Anger and Forgiveness

by Martha C. Nussbaum

license plate and thus enabling the police to track him down. He said,

  “This is a watershed moment for all of us… . Our decisions and actions

  will determine whether we use our pain, our grief, and our outrage to

  move forward to what is the only lasting solution for our country, an

  elected government of the people … by remaining a disciplined force

  for peace” (Inv 120). No more moving example of the Transition could

  be found, since Mandela had loved Hani like a son and was evidently

  experiencing profound grief at his death.

  We are now ready to examine three examples of the non- angry atti-

  tude at work, seeing how unexpected Mandela’s generous spirit was,

  232

  Anger and Forgiveness

  and what remarkable forms of cooperation it made possible: his deal-

  ings with white security forces, including a 1985 discussion with Kobie

  Coetsee, minister of Justice and Corrections, and subsequent treatment of

  white security forces after his release; his persuasions over the two- part

  national anthem; and his sponsorship of the Springboks, South Africa’s

  rugby team. All took place against the background of a firm conviction

  that the appropriate goal was the building of trust and confidence in the

  united nation, with two groups “marching together into the future” (LW

  744).

  IV.1. Kobie Coetsee, Trust, and Security

  The transition from armed resistance to negotiation had to begin some-

  where, and the way in which it was initiated, the signals that were sent,

  would greatly influence the prospects of the new nation. The issue of cre-

  ating trust was critical. As Mandela was, seemingly, on his way to release

  (which took place in a complex series of transitional moves), he was at

  one point in a prison hospital for his recurrent lung infection. It was at

  this time that a very important political figure, Kobie Coetsee, the nation’s minister of Justice and Corrections, arranged to pay a call on him. A lot

  hung on the outcome of this meeting: for had Mandela shown himself

  an angry revolutionary, that would have retarded his release, or perhaps

  made it simply impossible. The meeting might have been extremely

  fraught: for police and security forces had been responsible for atrocities,

  and Coetsee was by no means innocent. Still, Mandela was master of the

  situation. Despite being in pajamas in a hospital room, Mandela was the

  perfect host. He greeted Coetsee— who was almost a foot shorter— with

  regal graciousness and warmth, and the two men quickly established a

  relaxed rapport.31 They could talk with humor and gentleness, and they

  easily listened to one another. Mandela’s years of self- training to under-

  stand the history, concerns, and emotions of Afrikaners began to bear

  fruit that day.

  Nor was his rapprochement with Coetsee an isolated incident. In

  1994, on the day of his inauguration of the nation’s first democratically

  elected president, during the parade itself Mandela made a point of

  showing respect and inclusion to the white security forces. Looking back

  in 2013, an Afrikaner who was then a young recruit described watching

  Mandela unexpectedly walk up to one of his officers. Mandela looked

  the officer straight in the eye, and said, “You have become our peace. You

  are our peace.” Expecting some sort of hostility or coldness, the officer

  was amazed and disarmed; he began to weep, and his men around him

  joined in. Years later, at the time of Mandela’s death, the former police-

  man remembers this incident as one that created a revolution in his own

  Revolutionary Justice

  233

  thinking about the future of the nation.32 He had been brought up like

  all young Afrikaners on the story of the ANC as evil and destructive.

  What he saw that day was utterly different, inspiring feelings of trust and

  friendship rather than fear and resentment.

  Both of these incidents show Mandela winning over forces that were

  and are of the utmost importance for public trust. He understood that

  anger breeds mistrust, and only respect and friendship sustain it.

  IV.2. The Two- Part Anthem

  South Africa’s national anthem today is a composite of two anthems with

  very different histories. “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica” (“God Bless Africa”), and

  “Die Stem” (“The Call”). The former is itself a hybrid, in that its lyrics

  employ three major African languages: Xhosa, Zulu, and Sesotho. The

  anthem, written in 1897, became a freedom song of the anti- apartheid

  movement. “Die Stem,” written in 1918, was the national anthem of

  apartheid South Africa (sharing the stage with “God Save the Queen”

  until 1957). The current hybrid begins with “Nkosi,” then shifts to the

  first verse of “Die Stem” in Afrikaans, but ends with a further verse of

  that anthem with new lyrics written in English: “Sound the call to come

  together / And united we shall stand, / Let us live and strive for freedom /

  In South Africa our land.” The two anthems were sung separately side

  by side at Mandela’s inauguration in 1994, and it was this hybrid that

  the Springboks learned to sing, as we shall see; the merged version took

  over in 1997.

  Anthems have deep emotional resonances, and these two had come

  to define utterly clashing goals and sentiments. Black Africans learned

  to hate “Die Stem” in no less visceral a way than a Jew would detest

  “Deutschland über Alles.” White South Africans, for the most part,

  detested and feared “Nkosi,” the anthem of protest. But things were not

  so simple: for “Nkosi” was sung and endorsed by liberal whites; and

  many whites all along had reservations about “Die Stem,” which of

  course had anti- English resonances left over from the Boer War, and some

  of its verses praised the specific achievements of Boer trekkers. In such a

  situation, what should a new united nation do? One course might be to

  junk them both, and write something new. This course, however, would

  have forfeited the powerful motivational power for potential good that

  resided in people’s emotional connections to these songs, which speak of

  noble abstract goals of peace, prosperity, and freedom, meanwhile allud-

  ing to beautiful features of landscape, which all can love. For related rea-

  sons, despite her utter repudiation of Nazi ideology, Germany has not

  removed “Deutschland über Alles,” reasoning that its Haydn melody

  and many of its lyrics are free from taint: instead, the unobjectionable

  234

  Anger and Forgiveness

  third verse (“Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit”) has taken the place of

  the three- verse anthem.33

  Most ANC leaders wanted simply to get rid of “Die Stem” and to

  replace it with “Nkosi.” Indeed the executive had decided to do so while

  Mandela was out of the room on an international call. He protested, ask-

  ing them to reconsider their decision. “This song that you treat so easily

  holds the emotions of many people who you don’t represent yet. With the

  stroke of a pen, you would take a decision to destroy the very— the only—

  basis that we are building upon reconcil
iation” (Inv 147, cf. LW 747).

  It was a large demand: each group had to learn to see the world, in effect,

  through the eyes of the other.

  The next step was to get each group to sing the anthem it associated

  with the other. Although this is as yet an incomplete work, since at times

  people sing only the part they know or like best, decisive progress was

  made with Mandela’s next stratagem.

  IV.3. The Rugby Team

  Because the events surrounding the 1995 Rugby World Cup have been

  ably narrated by John Carlin in his book Invictus, and much more briefly depicted in the 2009 Clint Eastwood movie of the same name, they are

  familiar to many, and Morgan Freeman’s portrayal of Mandela has pow-

  erfully conveyed the generous, self- contained, and joyful spirit of the

  leader.34 Here is a sketch of what happened: Mandela was aware that

  sports, because of the deep patriotic emotions they can arouse, were a

  powerful avenue of potential reconciliation and unity for the nation. But

  sports had heretofore been separated along racial lines like everything

  else. Rugby was a white man’s sport, and black Africans scorned and

  resented it. White fans and players were quite likely, on their side, to

  view black Africans with suspicion.

  Through patient interaction with the coach and players of the national

  rugby team, the Springboks, Mandela— who by then was president—

  changed all that. First, he made a profound personal impression on the

  players, creating trust, hope, and friendship. He forged a particularly

  strong bond with the team’s coach, Morné du Plessis, and with its cap-

  tain, François Pienaar. He then prevailed on the team to sing both halves

  of the national anthem with passion, publicly, thus creating a paradigm

  for white fans to follow. At the same time, he set up training sessions

  where members of the team taught the game to scores of young black

  kids, and the children “reveal[ed] to their flabbergasted elders that big

  Boers could be friends too” (Inv 196). After these successes, he became

  the team’s most enthusiastic cheerleader, spurring them on to victory

  in the World Cup. If it was a performance, it was one that convinced

  Revolutionary Justice

  235

  everyone of its emotional warmth and genuineness— and, most prob-

  ably, it was genuine. Insofar as will and plan were involved, it was a

  will to believe and care. Mandela was not cold, but jovial and relaxed,

  full of warmth and humor (Inv 185). Above all, Mandela’s conduct was

  utterly free of resentment or racial division: the team were simply “my

  boys” (Inv 194), and his parental embrace of his former adversaries made

  no allusion to the past. Feeling comfortable with him, and accepting his

  affection, the team members became, gradually, zealous fans of the new

  united South Africa.

  The 1995 World Cup final, in which South Africa defeated New

  Zealand, proved a crucial emotional event for the nation, allowing

  South Africans of all backgrounds to come together in a celebration of

  national identity. When Mandela appeared wearing the number 6 jersey

  of François Pienaar, the mostly white crowd erupted in cheers, chant-

  ing Mandela’s name.35 Pienaar, describing the occasion shortly after

  Mandela’s death, finds the transformation incredible. He also remarks

  on Mandela’s humility and sincere love of the team: when he tried to tell

  Mandela that he, Mandela, had done a great thing for South Africa, the

  leader would have none of it: he said, “I want to thank you for what you have done for South Africa.” Eighteen years later, the eyes of the large,

  powerful athlete were filled with tears.36

  Anyone who ponders this story must marvel at Mandela’s good

  luck: for if his support had energized the team, it certainly was not suf-

  ficient for victory over a stronger and more talented team. So his judg-

  ment in allowing weighty emotional matters to rest to some degree on

  the outcome of the match can be questioned. His antecedent achievement

  in forging a unified public cannot.

  It was crucial that Mandela embraced rugby not coldly and politi-

  cally, but as a real sports fan and former athlete (he was a good amateur

  boxer). Sports fans everywhere could see that he understood the power

  of sports personally, from within. At his death on December 5, 2013, in

  addition to the expected tributes, came warm tributes from the world of

  sports. The ESPN website quoted him as saying, “Sport has the power to

  change the world… . It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite

  people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they

  understand. Sport can create hope where once there was only despair.

  It is more powerful than government in breaking racial barriers.” Major

  sports figures from Muhammad Ali to FIFA president Sepp Blatter paid

  tribute to his embrace of sports in the cause of freedom.37

  These incidents all show that generosity and forgetfulness of past

  wrongs— in the spirit of the father of the Prodigal Son— have enormous

  creative power. Mandela does not claim that anger is never justified, and

  thus he makes a weaker claim than I do. He claims, and shows in his

  236

  Anger and Forgiveness

  conduct, that anger is politically futile and generosity productive. If he

  had put whites on guard, taking away their anthem, treating the rugby

  players as racist bigots and oppressors, he could claim historical justifica-

  tion for that sort of payback. Who could fault the ANC for refusing to sing

  the anthem of the oppressor? But resentment would have undermined

  their cause. Anger’s payback mentality would have been a pointless and

  childish type of self- indulgence when the future of a nation was at stake.

  Couldn’t all this have been achieved by a performance of non- anger

  and generosity, rather than the real thing? Or: does this show the supe-

  riority of non- anger, or only of a non- angry style of conduct? Mandela

  certainly thought these two things could not be separated. Indeed he

  repeatedly credits his years in prison with giving him time to intro-

  spect and discipline his entire personality.38 His strong attachment to

  the William Ernest Henley poem “Invictus” (a work much influenced

  by Stoic ideas) is just one expression of an intense commitment to being

  “captain of my soul.” He was already inclined toward the Transition, but

  he needed to discipline urges toward anger, and he said he thought this

  internal discipline was necessary.

  Can we really imagine otherwise? Could a consummate hypocrite

  fool so many people and for so long? At any rate, even if such a thing

  were possible (and I certainly don’t oppose performance, when the only

  alternative is bad thought and perhaps action), the important thing is that

  it would be a performance of a psychology that my argument, following

  Mandela, has shown to be superior in a revolutionary context, as in other

  contexts. As Gandhi repeatedly insisted, the soul of a person who has not

  undertaken an inner transformation is not free; being in thrall to anger is

  a normatively unstable
and undesirable state, even if by some miracle for

  a time it produces no differences in outward conduct.39

  Our three thinkers, then, clearly show us the strategic superiority of

  non- anger: for it wins world respect and friendship, and it also eventu-

  ally can win over the adversaries, enlisting their cooperation in nation-

  building. Their arguments do not prove that anger is not instrumentally

  useful as signal and motivation— up to a point. (Indeed King strongly

  suggests this.) There may be some cases in which the main problem to

  be addressed is public passivity— and then, a limited use of anger as

  motivation may be quite useful, as it almost certainly was as Britain

  geared up to resist Hitler. But our three cases show that, strategically, the Transition is crucial, making it possible to move into the future with trust

  and cooperation.40 I have also argued (going beyond Mandela’s explicit

  statements, and agreeing with King and Gandhi) that the Transition is

  also morally superior: the path, or paths, of anger go wrong, either by

  exalting status to a value more important than it is, or by holding, falsely, that payback achieves something, atoning for the damages of injustice.

  Revolutionary Justice

  237

  The inner world is morally and politically valuable, even when (rarely) it

  makes no difference to external choice and action.41

  In all three of my cases, non- anger was practiced by a group that

  a dominant group had previously derided and demonized as subhu-

  man animals. Angry words and conduct would have nourished baneful

  stereotypes, and thus non- anger was commended by prudent thought of

  what the situation required. Does this show that anger is an acceptable

  strategy for groups who have never been so demonized (white European

  males, say)? I see no reason to think this. Should people feel licensed to

  be irrational just because nobody has accused them of being so? Mandela

  offers reasons for non- anger that do not depend on the contingencies of

  oppression. If some people accepted his lead only because they feared

  fueling ignoble stereotypes, they were right for the wrong reasons.

  Nation- building requires a great deal more than non- anger. It requires

  good economic thinking, an effective education system, efficient public