We need to find our story again
Rainbow over Hiroshima
On a cloudy day in 2016 Barack Obama stood in front of thousands of people who quietly watched the first American President to visit Hiroshima.
He started, “Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.”
Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor to Obama, describes in his book “The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House” how everyone on their team (including Obama) struggled to make sense of Trump’s rising political influence at the time Obama gave this speech.
He describes how Obama found some comfort in Yuval Noah Harari’s view on storytelling.
In his book “Sapiens” Harari explains that our ability to tell stories about ourselves is what distinguishes us from animals. According to Harari, the stories we tell ourselves are the essence of our survival and prosperity. “As long as everyone believes in the story, it works,” he says.
The collective narrative we tell ourselves determines what drives us, what values we hold dear, and even the actions we take. The way we operate (and cooperate) can be changed by changing the story we tell. (Which of course explains the dramatic change that has happened in the USA and the globe under the Trump administration.)
This made me think about our story – South Africa’s story. The story we tell ourselves as a nation, the narrative that we believe to be true.
In the heady post–1994 election days, our narrative was one of the Rainbow Nation. This phrase coined by Archbishop Tutu became central to who we believed we were – a nation that celebrated diversity, that could overcome the seemingly impossible, that could be an example to the world. We were proud of who we were and had faith in the future.
Of course, that was not the full story. Racism, poverty, and division could not be erased even by the phenomenal Nelson Mandela.
Yet, the story we told ourselves was one of hope and possibility.
Today it is a very different …well, story.
Somewhere a brick was thrown through the glass and our narrative was broken.
The Zuma years and the increasing destructive influence of social media has unravelled our shared narrative to a point where it is difficult to say what our common story- and thus value system- is.
Last week I had a conference call with a few Rwandan civil servants. Rwanda went through a devastating genocide at the same time as we were celebrating the creation of our rainbow nation in 1994. They still face many challenges. Yet, every time I have spoken to Rwandans over the last 20 years, their energy, determination, and focus are truly infectious. Their common narrative is clear and simple: to overcome their painful past and build a nation that is successful and prosperous - which is exactly what they are doing with the highest growth rate in Africa. In fact, so many policy and decision-makers from across the world are visiting Rwanda to learn from them that a special agency had to be put up to coordinate these visits.
It seems to me that we collectively need to find our story again. Yet, we have to tread carefully.
Because as Obama said at Hiroshima in his final days as President: “Nations arise telling a story that binds people together in sacrifice and cooperation, allowing for remarkable feats. But (as we know so well in South Africa), those same stories have so often been used to oppress and dehumanize those who are different.”
Perhaps we should return to our Constitution as a starting point.
“We, the people of South Africa,
Recognise the injustices of our past; and
Believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity.”
These are after all the threads that tie our story together.
South Africa is a remarkable country filled with remarkable people who can achieve whatever we apply our minds to. We just have to remember who we are and that we were and could again become the moral voice of the world.
We have to remind ourselves that our story is one that believes in “the irreducible worth of every person, the insistence that every life is precious and that we are all part of a single human family.” (to quote Obama).
On that day in Hiroshima, Obama stepped off the stage after his speech on how our stories shape history. He shook hands with one of the last remaining survivors of the atomic bomb. The small elderly man started to weep and Obama embraced him whilst quietly whispering something in his ear. And so, with his words and a tight embrace, the tall man with roots in Africa who had become the most powerful man in the world helped to write an ending of reconciliation and hope for a story of unbearable suffering and horror that started over 70 years ago.
The stories of failure, division, and corruption we are currently telling ourselves in South Africa must not be our story’s ending.