A Eulogy for the Right Revd Luke Pato

Eulogy for Bishop Luke Pato

The Most Revd Dr Thabo Makgoba

Archbishop of Cape Town

September 16, 2026

Readings: Isaiah 35: 1-2 and 8-10; Romans 8:31-39; and John 14:1-7

May I speak in the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Essie and whole family, I bring you my condolences and that of Manala and whole church on the passing of Bishop Luke. I think of the many, many of Luke’s gifts and ministries, the one which for me stands out is his ability to be a minister of reconciliation.

You can probably think of a number of examples, but let me offer just a few.

Born in the year after the after the Nationalist Party’s coming to power, the first half of Luke’s life was lived under what is called grand apartheid. His family knew forced removals. In his schooling and university career he knew years of rising black consciousness met with rising state oppression. He and his father knew the church’s own apartheid. And yet Luke chose a way of reconciliation with white colleagues.

Then in 1993, with the closure of St Bede’s and St Paul’s, Luke accepted Archbishop Desmond’s request that he head up the new College of the Transfiguration. There he met with two opposing hostile student bodies, and church leaders who wanted to see the College fail and chose to undermine it, particularly be withdrawing funding and students. And yet he managed to mould a coherent student body and set the College on a foundation which has allowed three decades of students to encounter one another across racial, cultural and gender divides, to be prepared for their own calling to be ministers of reconciliation.

Later, in his role at the South African Council of Churches, he was instrumental is setting up along with the World Council in Geneva, an Ecumenical Accompaniers programme in Israel and Palestine.

Then as Bishop of Namibia, he moved countries, into a new culture, where he did not speak any of the local languages, and with energy set about building a community in one of the most far-flung and impoverished dioceses in our Province.

In his personal life, he did not hold grudges. Even those who had been in deep conflict with him, were forgiven and met with cordiality and gentleness.

Luke, of course, was not a saint. Like all of us he had his fallibilities. But as he forgave and reconciled, he also knew himself forgiven, loved by God along with all his weaknesses and failings. Secure in that knowledge, he was able to offer others forgiveness and to be that minister of reconciliation that he was.

Given this extraordinary ministry, offered over more than 50 years, we could be forgiven for being disappointed that Luke was not given more years to enjoy retirement, family life, friends and good health. So we might also be somewhat upset that the Prayer book sets these lessons for a funeral:

“Do not let your hearts be troubled” John 14:1. “The desert and the dry land will be glad, the wilderness will flourish....sorrow and sighing will flee away” Isaiah 35.

Where is the acknowledgement of pain, sorrow and regret?

Yet the church in its wisdom sets these verses for us. And, as always with the scriptures, they invite us to dig a little deeper. As Luke taught many generations of students and preached in many hundreds of sermons, one cannot simply read these ancient words superficially. Fine theologian that he was, I am certain that Luke would encourage us, even in this time of sorrow, to pay deeper attention to the tradition of the church and her teaching of the scriptures.

The verses from Isaiah form a part of the prophet’s vision, Isaiah’s message of hope, for his bereft people in exile in Babylon. Drawing on the image of the exodus, Isaiah imagines, not a 40 years of wandering, but a highway, a straight road home to Jerusalem.

“Strengthen the feeble hands, steady the wobbly knees, be strong do not fear,” the prophet writes. Can you imagine his listeners in Babylon. They must have said: This is no prophet. He is a man out of his mind. We are in exile. As the psalmist wrote: by Babylon’s rivers we sit down and weep. And yet, and yet, says Isaiah “your God will come.” Even when there seems no hope, we must hope beyond hope.

And in words that I think would gladden Luke’s environmentalist heart, the prophet uses images of a flourishing creation to describe how wonderful this hope is. Like the crocus bursting into bloom, the desert will rejoice and blossom. Water will gush in the wilderness, as it did from the rock in the exodus journey.

And then in the gospel of John: Do not let your hearts be troubled. Doesn’t that seem an impossible ask? Yet these are Jesus’ words to his friends on the night before his violent death. Having predicted his betrayal by Judas and having predicted Peter’s denial of him, Jesus tells the disciples not to be troubled. I am preparing a place for you and I will come to take you with me, he tells them. None of this sidesteps the betrayals, the trials, the crucifixion and death. But it promises a oneness with Jesus. Like Isaiah’s audience, I imagine the disciples too, must have felt pretty sceptical. But like Isaiah who promises a way through the desert, Jesus promises a way -- through him. I am the way.

What a travesty that this verse: “I am the way the truth and the life. No-one comes to the Father but by me,” has been used to made exclusivist claims for Christians and even to condemn people of other faiths.

At the most basic level, we must recognise that Jesus never called himself a Christian. When Jesus lived there were no Christians. Jesus was a Jew, he kept the Jewish law, he taught his disciples according to the teachings of the Jewish rabbis. No one called themselves Christians until about 15 or 20 years after Jesus’ death. So quite simply, when Jesus says “I am the way the truth and the life. No-one comes to the Father but by me” he could not have been talking about being a Christian.

So what was he talking about? I think he was talking about a way of living. I think he was talking about living in loving relationship with God. Jesus is trying to explain to his friends how, just as he lives in complete union with God, so too can they.

Often when we think about being in union with God, or at one with God, we think we need to escape out of our everyday human life and enter some super-spiritual realm. Jesus directly challenges this. He says to his friends: “if you know me, you know the father.” In other words all we need to know about God can be seen in this human life. We don't need to escape our ordinary lives in order to be with God. God has already entered our everyday lives and we can be at one with God even when we are grieving and confused, as we go about our everyday lives.

If we put these two readings together, we might summarize them like this: For the depressed, miserable Hebrew people in exile, for Jesus’ troubled, fearful disciples, the message is the same. In the worst of situations, God makes a way. For those of us fearful, grief-ridden, sorrowful, God makes a way. As impossible as that might seem right now, can we trust this? How do we make any sense of this?

Perhaps we can do so in the memorable words of Paul: I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither the present nor the future can separate us from God’s love; neither angels nor demons, nothing in all creation will separate us from God’s love.

When Paul talks of this love of God, or really this love that IS God, he isn’t thinking about an old man with a beard in the sky. Rather he is talking about something much more profound. Because there is nothing at all that is outside of God, can we see ourselves in God? All of us in God. This congregation gathered this morning, those we love, those who have died, yesterday and tomorrow – all are wrapped in this wholeness we call God. God who does not just love but is love. We come into being in God-love, we live in God-love, we die in God-love and we are raised in God-love. And in love that we call God, we are separated from nothing or anyone.

So whether we feel like it or not, we are never separate from God. It also means we are never separate from one another. It’s just that sometimes we forget this. We feel separate and alone. That feeling is real. But the deeper reality is that in God we are never separate from one another, including those who have died.

Though we grieve Luke’s death, we have this assurance that we continue as part of one another, as we are together in God’s love, or more accurately in the Love we call God. Neither death nor life, nor angels, nor powers, nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God.

Could it be that even in death, Luke is exercising this ministry of reconciliation as he brings us together with each other, with him, with all creation, in God whom we call love?

* * * * *

Higher Education and the Work of Nation-Building - Rhodes University, Makhanda

 Higher Education and the Work of Nation-Building
A Response at Rhodes University, Makhanda
1 September 2026
The Most Revd Dr Thabo Makgoba, Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town and Chairman of the Archbishop Thabo Makgoba Development Trust

Vice-Chancellor, 
Deputy Vice-Chancellors, 
the Dean of the Faculty of Commerce, Professor Owen Skae, 
Faculty, 
Students, 
Other distinguished guests:

Thank you for asking me to join this panel today. It is a great privilege to have been invited to respond to Professor Mohale’s outstanding address, and also to be a fellow panellist with him and Judge Madlanga. Not only are the three of us fellow university Chancellors, but Bonang and I share the experience of being residents at Glyn Thomas House in the grounds of Baragwanath Hospital when it was the res to which Wits sent black students in the 1980s.
    Allow me also to greet also the Bishop of Grahamstown and his clergy, the Rector of the College of the Transfiguration, the students and staff, and my fellow parishioners in the Diocese of Grahamstown. 
     I am honoured to be standing on this campus, under a motto I have always admired: “Where Leaders Learn”. It is a fitting motto for the question put to us this evening: what is the role of higher education in nation-building, today, in 2026, more than three decades into our democracy; and at a moment when so many of the certainties of that democracy feel, once again, up for debate? As someone who once worked in academia, but who has been out of it full-time for many years, I hope I can contribute as one who is intensely concerned about today’s topic, using what I have learned as a leader in other fields for my input.
    Let me respond to Prof Mohale in two ways: one by using my own recent learning to underline the importance of universities helping to promote the transformation that our nation desperately needs with practical action; and the other by pointing to the kind of values I believe a university education needs to embody.

Practical ways of building a nation

Two weeks ago, Dr Phil Mjwara, South Africa’s representative at UNESCO and former Director-General of our Department of Science and Technology, gave us a thumbnail sketch at Fort Hare of how our universities have developed. He identified three waves: the first shaped by the discovery of gold and the demands of mining; the second influenced by the nexus between academia and the growth of state-backed industries; and the third, which we are in now, is one in which universities must aim for inclusion, sustainable regional development and engagement with the communities we serve.
    The sharpest point that Dr Mjwara made was this: South Africa is not short of knowledge, or of engineers, or of people who can build things. What it lacks is the follow-through that turns a working prototype into an industry. He gave three examples that should trouble every university: a fully-built South African electric vehicle that was never brought to market; a small modular nuclear reactor that could not attract the capital to promote commercially; and a place in a European aerospace manufacturing programme that South Africa simply abandoned. In every case, the engineers who built these things did not disappear — they left the country to pursue projects elsewhere in the world, taking with them value this country paid to create.
    That is not a research failure. It is a nation-building failure — the very failure this evening’s theme asks us to confront. A case study that Dr Mjwara referred to, drawn from a satellite-monitoring and land-use programme he has helped run with rural communities in the Mbhashe municipality not far from here, is a glimpse of what the third wave looks like when it works: local farmers, university researchers and a state space agency mapping grazing land and crop viability together, indigenous knowledge sitting alongside satellite data, with the explicit aim of moving subsistence maize and pineapple farming toward an export economy. It is a small programme. But it is exactly the kind of unglamorous, patient, jointly-owned work the New Struggle actually requires — and exactly the kind of work that dies if a university tries to do it alone, without a state and an industry willing to walk the last mile with it.

The new economy
Looking to the future, we need to develop not only technical competence in traditional fields, but we have to prepare students for the new, 21st century economy. 
    To quote Advocate Norman Arendse, speaking in a recent address on the Higher Education Act, our universities were designed for an era in which “qualifications were relatively stable, information travelled slowly and the boundary between education and employment was more clearly defined.” However, he says, “We now inhabit an economy shaped by artificial intelligence, platform technologies, cybersecurity threats, automation, climate transition, digital inequality and rapidly changing patterns of employment.” That means we need to educate people “not merely for their first job, but for a working life in which the nature of work itself may repeatedly change.”

Moral leadership
I now turn to the issue of values.
    Fourteen years ago, at my inauguration as Chancellor of the University of the Western Cape, I argued that education must aim beyond the mere accumulation of information toward something closer to wisdom. We need to develop the discernment that allows a graduate to engage constructively with the world. Such an education must include the promotion of moral leadership.
    I have spoken often, in other places, of what I call the New Struggle — the long, unglamorous work of building equality of opportunity that must follow, and is harder than, the struggle for political liberation. Equality of opportunity is not won in a moment. It is built, generation upon generation, brick upon brick, largely in classrooms and lecture halls and laboratories and libraries. Every student who walks through Drostdy Gate carrying a scholarship that a poor household could never otherwise have afforded is a brick laid in the New Struggle. Every research programme that turns its gaze toward Makhanda’s own broken municipal water systems, rather than only toward publishable papers in the Global North, is nation-building. Every academic who chooses to stay and teach here, on this soil, rather than take the well-worn road north or overseas, is nation-building.
    Unless a university education includes a component promoting moral leadership, we are in danger of producing graduates whose values the underlying objective of making as much money as they can without regard to the interests of the community. 

Learning Ubuntu, Not Just Reciting It
For a nation is not simply an economy or a set of institutions; it is a moral community, a shared story people are willing to tell about who they are to one another. And that is where universities carry a responsibility too few of them still take seriously. 
    We South Africans are fond of invoking Ubuntu — umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu — I am because we are. But Ubuntu is not a slogan; it is a discipline of formation. An education that trains its graduates only in individual competitive achievement, that measures worth by rank and salary, is quietly teaching the opposite of Ubuntu. A country cannot be built by people, however brilliant, who feel no obligation beyond themselves.

Courageous Conversation
Universities, and this one especially, have another related vocation in nation-building: to remain places where courageous conversations are still possible. We are living through a time in which public discourse increasingly rewards certainty and punishes complexity; in which people retreat into information environments that confirm what they already believe; in which disagreement is treated as betrayal rather than as the raw material of a shared future. I have long drawn on the practice of indaba — not as a decorative African metaphor, but as an actual epistemology: the discipline of sitting in a circle until every voice, including the one you find hardest to hear, has been genuinely heard, not merely tolerated.
    A university that trains people to sit in the discomfort of real disagreement — about land, about race, about history, about the names on its own gates and buildings — and to keep talking anyway, is doing nation-building of the deepest kind. The debates that have surrounded this university’s own name are not a distraction from its academic mission. Argued honestly and without either bitterness or defensiveness, they are itself a curriculum in nation-building — a live seminar in how a country reckons with an inherited, compromised past without being paralysed by it.

Generosity as a Theology of Nationhood
I want to add one more theological note, because I cannot leave it out of any serious reflection I offer. I have written about a Theology of Generosity, rooted in the  conviction that the deepest truths of a common life are not secured by what we withhold from one another out of scarcity and fear, but by what we are willing to give away.
    Nation-building, on this account, is fundamentally an economy of generosity. A university takes part in it not only through bursaries and outreach programmes, worthy as those are, but through the posture it teaches its graduates to carry into the world: are they being formed to hoard advantage, or to share it? Are they being formed to see a rural school in the Eastern Cape, an informal settlement on this town’s edge, a neighbouring struggling institution, as someone else’s problem — or as their own unfinished business?
    And it is worth remembering, finally, that a university is not one thing — not only its Vice-Chancellor, not only its Council. It is all of us: every scholar, every student, every graduate, choosing, in ways large and small, whether to close that distance or merely to describe it. Faith sees further. Justice reaches further still. So, I have come to believe, does the university — when it remembers what it is truly for.
Thank you.

*  *  *  *  * 

Address to an International Consultation on the Economy of Peace

 NIFEA Consultation on Economy of Peace
26-28 August 2026, Panama City
The Most Revd Dr Thabo Makgoba
Panel 3: Economic Pathways to Peace
Thursday August 27

Distinguished fellow panellists,
Friends:

Thank you for asking me to speak here today on a question which—it is no exaggeration to say—is critical to the survival of humankind. It is a special challenge for me, and a humbling one, to bring to you a perspective from a continent whose population has more than doubled since the late 20th century, a population which now totals one-and-a-half billion people and which is projected to reach nearly four billion by the end of this century.1 
    Since attending the first Ecumenical School on Governance, Economics and Management which many of you convened in Hong Kong in 2016, the questions which are the subject of this consultation have been close to my heart. I brought to Hong Kong my South African experience of what I call at home the “old struggle” and the “new struggle”. The old struggle was of course the struggle waged in the second half of the 20th century against apartheid, a largely peaceful struggle which succeeded in its objective of bringing about our political liberation. The new struggle is the struggle we still face in South Africa, which is a struggle to bring about economic liberation, a struggle which involves fighting against corruption, greed and self-dealing among the elite of our society. Most importantly, and of particular relevance to our discussions this week—it is a struggle against inequality. For according to the Gini coefficient, which measures the gap between the rich and the poor in a country, South Africa suffers the worst inequality on the face of the earth.
    Since Hong Kong, it has became clear that the crisis we face affects everyone across the planet. As I said in a presentation in Rome last year, the consequences of inequality and the concentration of power and resources by a few for their own benefit have become apparent not just to the Global South but to economically developed nations as well. We are seeing across the world—now including Europe and the United States—the phenomenon of large numbers of God’s people standing on the margins of society, looking on to see elites prosper while their standard of living is eroded. Alarmingly, we see many of those people in the Global North turning toward solutions reflecting economic chauvinism, xenophobic political nationalism, woven in with resurgent racism and even the stirrings of a new kind of fascism.
    “Like a cancer, economic inequality is metastasising across the world. And we see the rise to power of oligarchs in countries which we imagined were democracies, flawed democracies as they might have been, but democracies which aspired to reflect the views and the interests of all their people. These phenomena eat away at our social compacts, threatening to devour our very being, everything that makes us human. We face... a kairos moment for humanity.”2
    The implications of this for what we are discussing this week are game-changing. Half a century ago, we in the Global South were appealing to churches in the north to work alongside developing countries in our interests. Now we need to frame our task more broadly. To those in the Global North, we now say, the struggle that we face is a common one, and in challenging the citizens of your nations, you are challenging them to take up this struggle in their own self-interest as well as ours.
    But, that said, how do we, in the words framing this panel’s task, “mobilise moral voice, financial influence, and grassroots action to reimagine economic systems in service of life, justice, and enduring peace”?
    I want to give a three-fold answer to the question. 
    Firstly, there are initiatives on the ground which we can take, to which many of you can speak with more experience and more eloquently than I. To take examples from Southern Africa, I am thinking of initiatives such as large faith communities mobilising money and resources to a common end, such as churches working with financial institutions to provide services for their members, services which should be provided at discounted rates to facilitate economic progress. Or those in which women work together to mobilise money through South Africa's stokvels. Or food-growing initiatives deploying “God's way of farming”, environmentally and ecologically responsible and opposing the commercialisation of seed provision for corporate profit. Such initiatives will of course depend on the specific conditions which are relevant to each of your own contexts. 
    Secondly, there is public advocacy, whether on our own as churches or in large campaigns with other civil society and political forces. Here, I am thinking of the need to stop the scandal of transfer pricing by multinational corporations—the immoral trickery by which they shift profits earned in one country, nearly always a relatively poor country, and declare those profits in a tax haven with a lower tax rate, thus denying revenue to the government of the country in which the profits were earned.3
    In South Africa, when politically connected individuals shocked the nation during Covid by cashing in on the acquistion of personal protective equipment, I issued angry statements calling out the corruption for what it was, and then challenged global pharmaceutical companies to provide parity in access to vaccines. Post-Hong Kong, I joined an initiative arising from the massacre of striking miners to hold “Courageous Conversations”, involving all parties in the mining industry in a drive to reform mining practices and compensate the families of the victims; an initiative which has now developed into a global peacebuilding centre for business.
    But there is a third element which is quite crucial to mobilising, and that is strengthening our capacity to stay in the struggle for the long haul, and to commit to doing this no matter how daunting the odds we face may seem. I was selected for ordination training by the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the example of prayer and action which he modelled has always given me inspiration. In the darkest days of our struggle against apartheid, when we faced the most powerful military force in Africa, he never lost his conviction that, in the end, even if we were not alive to see it, the ideals for which we fought would prevail. He never lost hope, even when, as he colourfully said, he was clinging onto it by “the skin of his teeth”; even when, as he also joked, he would pray to God, “We know that in the end victory will be ours, but please God, can’t you make it a bit more obvious?”
    Nowadays in South Africa, when the inevitably of eventually winning our struggle against corruption and greed seems less clear, we draw inspiration from Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope. Unpacking this, Professor Jacobus Vorster of the University of the North-West, suggests that hope as a process is built on the often small signs of what he describes as “the living, moving God”, working through small acts that are the witnesses of God’s Kingdom, acts to which each of us, no matter how modest our power, can consciously give expression in our daily lives. Summing up his thesis, he has written that “To find hope... is to see and testify about the moving God who continuously grinds out of the hard rocks of evil the visible and touchable signs of goodness that can serve as the solid foundation of hope.”4
    Globally, across the world, we are all engaged in what will be a long, hard and demanding struggle. To survive that struggle, to overcome the setbacks we will face, and to incrementally make the gains, step by step, which are necessary towards winning it, we will need resilience, and resilience is one of the contributions that we as people of faith can bring to the struggle.
    At its most basic, we do this simply by turning up and being there alongside the poor and the marginalised, allowing them to set the agenda and standing or marching with them. Let me give you some concrete examples. During the final stages of our struggle for democracy in South Africa, when our communities were torn by intra-communal violence fostered by the crumbling apartheid security structure, as church leaders we used to visit communities which were literally at war with one another. One of the church leaders once expressed deep frustration after arriving at the scene of yet another massacre, in despair that we hadn’t stopped it from happening. Desmond Tutu turned to him and said, yes, it is frustrating that we couldn’t stop it, yes it is frustrating that we arrive after it has happened, but our ministry now is simply to be with the people, to walk alongside them, and to wipe their tears. This from a person who had also inspired and led some of the biggest marches which had directly challenged the apartheid regime, eventually forcing the release of Nelson Mandela and negotiations for democracy.
    The challenges we have faced in a democratic South Africa are very different. But the importance of being alongside the people, the poor and the oppressed, has remained the same. Thus, when communities sprang up in the bush outside Cape Town, without proper sanitation, and their people were campaigning and demanding decent toilets from municipalities, we would stage what I called “Walks of Witness” through those areas, taking the media with us to advertise the people’s plight and put pressure on elected officials. On other occasions we joined civil society activists and academics in travelling to rural areas to highlight the lack of proper sanitation in their schools. Similarly, when it became clear that the fourth democratically-elected president of our country was allowing corruption to flourish, robbing especially the poor of resources to improve their lives, we would hold what we called “Processions of Witness”, in effect large protest marches, to Parliament. 
    Not only did that put pressure on the government, but for people to see respected religious leaders campaigning alongside them, people we would call “influencers” in the language of social media, stiffened their resolve and helped give them resilience and hope.
    Beyond South Africa, with a similar objective we have travelled to Ukraine and Palestine to walk alongside the people in their struggles there, and to highlight their plight. For us, such action reflects a determination, arising out of our theological convictions, to speak, to write, to press for courageous conversations with all parties and to act to help bring about peace and a more equitable economic framework in which all God's people can enjoy the abundant life Jesus promises us in John's Gospel.
    Let me end with a word on prayer. As people of faith, contemplation and action aren’t an either/or choice. It is drawing on our spiritual resources which give us, uniquely, the resilience and the power we need to overcome adversity and setbacks and to keep up the fight. Hours and hours of prayer each day were at the centre of Desmond Tutu’s life, and he used to say true prayer would not allow you to luxuriate in never-ending contemplation: it would drive you off your knees and out into the world to work for the common good of all God’s children.
    So let us go out into the world in the power of the Holy Spirit and testify to the work of the living, moving God who continuously grinds out of the hard rocks of evil the visible and touchable signs of goodness. Amen.

* * * * *

Statement on the detention of opposition figures, including Bishop Trevor Mwamba, in Zambia

The Anglican Church of Southern Africa is calling for prayers for Zambia and her people in the wake of the country's disputed election, and particularly for healing, reconciliation and unity.

We are deeply disturbed at the detention of a number of opposition figures, including Bishop Trevor Mwamba, the retired Anglican Bishop of Botswana and a Zambian national who now leads Zambia's United National Independence Party (UNIP).

We add our voices to that of the UN Human Rights chief Volker Türk, who has called on Zambian authorities to end arbitrary arrests and respect due process. Other groups including the European Union, the African Union, SADC and the Commonwealth have also voiced concern.

Bishop Mwamba is a widely respected theologian across the world-wide Anglican Communion. Among those who have expressed concern at his arrest is his wife, Mmasekgoa Masire-Mwamba, formerly a Botswana diplomat and a Commonwealth Deputy Secretary-General from 2008 to 2014. She raised the alarm after Bishop Mwamba disappeared without explanation for a number of days, before it was revealed he was being detained at a Lusaka police station.

We pray for all those opposition figures held in various police stations in Lusaka. We strongly appeal to the Zambian authorities to allow them access to decent sanitation, reading material and other human necessities.

We pray for dialogue among all parties and that the democratically-expressed wishes of the people of Zambia will be respected in a united nation. 

The Most Revd Dr Thabo Makgoba

Archbishop and Metropolitan 

 

Take Jeremiah, Joseph, Moses, Samuel & Amos into the Voting Booth - St George's Cathedral

 Electoral Code of Conduct Observer Commission
Interfaith Gathering of Prayer for Peace, Integrity and a Just and Fair Election 
The Most Revd Dr Thabo Makgoba, Chair
St George's Cathedral, Cape Town
Saturday August 22, 10 am

My Colleagues who lead the Religious Communities of our City and Province,
Members of faith communities,
Fellow citizens,
Friends,

Welcome to the Cathedral for this important initiative, so vital to ensure that we have a peaceful, just and fair election which truly reflects the will of people. 

Thank you all for coming, and thanks to Dean Terry Lester for hosting us here at St George's, a venue which is no more important than any other place of worship in Cape Town, but which has a special record of hosting inter-faith protests and gatherings aimed at establishing and deepening our democracy.

As we gather to hear the leaders of different faith traditions bring our various perspectives and traditions to bear on the critical task of ensuring that the forthcoming municipal elections are conducted peacefully and that those who are elected truly reflect the views and aspirations of our communities, I recall the words of the Jeremiah, prophet of two of our city's faith traditions. In chapter 29 of the Old Testament, Jeremiah urges those in exile in Babylon: 

“Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you, and pray to the Lord on its behalf; for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” (Jeremiah 29:7)

These words are apposite for us today, because they encourage us not only to pray for the welfare of the city, but also to do something about it—to work towards ensuring that the city becomes a reflection of the kingdom of God.

There is a particular relevance in that Jeremiah's audience was being encouraged to do this at a time when the city and its politics were far from perfect. As exiles, the people Jeremiah was addressing were not living in a political dispensation of their own choosing. Yet they were being told: just because your situation is not perfect does not mean that you can set aside your responsibility to do something to make it better than it is now.

As we approach election day on November 4th, I am sure that I can take it for granted that we agree that we all have a duty to vote and that we will encourage others to exercise this serious moral responsibility. 

That said, each of us goes into the voting booth alone, unless we need special support, and each of us has the freedom to vote as we please, and for our ballot to remain secret. However, as we do that, each of us needs to take in with us the wisdom of our particular faith tradition. To be specific, we have a responsibility to build our cities, but we have a special responsibility to do that in a way that draws on our sacred texts.

Obviously, we should take Jeremiah with us: Jeremiah, who exhorts us to look after the welfare of the places in which we live.

But as Christians or Jews, I want to suggest that we also take Joseph with us. Genesis 41 records how Joseph helped Israel prepare for famine. He studied the problem. He planned. He managed resources. He thought about the future. Joseph teaches us that competent governance matters. We condone incompetence to our peril and frustrate the flourishing of the city. 

So when we enter that voting booth on November the 4th, let us also take Joseph with us. However much we may have been seduced by posters, however strong our emotional attachment to particular parties may be, we should ask ourselves whether we are voting for a party or for people who teach us, remind us, and exemplify the truth that competent governance matters.

It is not enough to have promises or good intentions. It is not even enough to ask, “Do I like this person?” We must ask the more fundamental question that Joseph places before us: Are they capable of governing?

I also want us to take Moses into the voting booth with us—Moses, whom Jethro advises in Exodus 18 on the art of leadership. Jethro gives Moses a remarkable and practical criterion for choosing those who will govern: they must be trustworthy and honest people who hate dishonest gain. That is the real test we face at this election, at this time as we ponder the lessons of the Madlanga Commission.

Corruption is not merely poor administration. Corruption is a moral issue because fundamentally, it is theft from the poor. Money stolen or diverted to favoured projects is money taken from schools and clinics, from housing, water, roads, and social services.

We can all agree that this is totally abhorrent, totally unacceptable, and that anyone who excuses or tries to explain away corruption is not fit to govern. We cannot put our X next to people or parties who dehumanise others, undermine the dignity of those made in the image and likeness of God. That adds profound insult to already festering injuries. 

So when we choose people we want to trust with leadership, we must ask: “Can they be trusted with that which belongs to everybody? 

Then there is Samuel, who when he is looking for a leader, sees Jesse's son Eliab and thinks, “Surely this is the Lord’s anointed.” But God responds: “Do not look on his appearance... because the Lord looks on the heart.”

Elections and campaigns are filled with appearances: posters, slogans, speeches, social media, promises, and political theatre. But faith asks us to look a little deeper. Each of our religious traditions challenges us to ask: What kind of character lies behind this candidate's campaign?

Character matters. And when we vote, we need to hold that criterion high in our hearts.

Let me mention one last person—one last person whom I think we need to take into the voting booth with us: Nathan. Now you will remember that Nathan was not afraid to confront King David when David has done wrong. No matter King David's power, Nathan does not hesitate to call him out. 

This is one of the Bible’s great statements about accountability. Kings are not above accountability. Nor are they above morality. Church leaders are not above accountability, nor are they above morality. Presidents are not above accountability, nor are they above morality. Political parties are not above accountability, nor are they above morality. And candidates for municipal councils are not above accountability, nor are they above morality. 

Nobody is. Each of our faiths therefore rejects political idolatry. We should never become so loyal to political formations or individual leaders that they can no longer recognise wrongdoing.

Finally there is perhaps the figure who is most important for us to take into the polling booth: Amos. The fundamental question of Amos, repeated throughout his prophetic ministry, is: What is happening to the poor? Recall that it is Amos who says: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Amos 5:24 

The plight of the vulnerable should deeply influence the discernment of every religious person, or person of faith, when considering politics. What do the policies being proposed mean for the poor, for the unemployed, for young people, for children, for elderly people, for women vulnerable to violence, for people with disabilities, for migrants and refugees, and for communities without adequate services?

And so we enter this time of electioneering, this season of deep reflection on the welfare of our city and the areas in which we live, we must as people of faith never evaluate politics only according to what benefits me. We have to ask: “What happens to my neighbour? What will serve the common good? What will serve and bless the good of all?

Amen.

* * * * *

Archbishop's Address on the Anniversary of the Marikana Massacre

 2026 Annual Marikana Commemoration Lecture 

Archbishop Thabo Makgoba 

August 2026

Honour | Engage | Create 

Our honoured families, members of the mining community, leaders of organised labour, esteemed guests and friends, colleagues, and fellow South Africans:

We gather once again to remember those colleagues and family members whose lives were lost in August 2012. 

We gather to honour their memory, to stand with their families, and to recommit ourselves to the long and sacred work of healing, renewal and justice. 

When I first spoke on such an occasion some years ago, I said that the Marikana Massacre had held up a mirror to South Africa. It forced us to look at ourselves: at the conditions in which people lived and worked; at the relationships between workers, companies, unions, communities, government and the police; at our failures of listening; at our failures of compassion; and at our failure, at times, to recognise the full humanity of one another. 

We could not then, and we cannot now, look away. 

The memory of Marikana is painful for those left behind, and also for the rest of the country, because it asks difficult questions. It asks: 

    • Have we done enough to ensure that such suffering never happens again? 

    • Have we done enough to restore dignity? 

    • Have we done enough to listen to the families, to workers and to communities? 

    • Have we done enough to build trust where trust was broken?

    • Have we done enough to make justice visible not only in words, but in practical change? 

I ask these questions because love of our country, love of our people and love of justice for all require honesty. Healing that is not grounded in truth cannot last. Renewal that is not grounded in dignity cannot take root. Hope that refuses to acknowledge pain is not hope at all; it is avoidance. 

And so today we remember with humility. 

We remember the lives lost. We remember the families who continue to carry grief. We remember the workers who carried the burden of difficult conditions and human aspiration. We remember a country confronted by its own wounds. We remember, too, the years of difficult work that have followed - work that has demanded patience, courage, listening and, above all, the willingness to remain in conversation even when conversation is hard. 

Over the years, I have spoken often about hope. I have spoken of ripples of hope, of green shoots of progress, of shared value, of trust, of courageous conversations, of building bridges across the chasms that separate us. Those were not slogans. They were and remain moral disciplines. 

Hope is a discipline. Trust is a discipline. Listening is a discipline. Reconciliation is a discipline. Responsible leadership is a discipline. 

And discipline is a continuous, daily work. The work of making mining serve the common good is one of the most important disciplines of our national life. 

I have also said before that the road towards healing and restoration is long and arduous. Today, we can say, believing it fully, that there has been progress. We have seen people who once stood far apart begin to sit together. We have seen families engaged with greater care. We have seen practical interventions seek to honour those who were lost and support those who remain. We have seen conversations among business, labour, faith communities and others that were once difficult to imagine. We have seen a growing recognition that mining cannot be measured only by what is extracted from the earth, but by what is restored to people, to communities and to the future. 

For this progress, we give thanks. 

But gratitude must never become complacency. Progress must never be used to silence pain. The fact that steps have been taken does not mean the journey is complete. The fact that bridges have been built does not mean everyone has crossed them – Indeed we saw earlier this year the murder of Chinette Callichan, a lawyer for Sibanye Stillwater, and the crossing of our built bridges must continue. The fact that hope has emerged does not mean hardship has disappeared, it does not mean that we can rest. 

Many families still carry emotional and economic burdens. Many communities still know the daily reality of inequality. Workers across our country still ask whether their dignity is fully recognised. Young people still ask whether the future being promised to them will be real. And South Africa itself remains a wounded nation, searching for ways to become more just, more compassionate and more united. 

That is why the messages of these past years remain valid today:

We must still hold up the mirror to assess ourselves, our achievements and our failures, clearly and honestly; 

We must still choose courageous self-examination over denial;

We must still reach across divisions, peacefully - not only to those with whom we agree, but to those with whom we disagree;

We must still recognise that trust is fragile, that it is built through actions more than speeches, and that it is hard-won and easily broken;

We must see that mining, when guided by integrity, a strong moral compass, can uplift communities, preserve environments, restore dignity and create lasting opportunities; and

We must still understand that shared value is not a phrase for a brochure. Shared value means that the benefits of development must be felt by those whose lives are closest to its impacts. It means that workers must be respected, communities must be heard, families must be supported, and future generations must inherit more than scars. 

So, as I prepare to step away from this role, my prayer is not that this work ends. My prayer is that it deepens. 

May the next chapter of the Marikana Renewal journey be marked by even greater courage. May it be practical, honest and people-centred. May it continue to honour the families, engage the difficult truths, and create a future worthy of those whose memory we hold today. 

Let us not allow Marikana to be defined only by tragedy. Let it also be remembered as the place where South Africans confronted pain and chose not to surrender to it. Let it be remembered as the place where grief called forth responsibility. Let it be remembered as the place where leaders learned again to listen. Let it be remembered as the place where a mining community began, slowly and imperfectly but sincerely, to build a new legacy. 

Thank you for allowing me, over these years, to walk a small part of this journey with you. It has been a privilege, a burden, and a blessing. 

May God bless the families. May God bless the mining communities of Marikana. May God bless all who continue the work of renewal. May the souls of the faithfully departed rest in peace and rise in glory. 

God loves you, and so do I.

*  * *  *  *

The 34 mineworkers killed by police on August 16, 2012:

    • Sitelega Meric Gadlela

    • Thembinkosi Gwelani

    • Patrick Akhona Jijase

    • Semi Jokanisi

    • John Kutlwano Legingoane

    • Jackson Lehupa

    • Janeveke Raphael Liau

    • Mafolisi Mabiya

    • Julius Tokoti Mangcotywa

    • Thembelakhe Mati

    • Anele Mdizeni

    • Bongani Mdze

    • Makhosandile Mkhonjwa

    • Telang Vitalis Mohai

    • Khanare Elias Monesa

    • Thabiso Mosebetsane

    • Thobile Mpumza

    • Babalo Mtshazi

    • Michael Ngweyi

    • Mphumzeni Ngxande

    • Ntandazo Nokhamba

    • Mgcineni "Mambush" Noki

    • Bongani Nqongophele

    • Mongezeleli Ntenetya

    • Andries Motlapula Ntsenyeho

    • Molefi Osiel Ntsoele

    • Henry Mvuyisi Pato

    • Modisaotsile Van Wyk Sagalala

    • Fezile David Saphendu

    • Pumzile Sokanyile

    • Mzukisi Sompeta

    • Thabiso Johannes Thelejane

    • Mphangeli Thukuza

    • Nkosiyabo Xalabile

    • Cebisile Yawa

    • Bonginkosi Yona

    • Thobisile Zibambele 

The 10 individuals killed in the days prior (August 12–14, 2012):

    • Daluvuyo Bongo (striker)

    • Hassan Fundi (Lonmin security)

    • Sello Ronnie Lepaaku (SAPS warrant officer)

    • Frans Mabelane (Lonmin security)

    • Paulina Masuhlo

    • Dumisani Mthinti

    • Thapelo Eric Mabebe (Lonmin employee)

    • Hendrick Tsietsi Monene (SAPS constable)

    • Thabiso Mosebetsane

    • Isaiah Twala