But it's really an amazing experience firstly to have been invited by the office of the Archbishop to share in this and they used a bit of subtle blackmail by saying that when we were in Puerto Rico, the Governor there met the students. So we have a really proud history in the Western Cape and in South Africa so that whatever the Governor in Puerto Rico can do, we can also do. So thank you to the Governor of Puerto Rico for getting me here.
But it's an experience that I think must be one of the most amazing experiences in the life of any young person to actually be on a floating university. I wish there was such stuff in my days. Because when we were a student, the best way to get out of university was to get yourself arrested by getting involved in anti-apartheid struggles. And then you could get your books sent to your cell and all of those things.
And the Archbishop was the Chancellor of the university that supplied me with books. I immediately enrolled in an Honours in English because that was the only way with - I don't think that the Archbishop intended it this way, but that was the only way you could get more reading than just the Bible, doing English Honours. But I did read the Bible as well.
But I think that coming to Cape Town - and I am told that you're all rearing to get onto land and to start exploring and that I should not be more than 20 minutes - but coming to Cape Town I think ought to be a great experience. This is a place that has been residence to three of the Nobel laureates in the world out of four that South Africa has had. You are having the absolute privilege of travelling with one of them, Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
He became a resident of Cape Town, because it comes with promotion in his job. The highest you can be in the Anglican Church is to be come the Archbishop of Cape Town. And that is how important Cape Town is; that if you want to be Archbishop you've got to live in Cape Town because the atmosphere makes for a good Archbishop.
The other one was the last so-called apartheid President, Mr F W de Klerk who has to take up residence as the President of the country in Cape Town. And his role in ensuring that there is a smooth and relatively peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy is well-known across the world as well.
And the third one was a resident in Cape Town against his will, and that was Nelson Mandela who was jailed, first on Robben Island, then in Pollsmoor and then in Victor Verster. And that made him for 27 years a resident in Cape Town and he also received the Nobel Peace Prize.
So you're coming to Cape Town, a city with a history, a city with multiple cultures, a city struggling with itself on a daily basis, but always hoping to be authentic and a city that we want to have become a home for all. A place in which every culture, every religion, every ethnic group, every difference amongst people can co-exist peacefully not in tolerance, but in mutual acceptance. And that's the vision that we have for Cape Town.
In many ways a vision is simple. But the way to get there is often painful. And we live every day in this city with the daily struggles of people trying to find themselves, their own identity and trying from their own identity to find acceptance for others and their identities.
I came across a very interesting quote, because in political terms we often use the word "solidarity" in such clichéd ways, in such loose ways that we often forget what it means. But Richard Rorty in his book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity - and this is the only thing that I will read - says:
"In my Utopia human solidarity would not be seen as a fact to be recognising by clearing away prejudice or burrowing down to previously hidden depths, but rather as a goal to be achieved. So it doesn't necessarily exist as a pre-condition, it has to be goal to be achieved. Because getting into solidarity with others is a job that has to be done. It is to be achieved not by enquiry but by imagination. The imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. You're not going to read up on solidarity. No-one is going to find you a definition of solidarity. No-one is going to give you a recipe for solidarity. You've got to first imagine the other, their suffering, and then to be able to place yourself there in order to gain empathy. And then you begin the process of entering into human solidarity. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection, but it is created. You've got to make a decision to be in solidarity with the other. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other unfamiliar sorts of people."
I thought that that was probably one of the most decisive understandings of solidarity that I have found. I think that you have been given a blessed opportunity that you don't have to imagine the other. You are on a ship for 100 days with a range of people who ordinarily would be the other, and out of reach of you. You berth in foreign ports which would test your imagination to have imagined what are the people like in Cape Town, in Puerto Rico, in every port that you land. You have been able to get a shortcut to imagination by being exposed to those people.
And what this does for you is to make you of the most privileged, blessed young people anywhere in the world. Because for you solidarity is more of a goal in reach than it is for others who suffer from stunted imaginations. And that I think is for me the key reason that I wanted to meet with people who have been given this golden opportunity to live out a solidarity, to confront their own identities and to embrace the differences of the other.
This world requires it. Globalisation has many blessings, but there's a hard edge to globalisation because globalisation with the speed of information, with the (indistinct - sounds like tyranny of the sound byte) globalisation means that today's people don't read volumes and volumes to understand other civilisations, other cultures, other religions. They learn it through the (indistinct - see above) where Islam can be presented only by a picture of Osama bin Laden; where what happens, the entire situation in the Middle East can be summarise by one picture of Saddam Hussein. And that's the shortcut that stunts the imagination today because we get taught to see each other's stereotypes, to look through the lens of our prejudice, to analyse through our bias. And we don't do the hard work of reading, of interacting and of dealing with people as they are.
I have found in my own reading of both the Koran and sometimes the Bible that probably even what Richard Rorty says about what solidarity is, I found even simpler definitions of solidarity. The Koran for example speaks, and it's a lesson that Muslims themselves miss, where the Koran says in Arabic (speaks in Arabic) in English it says: "God says: I have blown of My own Spirit into you." Into every one of us. I have blown of My own Spirit into you.
I discovered John's 1st Epistle, Chapter 4, I think it's Verse 3 where he says: "Who lives in love, lives in God, and God in them. We know that we live in God and God in us, because God has given us of His Spirit."
What a wonderful - what is it? Coincidence. Or maybe it's not. Maybe we all have truths that coincide. But if the Koran says on the one hand that God has blown of his Spirit into each one of us and the First Epistle of John tells us because God has given us of His Spirit, what does it mean? What does it mean for solidarity? It simply means this: That each one of us, despite our differences, carry divinity in us. We are the carriers of a part of God's Spirit. And therefore, before we see the stereotype, we must see the Spirit. Before we see the hair type, we must see the divinity. Before we listen to the language, we must listen to the spirituality in each of us. Before we judge on culture, we must judge on the godliness that we all carry with us. And if each human being has that divinity, that spirituality, that godliness that is spoken about both in the Koran and in the First Epistle of John, then that is the organic and natural basis of human solidarity. Because we are speaking to that which is common in all of us. It makes the imagination a lot easier. It makes the acceptance of the other a lot easier. Because to tolerate the other is to tolerate a part of the same spirit that has been invested in me and that's invested in each one of us.
So the point that I'm making is that this world in all its complexity, in all its violence is a world that can be better if we strive for human solidarity across borders and if we recognise human spirituality in each one of us. And the tests are very simple. It's a test that I often put to Muslims when we claim our rights in South Africa as Muslims. The question we must answer is this: Are we willing to give to others what we claim for ourselves? And let's do it within a Muslim context. Let's ask ourselves an even harder variation of that question. Are we willing to give to those who are most unlike us, who are most different from us, who we even detest in their differences; are we willing to give to them what we claim for ourselves?
If I must practicalise it even more: Am I willing to give for example to a gay person what I want for myself? And once you pair down human solidarity to those levels, then the tests go right to our core. Because then we begin to grapple with the hardness of the choices that confronts us.
And that's the wonderful thing about South Africa that you have landed in. An active struggle, before tradition freezes over. We're a relatively new country, we're 14 years old. We're quite iconoclastic. We have got no holy cows. This is the period of greatest creativity, of greatest free thinking. And people like Archbishop Tutu is helping us. Whenever we try to stunt free thinking, whenever we try to create traditions out of things that only happened 14 years ago, he reminds us; he rattles the cages because we must prolong for as long as possible the sense that we live in a laboratory. The sense that everything is up for scrutiny. That we retreat only into a few truths and values from which we build an entire new culture.
Because what globalisation does is that it creates uncertainty. It de-traditionalises. Because it puts so much technology at our disposal, so many facts at our disposal, so much science at our disposal that it can even make traditions, religions and everything seem irrelevant and it creates a battle for us to assert our relevance and to find it firstly.
But you know, the danger in that - and this is the danger of the Middle East, this is the danger of certain administrations in the world, this is the danger that goes across all faiths, all ideologies - the danger is found in the words of that Canadian born American economist, J K Galbraith when he says - "The more uncertain people are, the more dogmatic they become."
The more uncertain people are, the more dogmatic they become. The retreat into the few truths they have or believe they have, and assert it so viciously sometimes. They are willing to die for it, because it's the only anchors they believe they have in life. And that's the breeding ground of fundamentalism.
And fundamentalism, they enter into conversations such as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel. That's the language, when fundamentalists enter into conversations and into discourse, that's the fields on which they talk.
What does that mean for the rest of us? The rest of us may have to say that we are having to enter into similar conversations of mindsets and not the formal differences that exist. It is not simply that we must create a conversation between Muslims, Christians, Hindu's, Jews, etc. It's not simply that we must create conversations between Black, White, Brown, Red, Orange, etc. It's not simply that we must enter into conversations where the divisions are formal and historical.
But fundamentalist mindsets have more in common with each other than they sometimes have with their own fellow religionists. I have more in common with Archbishop Tutu than I would have with any discipline of Osama bin Laden. Because I know that Osama bin Laden is a mindset that is foreign to me and foreign to how I understand Islam. But that Archbishop Desmond Tutu's ministry, what he says and how he behaves is far more of a mindset that I associate myself with; and that's why I spend a lot of time in the cathedral. It's far more of an association that I want to be associated with than I would with other mindsets, even if we both speak Arabic, wear the same clothes, recite from the same Koran and perform the same prayers at the same time of the day facing in the same direction.
And that I think is the management of difference. That's the wonderful laboratory that you've landed at in Cape Town, in South Africa, on the African continent. I hope that for the seven days that you are going to be here, in addition to the formal learning of what is here, that you will mix with as many of our people as possible; that you will visit as many of the sights of memory as possible. That you will be able to imbibe a free spirit of experimentation that fires your imagination so that you achieve far quicker the goal of human solidarity. That you will come out here able to have discovered your own identity in solidarity with other identities.
And I'm hoping that in addition to all of that you will have what we call in Cape Town just a jol, one big party, just a sense of enjoyment. This is the jazz capital of the country, this is the creative capital of the country, this is the tourist capital of the country. So there's much to be doing, and I should not delay you any further.
Thank you very much.
