Address to American and South African youth at the Tutu Legacy Foundation, Cape Town

 

Bridging Borders to Prosperity by Empowering Youth for Financial Inclusion and Entrepreneurship

A Shared Interest event in partnership with The Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation

Remarks by Archbishop Thabo Makgoba

April 7, 2025

Shared Interest is a New York-based organisation which grew out of  efforts by anti-apartheid activists to support South African before apartheid ended, and now aims to empower global social impact leaders in the U.S. and Southern Africa to foster entrepreneurial innovation and sustainable development. As part of this commitment, it hosted an inaugural Shared Interest Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) and Partners Delegation in Cape Town from April 6–11, 2025. The inter-generational experience connected HBCU students, donors, and South African leaders to advance youth entrepreneurship, sustainable investments, and cultural and educational exchanges.

Good morning to you all, and thank you very much to Shared Interest and the Tutu Legacy Foundation for welcoming me and hosting this round-table today. Shared Interest and its founders have played an extraordinary role in supporting, first, our struggle for political liberation and then, after we overcame apartheid, our struggle for economic liberation. Led initially by Donna Katzin, you have stuck with us, even when the going has been rough and our democratically-elected government has messed up. We are deeply grateful to you.

And please allow me to add my welcome to those of you visiting South Africa, and especially those from historically black institutions in the United States. We meet at a time when all of us face an uncertain future. During my lifetime, we have experienced many such moments in South Africa, but I have to say, little did we ever expect that the uncertainty would be created by the world's biggest economy.

This means that, more than ever before, we—both South Africans and Americans—are in same boat. We share many of the same fears for the future, particularly in the economic sphere. And I dare say that you who are from the United States may well still have similar challenges to ours in breaking through what we might call the “racial glass ceiling” when it comes to making your way in the world as entrepreneurs and professionals seeking equal opportunities in society. It is a matter of deep regret to us in South Africa, where redress for past discrimination and exclusion is built into our Constitution, to see what is happening to similar measures in the United States.

But, having first noted and recorded the difficulties we all face right now, let me turn to my main thesis today, which is one based on hope and confidence for the future. Why do I say that? Well, it's because at every turning point in society, young people such as yourselves—young people with new ideas, new purpose, new energy—have been those who have turned despair into hope, who have campaigned for change, and who have brought it about.

Take, for example, what happened in the 1980s, when we were fighting apartheid. In the years when President Reagan was refusing to impose sanctions against apartheid, young Americans on university campuses played a large role in the campaign against his policies – a campaign so successful that when Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986, and President Reagan vetoed it, Republicans joined Democrats in overriding the veto, inflicting on the president the worst foreign policy defeat of his term of office.

You, the young people of both our societies, are the drivers of innovation and the catalysts of change. In South Africa, the generation of 1976, starting with 14-year-olds in the junior secondary schools of Soweto, precipitated a youth rebellion which unleashed the final revolution which brought down apartheid. And if we could beat apartheid in South Africa, upheld as it was by the most powerful military force in Africa, then we can overcome the challenges we face now. So the next question is: reinforced with this confidence, what is it that should guide what we are aiming to do?

I have been distressed to read a transcript of a recent interview given to the American podcaster Joe Rogan by the South African-born entrepreneur Elon Musk. In the interview, Mr Musk said, and I quote: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” While he claimed to think that “empathy is good,” he also described it as “a bug in Western civilization” which was, in his words, being “weaponized”.¹

Let's set aside his apparent obsession with Western civilization, whatever you might believe that to be, and focus on his identification of empathy as a weakness. Listen instead to these words: “In our African idiom we say: 'A person is a person through other persons.' None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, or walk, or speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. The solitary, isolated human being really is a contradiction in terms.”

Listen also to these words: “The first law of our being is that we are set in a delicate network of interdependence with our fellow human beings and with the rest of God’s creation. We are meant to live as sisters and brothers, as members of one family, the human family, God’s family. We are created for peace, for harmony, for togetherness. All kinds of things go horribly, badly wrong when we flout that fundamental law..."

The words, of course, are those of Desmond Tutu, and they describe a way of living with empathy as its core. Our experience in South Africa—the experience of those who have lived here all their lives, of those who stayed and fought apartheid, even when they could have left—is the reverse of a philosophy which fears empathy, and is suspicious of those who show it.

What held us together under apartheid; what has held us together in the most turbulent years of three decades of democracy; what has enabled us to flourish when we have done so; and what enables societies to flourish economically is in fact empathy. For what is the purpose of economic activity? It's not about money for money's sake. Money, as we all know, doesn't buy us personal happiness. Each one of us lives in relationship with others, so our economic activity is worthless unless it is about ensuring human flourishing, which can be achieved only by working for the common good.

In South Africa, a lot of young people tell me that the promises of democracy are not being realised. When we look at much of what is happening in public life, I can understand their disillusionment, and why they are opting out of public life. But that is not the answer to our crisis. It will not secure our future. I always urge young South Africans to dig into the radical roots of the old struggle against apartheid, and dare to dream and work for a country in which there is justice, equity and equality of opportunity. Once we achieve those, we will take off economically.

What kind of economy will achieve human flourishing and promote the common good. Some years ago I attended a high-level school on governance, economics and management in Hong Kong, which looked at how to achieve a new “economy of life”. Such an economy would replace the current global governance of money with financial systems which are less exploitative and share resources and income more equitably.

All of us, but especially you as young people, need to develop initiatives such as this to help you challenge old stereotypes and find new ways of making an ever more complex and fast-paced world into an ethical and sustainable place for all.

So let me conclude with these words: please, young South Africans, please, young Americans, please, young people everywhere: dare to dream and work for a world in which there is justice, equity and equality of opportunity, a world of flourishing economies and therefore peaceful, harmonious societies.

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1https://www.happyscribe.com/public/the-joe-rogan-experience/2281-elon-musk