The last of the idealists

With the death of Nelson Mandela, one could say that the twentieth century definitely comes to an end.

His passing closes the century as an age fraught with the most cataclysmic events in the history of mankind, an epoch marked by revolutions, genocidal wars, the end of colonialism, the lives of two great visionaries and their experiments with truth, the search for morality running alongside a decline into moral bankruptcy.

For the western world, the twentieth century’s curtain-raiser seems to have been the Great War, a world war that killed millions, buried the nineteenth century and its empires, and ushered in the modern age and its weapons of mass destruction.

For the colonised world, the last century could just as well have begun over ten days in 1909 when Gandhi was en route from London by boat, fittingly, to Johannesburg. On that journey he wrote Hind Swaraj , a tract that presaged the long search for self-hood and sovereignty. For Gandhi, swaraj was not just a birthright as Bal Gangadhar Tilak had visualised it but a struggle for righteousness, not a quest for “political domination but moral mastery”, in Ananya Vajpeyi’s words.

In the mid-1990s, Mandela, a self-confessed admirer of Gandhi, gave the world a taste of another ‘experiment in truth-seeking’ while engaged in the most traumatic struggle against apartheid. Bitter and hard as the struggle had been and as different as it might appear from Gandhi’s satyagraha -led movement against the British, what unites both is their vision of the road to freedom.

Gandhi and Mandela were the last great visionaries, cut from the same cloth, in search of a higher moral order by which they believed people ought to live.

Both Gandhi and Mandela delved deep into their own cultures for the roots of a humanity that had been driven out or suppressed by the ideological and political power systems of colonialism.

Gandhi wanted Indians to practise swadeshi and follow ahimsa as part of a moral conduct that signified rule over self as much as sovereignty in the modern sense. For Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, South Africans had to regain a higher truth and their humanity through expiation and healing -- through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

So the twentieth century could be rewritten by positioning Gandhi’s swaraj as a dream for India first penned in 1909 and foreclosing in 1990.

The latter was a watershed not just because it marked the end of apartheid but also ushered a remarkable process of reconstruction: a battered and embittered people reliving and recounting the oppression not for revenge but for restoration.

For Mandela and Tutu the end of apartheid meant not just the appropriation of political power but the re-assertion of faith in tolerance and forgiveness, and the rejection of a dogma that called for revenge, an eye for an eye.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in which both victims of the grossest human rights violations and their oppressors could testify, was a public court for “restorative justice”.

Begun in 1996 with Tutu as chairman, it continued its public hearings for two years; in 1998 it published its voluminous report. This formed the basis for a peaceful transition to a post-apartheid society that was to be remarkably free of the vengeful violence that racked Zimbabwe and Angola.

The TRC was probably the most dramatic return to Africa’s ancient traditions of restorative justice.

But more than that, given the context of the scale of crimes, the TRC hearings bear testimony to a terrifying epic, almost impossible to imagine.

It called for acts of supreme transcendence on the part of the system’s victims, a commitment not to one’s right to a personal truth or versions of it alone, but to an abiding belief in giving a fair hearing to perpetrators of the most heinous human rights violations.

Tutu more or less summed up the ethical basis of the TRC when he said the mandate of the commission was to listen to everyone, and that everyone would have a chance to speak the truth as he or she saw it.

Antjie Krog, an award-winning Afrikaans poet and journalist, covered the hearings of the TRC and wrote about them in her remarkable non-fiction book Country of My Skull .

This is what she had to say about the TRC: “If its interest is linked only to amnesty and compassion, then it will have chosen not truth but justice. If it sees truth as the widest possible compilation of people’s perceptions, stories myths and experiences, it will have chosen to restore memory and foster a new humanity and perhaps that is justice in its deepest sense.”

It is possible that the TRC prevented the kind of bloodbath that destroyed Zimbabwe and Angola. Yet both India and South Africa remain flawed societies.

But those years of the TRC, whatever its shortcomings, offered a crucible for the retrieval of memory and the incubation of a morality of restorative justice to a world drenched in ideas of revenge.

In the quest for that moral order suppressed so long and brutally by the “imperialism of categories” (Ashis Nandy’s expression) lay true swaraj , the ground on which Gandhi and Mandela met.