Not all that long ago, looking into the future, it would have been easy to prophesy the situation in South Africa: the whites in their apartheid laager fighting on and on a prolonged last-ditch battle against an ANC growing increasingly militant and the whole country disintegrating into blood-soaked ruin.
So much for prophecy. In 1994 Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as President of South Africa and men who had fought with him through the cruel years were by his side. But so were de Klerk and other foes of yesteryear. The military who had killed Mandela’s men now fired to salute him. “Men of peace must not think about recriminations or retribution. Courageous people do not fear forgiving,” this great man declared. There are still terrible problems to overcome but, miracle of miracles, South Africa is doing well. Can anyone think of a precedent for what happened in South Africa – a transfer of power which maintains the support, expertise and investment of the minority with the agreement of the majority? Has any country ever produced a leader who has had the authority, charisma, and steely determination allied with profound goodwill to command his own people while conciliating their once most bitter enemies? There is no world leader who was not a pigmy beside that man.
I still remember vividly the extraordinary emotion when Nelson Mandela took the oath of office as President of South Africa. We all should recall his achievement regularly as the infinitely smaller problems of Guyana continue to go unsolved.
There is another event which also should never slip the mind. I do not think it is often recalled in this age of astonishing developments and phenomenal technological change but I think it is an event which will loom larger and larger as the years go by. It will be remembered when the coronations of Kings and the elevation of Popes are long forgotten. It is a simple event but symbolic of a major shift in the consciousness of man.
It is when man, climbing into space, first saw the world as one small and complete whole, very fragile, spinning blue and unsullied in its loneliness. It is perhaps already hard to realize that until a very short time ago no man had ever seen the world whole like that, a globe actually sailing before his eyes, entire and undivided, looking as if it could be grasped in the palm of one hand.
As the years go by this image will become, I feel, a symbol for growing understanding in the world. Because, when one thinks about it, how absurd seem conflicts, rivalries, and divisions when we have entered an era when we can see the entire planet as a seamless whole. Our minds constrict around a constricted vision. But when you can look at the whole world in one image, blue with its seas and wrapped around with its white veils of cloud, earth-bound rivalries should seem petty in the extreme. Seeing that image for the first time in all history three things become clear as crystal.
One is how beautiful the world is, shining and valuable and owned indivisibly by all of us. Any ugliness that mars it – the desecration of wars, the pollution that sullies the earth, the poverty and prejudice that make it ugly at ground level – should come to seem a personal affront to all men.
The second thing that becomes clear is how small and fragile the world really is. It may seem vast to earth-bound mankind, but in the scale of stars and suns it is no more than a speck bright and glowing, but light as gossamer and perhaps as easily blown away with a flick of man’s itching technology finger.
Thirdly, above all perhaps, when man can hold the whole world in the lens of his naked eye, it must become much clearer than before that it is indeed one world we live in, belonging to all men, and calling for the brotherhood of man. In such a world every war is simply a civil war, every rivalry a family fight – nothing reasonable in any of them.
When the first pictures of the globe of earth came back from space, Archibald MacLeish wrote a poem which sums up for me this image of the world that belongs to all of us.
To see the earth as it truly is,
small and blue and beautiful
in that eternal silence where it floats,
is to see ourselves as riders on this earth together,
brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold –
brothers who know now they must be truly brothers.
It is such a vision of the world that we should celebrate and in such a celebration dismiss the evil pettiness and narrow hatreds which habitually bedevil and belittle our common humanity.
