We have not inherited hundreds of years of tradition, we are a new democracy, we are creative people, we are pliable and adaptable and this is the ideal laboratory for the United Nations to see what can work and what does not work, so feel free to use us as that laboratory.
I want to thank Advocate Majokweni from the National Prosecuting Authority and your entire team that is here. Thank you very much for being here and for being in the forefront of the work that is important to our people.
I also want to greet and acknowledge Minister Ramatlakane, our Minister for Community Safety who is also amongst us this evening. You all heard our Minister of Finance and Tourism speaking and I think the reason we asked her to speak this evening was because amongst all the tourists we want to bring to our province, we do not want those who exploit the vulnerability of our people. That is where we draw the line.
Like Archbishop Ndungane, I want to start of with a quot, because I think it captures so much of what we are doing here over the next few days. It is something that Richard Rorty writes in his book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, this is what he says and I quote:
"In my utopia, human solidarity would not be seen as a fact to be recognised by clearing away prejudice or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people".
I think today and the next few days are about creating that solidarity between people who may not have been exactly the same. It is about unleashing our imaginative capacity rather than our purely intellectual and reflective capacity. Because for us to be committed to the fight against human trafficking, it is not going to be a commitment that comes from intellectual excursion. The stats are there, the theories are there, but the will to act must be unleashed by the use of the human capacity for imagination.
When we can put ourselves in the other's shoes and feel their pain and humiliation, then we will be moved to action. We must define and contextualize this problem. In the first iteration of this problem in the world, a few hundred years ago it was pure slavery. Today we call it human trafficking. Even when there were people who walked around in chains, even when there were people who were physically taken off one continent and transplanted into another continent, even when there were people who were made to work in chains, it took our human instincts, decades if not centuries to say that it was wrong.
It took our religious consciousness decades if not centuries, to stand up and to develop a counter theology, to counter act the theology that turned a blind eye to human bondage. It took decades if not centuries to develop solidarity against that form of slavery, which was visible, which was in your face, which was horrible. It took decades if not centuries for the world to stand up in revulsion and say that slavery was wrong.
The danger is that it may take centuries to develop a revulsion against human trafficking because this form of slavery is more subtle, it is more hidden. We know it exists but we do not see the chains. We know it is there but we do not hear the whips.
The point that I am making is that this will take an extraordinary unleashing of the imagination to spur us into action and hence the decision to have this conference start, with a service in a Cathedral this morning, was probably one of the most inspired ones because it seemed to locate that the problem was rather in the soul of our people as much as it is in the commercial transactions or any of the other more visible elements of society. It says that in order for us to win this battle against human trafficking, we have to awaken something in the spirit, the instinct and the soul of our people.
It was the right thing to kick off this fight against human trafficking, not simply through the mobilization of the law enforcement agencies, not simply through the mobilization of organizations across the world but by mobilizing the religious instinct for good, the drive for morality and to stir the souls of our people out of their religious consciousness, to act against something.
To a large extent, the religious consciousness has understood how to believe in that which they do not see. When we do not see the chains, we need people whose imaginations have told them that there is something to be acted against and that is what we have decided to mobilize over the next few days.
It is not because I believe that any of the religious leaders who are sitting here, believe that they have the divine right to be the first in line to provide solutions. I do not believe that anyone is sitting here with a religious arrogance that we have all the answers. I believe in fact, that the religious community needs this mobilization for its own relevance.
Religion has often been the cause of some of the most difficult times that the world has seen. It has often tacitly created conditions for wrong things to manifest such as, for example: it is sometimes silent on matters such as patriarchy that allows others to interpret the bible or Qur'an to the extreme, as if women can then be trafficked and children can be trafficked because what after all are women. If they cannot be equal in your church, can they be equal in your life, if they cannot be equal in your Mosque, if they cannot even enter your Mosque, can they be anything other than subhuman?
So this is not where the religious leadership stands up in arrogance to lead the fight. I believe that the religious leadership is saying: this fight is embedded in the very fabric of our worship. We need it to even liberate ourselves from those things which we have inherited from times gone by. We need to be liberated from patriarchy ourselves, in order to liberate people from trafficking.
The point that I am making is that the side show to this conference has been a remarkable one. Because we have shown tonight, earlier today in our march, this morning in our service and over the next few days at our conference, that we often concentrate far too much on the formal differences between us. We are so obsessed with who is Muslim, who is Christian, who is Jew and who is Hindu, that we are blinded to other matters.
We are so obsessed with the fights in Palestine between Jews and Muslims, in Northern Ireland historically between Catholics and Protestants. We have fallen into the trap of believing that those differences define us.
What Cape Town tells the world today, is that the world is not divided according to Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jews, Catholic, Protestants orthodoxies. The world is divided by mindset. The world is divided by those who when they faced the kind of adversity that we face in the world today, they turn to fundamentalism and extremism as a way to deal with things.
There are others who tend turn to conservative orthodoxy, who retreat into the Mosques and to the churches, hiding from the world, denying the world being unable to fathom what is unfolding. What Cape Town has shown today is that here is a group of people, rooted in their own traditions, but unafraid of sharing their faith with others, free of the kind of insecurity that is the thriving point of extremism on the one hand and conservative orthodoxy on the other hand. Here are people, who understand that the objectives of all religions are the same, that if we cannot make a difference to the least amongst us, we are not worth our salt on this earth.
What you show us here today is that as a Muslim I have far more in common with the Anglican Archbishop, than I have with the fellow Muslim who has dabbled with extremism. That the fellow Muslim who has dabbled in extremism, has far more in common with the Baptist who votes for war in Iraq, they have their own conversations on the battle fields of Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and other places. We have our conversations in trying to solve the problems that made life a hell for the most vulnerable amongst us.
That is what I think, is the important bi-product that you produce in mobilizing us for the main product, which is the fight against human trafficking. We can only be thankful that Antonio Maria Costa has come to Archbishop Ndungane and out of their conversation they have decided on this course of action because I think we have gained as a world, far more out of that conversation than merely the fight against human trafficking.
We are beginning to discover that we have a common soul and that the soul can respond to human suffering and that in our religious text, in our different religious traditions, we have the impulse to the same good that the world requires. We have shown that if we stand together in this way, we can isolate the extremists on the one hand and we can make irrelevant the conservative orthodox who denies the world but we can gently lead them both from their own extremes and bring them to the center where all of us are. That is what the world requires and that is what I think we celebrate here tonight.
Thank you very much and welcome.
