Help find the soul of society

Jun 28, 2026 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths by GHK Lall…

(Kaieteur News) – In the search for a moral compass and a nation’s soul, South Africa surfaces.  It was the time of a rabidly racist regime.  Apartheid was the name; racial domination the game.  It wasn’t a game.  But a harsh, bitter, gruesome time in Black South African life.  Life was cheap.  Black lives were cheapest.  A big Christian Church was supportive.  Not with the killing.  But with separating and keeping down.  Its leaders tried Biblical acrobatics to rationalize inequality, cruelty, and inhumanity.  The Dutch Reformed Church, it was.  A bad state spiritually.  A few, the frail, in the finest Christian tradition, fought to find the soul of a bestial nation.  To end the apartheid state, when the Dutch Reformed Church and cowardly men of God couldn’t find their voice.  Couldn’t take a principled stand.  Guyanese have those.  They come in different outlines, have their lines ready.

Recall those who celebrated excellence in leadership.  And those who stayed silent.  And those who prefer anonymity, stealthy, shadowy safety.  The common thread is they speak god’s language.  Their god is a mystery to me.  Earthly gods, maybe.  A god made of money.  How about political gods?  Those men made of mud, whose minds are muddled, to be kind.  A country with incredible wealth.  A citizenry yoked to poverty.  And, Guyanese absorb the slavishness of excellence in leadership.  The equivalent of political rallies, political campaigning, in religious houses. Their own people are flayed.  Their shepherds sell themselves for a penny.  Insinuate themselves into high places.  Pave their road to personal prosperity.  Receive to receive a reward.  They may pray in different languages.  There is a language they know best, love the most.  It’s the language of money.  The Bible insists that nothing is impossible with God.  Men and women of some god respond: who waan fuh try wid dah can try.  They go where the money is.  Plus, the prominence.  They forgot two things that the man from Galilee counseled.  Don’t seek the important places.  Then, tend my sheep.  Guyanese spirituals forgot.  Or dismissed that exhortation.  Now, let’s talk South Africa.

There was a man named Desmond Tutu, a bishop.  More a giant of a godly man than a bishop.  He couldn’t align with that racist, unclean, South African regime.  He felt the pains of his people.  He struggled with them.  He uplifted Black South Africans.  He worked to make White South Africans (especially Christian ones) better.  Tingle from the sharp pricks of their conscience.  Persistent energy.  No consorting with the enemy for the cheap thrill of money, a photo shot, and an I-have-arrived moment.  For anyone who wants to talk, to locate, to recognize, a society’s moral compass, I tender a simple man, a real honest-to-goodness man of God.  Archbishop Desmond Tutu.  There was a man who functioned as his ‘society’s moral compass.’  A fighter, not a bootlicker.  He had a small company of tireless missionaries.  The bold men who came before and those who followed, with some hardy women in tow.  They had to be.  To manage corrupters and arch segregationists.  Hendrik Verwoerd.  Baltazar Johannes (John) Vorster.  P.W. Botha. And the Afrikaner Broederbond.

Scottish missionary, Robert Moffatt came before Tutu.  He stayed 49 years in disfigured, hopeless South Africa.  An English Anglican missionary, Trevor Huddleston, wrote “Naught for Your Comfort, where he flatly stated that apartheid was “inspired by a desire, which was fundamentally evil, and un-Christian”, one seeking to “preserve a position of racial superiority.”  Archbishop Geoffrey Clayton was recalled to England, then returned to say, “I don’t want to end my days in prison, but I will go if I have to…”

Men of steel who labored against the Natives Land Act, Representation of Natives Act, and the Pass Law.  Not bow and curtsy, as happens here with religious leaders.  Not avert the gaze to pretend not seeing double standards.  Not prattle about ‘excellence’ when inequity rages with money, jobs, awards.  There is IDPASA-G: a disgrace.  In any genuine search to find the soul of this nation, there has to be the Guyana equivalents of Desmond Tutu, Huddleston, Moffat, Clayton, and the native-born Tiyo Soga and Nehemiah Tile.  To find ‘society’s moral compass’ and ‘find the soul of this nation’ find spiritual men of their moral caliber.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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• GHK Lall, moral compass, racial domination, soul of society

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