Related Collections from the Archive
Dear Prime Minister,
YOUR people more than any other section of the white community must surely know in the very core of their beings, if they were unaware of the lessons of history both ancient and modern, that absolutely nothing will stop a people from attaining their freedom to be a people who can hold their heads high, whose dignity to be human persons is respected, who can assume the responsibilities and obligations that are the necessary concomitants of the freedom they yearn for with all their being...
We all, black and white together, belong to South Africa and blacks yield place to no one in their passionate love for this our beloved land. We belong together - we will survive or be destroyed together...
I write to you, sir, because our Ambassador to the United Nations, Mr Botha, declared that South Africa was moving away from discrimination based on race. This declaration excited not only us but the world at large. I am afraid that very little of this movement has been in evidence so far. It is not to move substantially from discrimination when some signs are removed from park benches. These are only superficial changes which do not fundamentally affect the lives of blacks...
We don't see this much-longed-for movement when we look at the overcrowded schools in townships, at the inadequate housing and inadequate system of transport...
I write to you, sir, because, like you, I am deeply committed to real reconciliation with justice for all and to peaceful change to a more just and open South African society in which the wonderful riches and wealth of our country will be shared more equitably. I write to you, sir, to say with all the eloquence I can command that the security of our country ultimately depends not on military strength and a security police being given more and more draconian power to do virtually as they please without being accountable to the courts of our land; courts which have a splendid reputation throughout the world for fairness and justice...
That is why we have called and continue to call for the release of all detainees or that they should be brought before the courts where they should be punished if they have been found guilty of indictable offences...
There is much disquiet in our land that people can be held for such long periods in detention and then often either released without being charged or when charged are usually acquitted; but this does not free them from police harassment. Though often declared innocent by the courts, they are often punished by being banned or placed under house arrest or immediately re-detained...
How long can a people, do you think, bear such blatant injustice and suffering? Much of the white community by and large, with all its prosperity, its privilege, its beautiful homes, its servants, its leisure, is hagridden with a fear and a sense of insecurity...
And this will continue to be the case until South Africans of all races are free. Freedom, sir, is indivisible. The whites in this land will not be free until all sections of our community are genuinely free...
We need one another and blacks have tried to assure whites that they don't want to drive them into the sea. How long can they go on giving these assurances and have them thrown back in their faces with contempt? They say even the worm will turn.
I am writing to you, sir, because I have a growing nightmarish fear that unless something drastic is done very soon then bloodshed and violence are going to happen in South Africa almost inevitably. A people can take only so much and no more...
I wish to God that I am wrong and I have misread history and the situation in my beloved homeland, my mother country, South Africa...
A people made desperate by despair and injustice and oppression will use desperate means. I am frightened, dreadfully frightened, that we may soon reach a point of no return, when events will generate a momentum of their own, when nothing will stop their reaching a bloody denouement which is 'too ghastly to contemplate' to quote your words, sir...
Last year, I was privileged to address the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Ireland in Belfast - and what I saw shook me to the core of my being...
We saw daily on TV in Britain horrific pictures of the pillage and destruction being perpetrated in Vietnam, children screaming from the excruciating agony of burns caused by napalm bombing, a people rushing helter skelter, looking so forlorn and bewildered until one wanted to cry out 'But is there no God who cares in heaven?...
No, I know violence and bloodshed and I and many of our people don't want them at all...
But we blacks are exceedingly patient and peace-loving. We are aware that politics is the art of the possible. We cannot expect you to move so far in advance of your voters that you alienate their support...
We are ready to accept some meaningful signs which would demonstrate that you and your government and all whites really mean business when you say you want peaceful change...
First, accept the urban black as a permanent inhabitant of what is wrongly called white South Africa with consequent freehold property rights...
He will have a stake in the land and would not easily join those who wish to destroy his country...
Indeed, he would be willing to die to defend his mother country and his birthright...
Secondly, and also as a matter of urgency, to repeal the pass laws which demonstrate to blacks more clearly than anything else that they are third-rate citizens in their beloved country...
Thirdly, it is imperative, sir, that you call a national convention made up of the genuine leaders of all sections of the community to try to work out an orderly evolution of South Africa into a nonracial, open and just society...
I believe firmly that your leadership is quite unassailable and that you have been given virtually a blank cheque by the white electorate and you have little to fear from a so-called right-wing backlash...
For if the things which I suggest are not done soon, a rapidly deteriorating situation arrested, then there will be no rightwing to fear - there will be nothing...
I shall soon become Bishop of Lesotho when I must reside in my diocese. But I am quite clear in my own mind, and my wife supports me in this resolve, that we should retain our South African citizenship no matter how long we have to remain in Lesotho...
Yours respectfully,
Desmond Tutu.