Peace is Cool and there is Nothing Sexy About Violence! Calling the Church to the Task of Building Peace

The following address was delivered by the President of the South African Council of Churches, Prof Tinyiko Sam Maluleke (Executive Director: Research, UNISA), at Marianhill, Durban

1. Introduction

The title of my talk is inspired by much more than the desire to be catchy and trendy. Peace is not just cool, it is essential. The problem is that we do live in a world where peace tends to be understood and depicted as something negative, depicting an absence (of something else) rather than a presence. Like darkness, which can only occur in the absence of light, peace is often depicted as something that can only emerge in the absence of war and violence. In this way and in common South African political parlance, peace is depicted as a 'reactionary' while violence and war are depicted as 'revolutionary'. Peace is then depicted as a boring state of non-action and non-life. Worse still, peace, especially in church circles, tends to be understood in terms of inward bliss and outward serenity.

In similar vein, we risk triviality when we depict violence as merely not sexy. Violence is a lot worse than merely being unsexy. It is destructive and devastating. The problem, however, is that certain notions of violence are constantly being manufactured overtly and covertly even as they are constantly reinforced in a variety of ways. One such notion is the very notion of violence as sexy and trendy. This notion is often hidden in messages that link sex to violence and violence to power and power to sex. Herein lies the deadly fascination with pornography. The violent film character is not violent and sexy, but sexy because he is violent; sexy through violence. There is a short distance between these depictions of violence as sexiness and rape. Another notion is the rather absurd but powerful suggestion that violence and war are both inevitable and necessary. Similarly we are constantly being told and trained to think and accept that the only way to end violence is the employment of a greater amount of violence - 'the shoot the bastards mentality'. Worse still, violence is often put forth not merely as necessary, but as a 'vaccine', a 'cleanser' of persons, a 'purifier' of society and the deadly 'glue' that keeps society in check and in place.

2. Coming to Terms with Violence

Recently the Institute for Social Health Studies at UNISA released their annual national injury mortality statistics. Basically, they conduct research at mortuaries to identify the causes of unnatural deaths in South Africa. In fairness, this study by the ISH should be titled: 'South African Ways of Dying' - playing on Zakes Mda's novel of a similar title. The numbers are astounding. Of the five hundred thousand deaths per annum in South Africa, nearly one hundred thousand are due to unnatural causes. The vast majority - around 70% - of these deaths are caused by violence of one sort or the other. In the report, references are made to fatal injuries due to sharp and blunt objects as well as deaths caused by guns. The second cause of unnatural deaths in South Africa is road accidents. They also revealed a worrying rise in suicide deaths among young and old South Africans. Indeed wading through these statistics one gains a horrifying perspective not merely into how South Africans die, but also into how they live. How people die is a reflection of how they live. These statistics reveal a different map of South Africa replete with highways, byways and backstreets that lead South Africans to their deaths. It is a story of South Africans who die unnaturally, needlessly and prematurely. But the corpses are only a fraction of the victims of violence. There are many who live with the scars of violence on their bodies and the terror of it on their souls. There are many whose encounter with violence does not succeed in ending their biological lives but it succeeds in killing their spirits. These are the people who live under the shadow of violence, worrying about the likelihood of violence in their own lives (and deaths), imagining their own violent deaths and those of loved ones; fearing violence and protecting themselves against violence with the necessary paranoia. The latter are people who fall outside the purview of the national injury and mortality rates and statistics.

Violence occurs long before the stabbing with sharp objects; before the bludgeoning with blunt objects and long before the shooting with guns. Violence is afoot before the actual spilling of blood. Violence exists in the unjust, inhuman and unequal power relations between people and people; between men and women, between black and white, between adults and children, between countries and between humans and the rest of creation. It is inherent in the warped priorities, poor choices and short sighted decisions of governments and individuals alike. Indeed, violence rages in the insatiable desires and the peace-less human hearts, forever wanting more and wishing to try something else. The seeds of violence are there in the abusive and angry patterns of human interaction - where one's humanity appears to be mistakenly predicated on the inhumanity of the other. There is violence long before violence breaks out. The spilling of blood is the manifestation of unjust, inhuman and unequal relations and interactions.

Therefore there is the violence before violence; there is the violence of violence; and there is the violence long after the violence. In some ways the violence before, like the violence after are deadliest forms of violence as they are often both misunderstood and left unchecked. All three phases and manifestations of violence must be recognized and understood even as we must grasp the adage that says violence begets violence. If we intend to build peace, we cannot afford to focus on the one phase of violence to the total exclusion of the two others. We must develop both the spiritual and intellectual antennas to 'smell' violence from a distance. Indeed the idea is not merely to combat violence, but to overcome it by comprehending it so well that we are able to prevent it systematically and automatically. We should also be able to tell the lingering smell of the aftermath of violence as it eats away at the wounded souls of its victims, undoing their self-esteem while bringing to rot their hopes for the future. Our highly developed antennas should enable us to see the coming and the hidden fountains of violence in society. We should see how these manifest in the family, in family relations, in the workplace, in the schools, in warped ethnic, racial and gender relations.

In short; we should be able to unmask violence before it breaks out as crime, xenophobia or war. Indeed our energies should be spent in acts, words and rituals designed to lament over, warn against and prevent violence. Undue and belated focus on violence at its gory stage can sometimes have the inadvertent effect of putting violence on a pedestal, praising and lauding violence when what we wish to do is to undermine it. Our efforts should not be allowed to turn into a negative marketing strategy that promotes violence even though what we really want to do is undermine violence. Therefore for us, both violence and peace-building must have human faces. Violence like peace-building must never be reduced to mere numbers games, sheer statistics and graphs, mere clever tactics and sheer astute techniques. Violence like peace must always have a human face. We must do everything in our power to give a human face to war, to crime and to violence. Similarly, we must constantly resist the temptation to think of violence in silos. Our task is to make and demonstrate the connections between domestic violence and crime, xenophobic violence and ethnocentric violence, gender violence and race violence, military terrorism and the economic weapons of mass destruction that annihilate millions. But we must do more; our aim is to prevent and overcome violence. It is not our aim either to 'worship' violence or merely to study it. This is where peace-building enters the fray.

If peace-building is to cease to be a mere fancy word we must seriously reflect on our many ways and many layers of complicity in society's project of violence. We must seek to understand the many ways in which we both opt for and are co-opted in the service of violence. All of us must come to recognize our roles, positions and job descriptions in the kingdom of violence. All of us must come to admit to our roles in the factories that manufacture violence, violent people and violent relations. Institutions of society must own and own up to their own contributions in the project of violence. The church is no exception. These exercises of owning up must be undertaken so thoroughly and so genuinely until violence ceases to be something out there; perpetrated by masked and bearded strangers in the dead of night. If we engage thoroughly enough in studying our complicity and our own willing and inadvertent 'abduction' into the logic and the practice of violence, we will realize that violence is indeed not something out there, but in here. Violence sits in the living room of many suburban homes. It lies waiting in the bedroom. It stalks boys and girls in the kitchens of their own homes. Violence occupies centre stage in many squatter homes and squatter camps. It is in here not out there. Violence is the unnamed subject in many of our schools - the one subject every child learns with unparalleled dedication. Violence reigns supreme in the workplace. It is the unspoken covenant into which married couples enter behind the official vows. Yes, violence can be seen in church; in church committees and hierarchies; in the pews, in the pulpit, in song, in the prayers, in the texts read and in those texts left unread. Violence is not out there it is inside here. Until we come to terms with the truth of this expression, we may be ready to talk the talk, but as yet, not ready to walk the talk.

Phyllis Trible has taught us that our Bible contains texts, which she has called the 'texts of terror'. These are the texts which Black theologians identified as those texts whose message is so violent that no amount of hermeneutical technique and surgery will manage to blunt. These texts are the secret weapons of the patriarchal and dictatorial church. They lie hidden behind the familiar texts only to be unleashed from time to time when and where necessary. The function of these texts, as Trible has long suggested, is to terrorise and to legitimate terror and violence. But we will be fooling ourselves to think that these texts are found only in the Bible. Our societies have other texts of terror, which when combined with Biblical texts of terror, have an equally devastating impact. These are the cultural and the economic texts of terror. These are the texts that aim to socialize some in society - especially the poor and the women - into accepting violence and dying as a way of life. Such texts are often rationalized in the name of the markets, 'our way of life', 'our high standards' and 'our culture'. Furthermore while the texts of terror serve to rationalize violence and to nourish violent culture, contemporary drivers of violence include the pursuit of profit as well as the hedonistic and insatiable materialism.

But the culture of violence is not satisfied to leave the reign and regime of violence in the realm of mere mortals. Violence is often proclaimed as something favoured, desired and decreed by God. Hence we hear of notions of holy war and just war - oxymoron of the highest order if ever there was one. Similarly we have heard of liberatory violence and of freedom born of and from the barrel of the gun. Such notions of violence are often pitched at the level of God and of 'salvation'. Our notions of God tend to betray both our infatuation with and worship of violence. And so we proceed to name God in terms that are violent; to arrange and do church along patterns of violence and to define and arrange community also in ways that honour violence rather than peace. For this reason we lose nerve when we are supposed to confront those who perpetuate violence in our name and in the name of God.

3. Building Peace

To return to a theme I invoked at the beginning of my talk; we do live in a world were peace tends to be understood and depicted as an absence rather than a presence. We do live in an era when peace, for all its benefits, is nevertheless constantly depicted as a boring state of non-action, non-life and nothingness. Peace is not seen as a 'state that is alive with possibilities'. And yes, in some church circles, tends to be understood in terms of individual inward bliss, the bliss that comes to a 'one heart one way community' or the outward serenity that is supposed to belong to people of faith. It seems to me therefore that the first step in peace-building is in the redefinition of peace. The saying that peace means a lot more than the absence of war has become clichÇ. It is a very important clichÇ. Peace is a presence not an absence. It is a presence of justice. Many of us will recall the famous song of the Jamaican reggae star, Peter Tosh where he croons, 'I don't want no peace, I want equal rights and justice'. The prophets also tell us that there is such a thing as false peace - 'the shouting of peace, peace when there is no peace'. One of the most effective ways of undermining peace is to misname it and to do so deliberately. To make people think they have it when it is patently absent. This happens when people are told that they live in an age of hope when in fact they live in an age of despair and disrepair. It happens when armed response companies take money from people in return for an idea of peace and an equally false sense of security. False peace is being proclaimed when official statistics keep telling us that crime is down and that our streets are safe, when we know that our streets have become battlegrounds and that women and children are still being raped. It is false peace when we are asked to be satisfied with the raping of fewer women. Why must women be raped at all? We know peace is absent when exorbitantly prized gold estates are billed and advertised as the only havens on peace in our society! What more evidence of its absence can we obtain than to be told it is to be found only in secluded and expensive places? Perhaps the first thing is not so much to define peace as it is to tell fake peace from real peace. These are some of the examples of fake peace. Fake peace is peace built on unacknowledged injustice.

Peace-building is a building metaphor. The first and most important tool in the process of building is the mind. Someone has to visualize the building or the infrastructure. The visualization has got to be vivid. This idea/vision must then be drawn into a plan based on some piece of concrete land. Without vision, without a plan and without a piece of land on which to implement it, we can forget about ever building anything.

According to Lederach, peace-building involves a long-term commitment to a process that includes investment, gathering of resources and materials, architecture and planning, coordination of resources and labour, laying solid foundations, construction of walls and roofs, finish work and above all ongoing maintenance. Lederach also emphasizes that peace-building centrally involves the transformation of relationships (Lederach, 1997, 20, 82-83).

What then is our vision of peace? Where does such a vision come from? We agree with fellow peace workers in the world that peace is the glue without which there will be no social cohesion no matter how much economists may brandish this term. We agree with fellow peace workers that peace is the most basic ingredient of development. It is the starting point of democracy. Peace is the most important driver of the economy. But our vision of peace comes from the prophets of the Old Testament - peace founded on justice. A vision of peace proclaimed not merely on the basis of what obtains in society but also in spite of what obtains in it.

Our vision of peace derives from the ministry of John the Baptist - peace that will result from and that is based on repentance, a change of ways, humility and a love for the simpler things in life. Those who work for this kind of peace are willing to decrease while Jesus increases. It is not about them. Our vision of peace comes from Jesus, who once stood looking at Jerusalem and cried for he saw that despite appearances, despite outward serenity and order, Jerusalem had, at its core, no peace at all. Our vision of peace comes from the resurrected Lord who says 'peace unto you', the Lord who gives us peace, not as the world gives it, not as the world understands it. Indeed our vision of peace comes from our experience of the violence of the cross. That is where our vision of peace comes from!

But if peace is to be built we must be meticulous about it: it must include, a biblical vision of peace; deep and not superficial thoughts; careful plans and not quick fixes; well chosen words and not careless speak; appropriate actions and rituals of lasting impact and not hollow actions and meaningless rituals; brave witness and not timid protestations; a sustainable theological and ecclesiastical will and not a mercenary approach.. Peace must be waged, slowly and painstakingly! Waging peace is a task that needs to be carried out all the time - backstage, on stage and after the show! The task is a great and demanding one. But it is one from which we dare not run. Our survival on earth depends on it.

References (Incomplete)

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace: Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peace-keeping Document A/47/277 - S/241111, 17 June 1992 (New York: Department of Public Information, United Nations, 1992). http://www.un.org/Docs/SG/agpeace.html

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Supplement to An Agenda for Peace: Position Paper of the Secretary-General on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the United Nations Document A/50/60 - S/1995/1, 3 January 1995 (New York: Department of Public Information, United Nations, 1995). http://www.un.org/Docs/SG/agsupp.html

John Paul Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1997).

Lederach J.P. Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation Across Cultures (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995).