South Africans have lost ‘sense of right and wrong’

ARCHBISHOP Desmond Tutu has warned that South Africa has failed to sustain the idealism that ended apartheid and its people seem to have lost their sense of right and wrong.

Delivering the Steve Biko Memorial Lecture at the University of Cape Town, the Nobel Peace laureate asked why respect for the law, the environment and life itself were missing in the new South Africa.

“What has happened to us? It seems as if we have perverted our freedom, our rights into licence, into being irresponsible. Rights go hand in hand with responsibility, with dignity, with respect for oneself and the other,” Dr Tutu said.

Dr Tutu decried the rape of children, some as young as nine months, and South Africa’s staggering murder rate, the second only to Colombia, and said it appeared the African reverence for life had been lost.

“Is it not horrendous ... for an adult man to rape a nine-month-old baby?” he said. “We are not appalled that some of us can chuck people out of moving trains because they did not join a strike.

“What has come over us? Perhaps we did not realise just how apartheid has damaged us so that we seem to have lost our sense of right and wrong.”

He was referring to a recent national strike by security guards in which some non-striking workers were tossed off of trains.

His reference to the rape of a child refers to a belief by some that having sex with a child can cure AIDS.

The lecture is an annual event in honour of Steve Biko, the founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, who died in jail after being tortured and beaten by police.

Dr Tutu, in his speech,recalled how a naked and comatose Biko was driven from Port Elizabeth on South Africa’s far southern coast to Pretoria where he was shackled to a grate and left to die.