MADIBA: A LIFE OF DIGNITY, JUSTICE, EQUALITY FOR ALL

AS WE celebrate Nelson Mandela Day today, we should also remind each other that one of Madiba's most needed qualities today in South Africa and the rest of the world - is his boldness to fight for a just peace: a peace grounded in justice and culminating in joy.

- NICO KOOPMAN

At home and abroad, extremism - together with populism, oversimplification, absolutism and anti-intellectualism seems to be the dominant culture. Extremism implies prejudice and stereotyping, stigmatisation and discrimination, dehumanisation, demonisation and annihilation of those who differ from me.

It leaves no room for thorough analysis, for dataand fact-driven discernment, or nuance; no space for acknowledging that our choices are rarely simply between right and wrong, between more right and less right, or between more wrong and less wrong. Extremism refuses to allow morally acceptable compromises or recognition that every person and event contain both good and bad that one side is rarely entirely good and the other entirely bad.

Extremism embraces the belief that in some situations people are simply irreconcilable that reconciliation is not possible; that we have reached the point of irreconcilability and incommensurability where peace is no longer an option, only violence, war and bloodshed.

South Africans know this doctrine of irreconcilability so well. Apartheid ideology claimed that the diversity of South Africans was irreconcilable, and that they should rather be separated from each other. This separation implied viewing other groups as inferior, discriminating against them, and stereotyping and stigmatising, dehumanising and demonising them.

Moreover, white Reformed churches attempted to provide biblical justification for the apartheid ideology and the political, economic and social system that followed. This system was designed to give concrete form to its extremist, racist ideology.