or not,
Nadia
Bishop's call to the Grenadian people for unconditional forgiveness and
reconciliation appealed to deeply-entrenched values in at least two of our
ancestral cultures. Traditional, and to some extent modern, societies in Africa
and India accord(ed) great importance to such values, which are regarded as
absolutely essential for maintaining social harmony and promoting solidarity in
their multicultural societies. We in the Caribbean arguably still retain such
values in our cultural genes, values that can be resuscitated when the need
arises, as it apparently has in present-day Grenada. Our ancestral values of
forgiveness and reconciliation evolved/developed within societies that were
constructed on the fundamental community values of integration, solidarity, and
togetherness. Those estimable values have been so overlaid by the adversarial,
confrontational, individualistic, devil-take-the-hindmost, selfish
"values" of the West and the North, which were initially imposed on,
and subsequently adopted most willingly by, Caricom societies that many of us
might consider Nadia Bishop's appeal "unnatural" and/or unachievable.
It is anything but. Moreover, it is an appeal that concerned persons in other
Caricom countries would do well to adopt, advocate, and apply to their own
societies.
Because of constraints of
space, I shall limit my illustration of the desirability and the achievableness
of Nadia Bishop's appeal to African cultures. There is a great deal of
literature on the importance, in African tradition and African customary law,
of confession and contrition on the part of the offender and the subsequent
forgiveness of the crime or offense committed by the latter, on the part of the
injured party. Indeed, that was the raison d'ętre of the South African
Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) which was based on the traditional
principles of ubuntu, the southern African form of giri. Public
confession of illegal acts committed under the apartheid regime was followed by
forgiveness (by both the law and the victims) of those acts, with the objective
of purging feelings of hatred and vengeance and restoring social harmony.
Confession followed by forgiveness effected a tabula rasa that permitted
a fresh start, unencumbered, respectively, by the burden of past sins or that
of embittered feelings.
Those traditional values of
confession, repentance, and forgiveness appear to be genuinely pan-African, not
just confined to southern Africa. Richard Sklar perceived a genuine similarity
between the TRC's confessional procedure and the episodes of public repentance
on the part of African officials who participated in the National Conferences,
which were convened in the mid-1990s in Francophone Africa in efforts to bring
about national reconciliation. (African Politics: The Next Generation,
1999 (book chapter). In African tradition, the oucome of a process of
forgiveness and reconciliation is often sealed with a symbolic act. At the end
of the National Conference in Congo, one of several held in Francophone Africa
in the period 1990-1991 to promote peaceful democratic transitions and bring
about a reconciliation between the ruled and their rulers, each of the 1,500
delegates solemnly took turns to dip their hands in the reflecting pool outside
the Assembly hall. It was a purification rite intended to symbolize the washing
away of the acrimonious feelings revealed at the conference and to seal the
national reconciliation which it helped bring about.
Traditional African
reconciliation mechanisms were developed to resolve conflicts in a manner that
would heal deep social wounds and prevent the perpetuation of underlying
animosities. The Oromo people of Eastern Africa developed elaborate methods to
resolve conflict, based on reconciliation processes in which forgiveness played
an important part. If prevention failed and social conflict did indeed occur,
mechanisms were put in place to keep the conflict from escalating and to
resolve it through a reconciliation of the disputing parties. An important
stage in the elaborate reconciliation process of the Oromo is a religious
service, in which not only the disputing parties but also the entire community
participates. The ceremony is intended to purge away the anger and ill feelings
of everyone involved in the conflict. The Oromo process of forgiving,
forgetting, and reconciling, in which that ceremony plays a key role, is a
method of ensuring that family and clan members would not inherit any of the
bitterness or animosity that may have been generated by the conflict.
In settling disputes
between groups and individuals, or in arriving at decisions on contested
issues, the requirement of social harmony led African societies to adopt
policies that place great emphasis on compromise and reconciliation. That
approach, which is still largely operative, applies across the board in African
societies, informing not only social policies but also political and legal
policies. An emphasis on compromise and conciliation was characteristic of politics
in traditional Africa. Compromise is an important feature of the political
culture of Mauritius, which has recognized how essential it is to the
maintenance of peace and stability in its multi-ethnic society. "The
rules of the political game [in Africa] put a premium on compromise." (Naomi
Chazan, Democratic Fragments: Africa’s Quest for Democracy, 1992 (book
chapter).
Because of the great
importance that African societies traditionally place on compromise and
reconciliation, they generally tried to avoid designating winners or losers in
a dispute, or of treating political conflict as a zero-sum game. The frequent
recourse to, and encouragement of, reconciliation between disputing parties
gave a certain importance to the role of mediator or "go-between" in
traditional society. Thus, the main function of the various African indigenous
judicial processes and institutions was not so much to decide who was right and
who was wrong as to reconcile contenders in the interest of communal
solidarity. (Immaculate N. Kizza, Africa's Indigenous Institutions in Nation
Building: Uganda, 1999).
The need to preserve
interpersonal relationships and to maintain social harmony in Africa's
multicultural societies favoured the development of dispute-resolution
procedures that would avoid litigation which, by its very nature, is
contentious and confrontational. The customary Lozi court (Zambia) tends to
seek conciliation. It strives to effect a compormise acceptable to, and
accepted by, all the parties. For the Oromo people of eastern Africa the
ultimate goal of their conflict resolution processes is to restore harmony (nagara)
through a reconciliation of the disputing parties and, for the same reason,
most cases in Buganda were settled before they reached the courts. African
traditional judicial systems seek to redress injuries and reconcile disputing
parties rather than identify which party is in the right and which in the
wrong. Their essential function is to bring about an amicable settlement
between the disputing parties, one that is based on mutual agreement, rather
than seek to render each party his "due". (Hamada Tuso, Indigenous
Processes of Conflict Resolution in Oromo Society, 2000 (book chapter).
Traditional Shona courts
(Zimbabwe) consider customary law as providing no more than a broad, flexible
basis for negotiating a settlement, one that would permit a reconciliation of
the disputing parties and the restoration of harmonious relationships. The
supreme value the Barotse (Zambia) accord to social unity and harmony requires
their judicial process to end in a reconciliation. Similarly, in Ibo society
(Nigeria), reconciliation is the paramount goal, not punishment. Even when
fault is attributed by a traditional court, the punishment meted out is aimed
at social reintegration of the offending party.
The Mozambique civil war
(1977-1992), a bitterly waged 15-year long conflict between the FRELIMO and
RENAMO political factions that began only two years after the country had won
its independence from Portugal by force of arms, was a traumatizing national
experience which caused one million deaths in a total population of some
fifteen million people, making a further five million people internal refugees.
Traditional reconciliation mechanisms were brought into play immediately after
the cessation of hostilities. They were so effective that the deep social
wounds caused by the sanguinary internecine civil war were healed to such an
extent, and within only a very few years (no more than five), that it
rendered unimportant which community or which individual had fought on which
side of the war. Such an extraordinarily rapid and incredibly successful
process of national reconciliation can be contrasted with the length of time it
has generally taken to heal the deep social wounds caused by most civil wars in
modern times e.g the American and Spanish civil wars. Notwithstanding the
proven effectiveness of African traditional methods of reconciliation, the
international community still urges upon Africa its culturally inapropriate Western
methods of coflict resolution - methods that have proven most ineffective in
achieving sustainable peace in Africa. African leaders and elites, like those
in most of the South (including our own region) appear to be guided by an
unspoken, unwritten slogan: "What is best lies in the North and the
West".
Because its office in
Mozambique was a privileged eye-witness to Mozambique's successful
post-conflict reconciliation process, UNDP is the only member of the
internatinal community to have perceived its great value as a model for
settling communal conflicts: “Reconciliation is thus an intrinsic part of
conflict resolution in the African socio-cultural universe......This
traditional conflict resolution process through dialogue, sanctions,
purification rituals, and celebration is a model that is almost ideal for
dealing with conflict at the community level. It is a functional series of
principles for solving problems for the group." (National Human
Development Report, Mozambique (1998).
Our Caricom societies need
to urgently discard their adopted Northern individualistic values which not
only disdain social solidarity but also encourage us to distance ourselves from
our less economically and socially fortunate fellow citizens. We need to
replace those socially-divisive Northern values with our ancestral ones that
accord(ed) great importance to such inclusive values as sharing, solidarity,
and togetherness, buttressed as they are by values of forgiveness and
reconciliation, and which demonstrate the humanity, empathy, and understanding
which all human beings deserve, especially members of our own society. I do not
know whether any systematic studies have been conducted on the beneficial
effect on those in our societies, who have been summarilly deemed asocial, anti-social,
or a menace to the middle class and upper class, when they are treated with
consideration and humanity by the latter. However, there is a considerable
amount of anecdotal evidence that confirms the reality of such benefits.
Moreover, the values mentioned
above are those which Christ himself preached. Gandhi, who practised
forgiveness and reconciliation all his life, expressed great disappointment
that Christians in the West did not practise what Christ preached and taught: "If
Christians would really live according to the teachings of Christ, as found in
the Bible, all of India would be Christian today." It is a challenge
to Caricom citizens, who are Christians, not to be seduced by those right wing
Evangelist preachers in the North who claim to preach the word of God but
instead preach hate and rejection of those who are different from, or think
differently from, them. Pastor Steven Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist
Church in Tempe, Arizonia, told his congregation that he prays for the death of
President Obama. "I'm not going to pray for his good, I'm going to pray
he dies and goes to hell." Rev. Wiley Drake of First Southern Baptist
Church in Buena Park, California, also told his congregation that he was
praying for the president's death. Most unfortunately, unless I am seriously
mistaken, evangelism from the North (though not necessarily the extremist kind
espoused by those two so-called "Christian" pastors) appears to be
gaining ground in the Caribbean.
October 21, 2009.