Welcome to this extraordinary dialogue with a truly amazing woman, Mampilla Ramphele, whose remarkable career extends from medical school, to South African activist, to managing director of the World bank and to president of Club of Rome.

Mampila explores topics such as oppression, apartheid and the necessity of empowerment under the face of oppressive politics.

Looks at how a tiny minority, 10% in South Africa can control an entire nation and the importance of escaping not only political apartheid but mental apartheid in which we see ourselves as less than others.

She talks about the tragedy of whites holding on desperately to their privilege in South Africa and compares it to the way in which many of us are now holding onto our privileges despite the threats to our burning planet and to our very civilization.

Welcome to deep transformation.

Self, society, spirit, life enhancing, paradigm rattling conversations with cutting edge thinkers, contemplatives and activists.

With Dr. Roger Walsh and John Dupuy, join us in the evolutionary fast lane as we take a deep dive into transformational practice.

Peak experience, profound understanding, powerful contribution.

I'm Roger Walsh and our co host is John Dupuy, founder of Iawake Technologies.

And our guest today is someone who has literally helped transform her country, been a leader in political movements, a physician, an activist, manager of the World bank and currently co president of the Club of Rome.

This is Mampila Rampilla.

Her life is just quite extraordinary and I want to spend just a little time just giving an overview.

It's so multifaceted, so multidimensional and has made contributions and transformations in so many areas.

She was trained as a physician in South Africa and eventually went on to get additional degrees in tropical medicine and public health as well as a PhD in social anthropology.

But while a student became also a student activist working against apartheid and becoming deeply involved with political activism.

Was the partner of Stephen Bikou who I first learned through that film Cry Freedom but because of her activism was banned in South Africa.

That didn't seem to stop her at all and she continued in multiple roles.

Eventually after apartheid was broken, became Vice Chancellor of the university and Cape Town and I had the privilege of meeting her in San Francisco where she is on the board of the Global Compassion Coalition.

And the more I've learned, the more just delighted I've been to frankly to know you Matthew and to have the.

Just to be able to think of having a really in depth dialogue with you and about your work and who you are and what you've done.

We began just before we started recording saying a little bit about the podcast and you, you said well, seemed like a wonderful alignment because Your life had been about transformation.

So maybe that'd be a great place to start.

Maybe you could say, yeah, yeah, tell us what, what is the underlying theme of your life?

Because there's so many facets, so many aspects, you've been active in so many ways.

I've been very fortunate to be born into a family of educators.

And so from early childhood I knew that my mind had the capacity to learn and continue to learn.

But I was aware that there was something not right about my country.

But I didn't know what it was because at that time, my parents, being teachers and therefore public servants, they shied away from talking any matter that is political.

But children have got a capacity to know that things are not what they should be.

And that question mark in my mind, particularly because my dad was the school principal, even though his highest academic standard was a primary school diploma, and then you had, at that time, you could then go to college to do what they called a native teacher's certificate.

He became self educated.

So I grew up in a home with books, encyclopedias, Shakespearean plays, and my dad, when he was home, was always lying on his bed and reading.

So I grew up with this curiosity about what was in books.

And I was a very tiny, fragile child.

So can you imagine holding an encyclopedia at the age of 9, 10?

It was impossible.

So I would lie on my belly and try and see what it was and I couldn't figure out what it was.

So I would have an Oxford or Webster dictionary that year to try and figure out what these words were.

So having grown up in that home and then going to high school, and I was a top student all the way throughout my school years, but I was ignorant of what made my country so different, because I knew something was different, but I didn't know what until I went to medical school and met with other young people who were also first time entering universities from their families.

And we spent months during 1968 trying to figure out how do you explain that a tiny minority population can hold a majority population.

And we're not talking a small majority, I mean, we're talking about less than 10%, holding more than 90% of the population.

And we couldn't figure out how is it possible?

I mean, we had great respect for our parents.

Why were they allowing this to happen?

It was the day the penny dropped, that for as long as we called ourselves non Europeans, non whites, we actually are giving the oppressors the power.

It was such a stark revolution, stimulated of course by what was going on in student Life.

In the 68, you remember, there was the anti Vietnam War demonstrations in the US and in Europe, the students were also standing up.

And so for us it was very potent to come to this realization.

And once we pronounced ourselves black and proud, we made a decision.

It was a weekend.

We said, on Monday we are going to see the school principal or the university principal or president in your language, and we are going to demand that the labeling of our segment of the campus at the University of Natal, which was called Natal University Non European section, that that has to change and change immediately to Natal University black section.

We were shocked when the delegation of two people went to the principal's office, came back to say, you know what he just said?

Oh, sure thing, no problem.

They could have fallen off their chair, thought we were going to have a titanic struggle, no.

And so by the end of the week, everything had been changed.

How old were you at this point when this occurred?

I was 19.

And so here we were, we were all between 19 and 22 at most.

And so here we were seeing a demonstration that subjugation happens because the subjugated acquiesce to it.

The day you name yourself and you refuse to be identified by the oppressor with a name that literally makes you a second class citizen in your own country.

Imagine someone coming from Europe and telling Africans that you are non European, who said you wanted to be Europeans.

But our parents and our grandparents had accepted this for two, three generations.

And that magical weekend is etched in our memory because it gave us back the power as human beings to self identify and to draw strength from being connected with our rich heritage.

It filled your life with purpose at that point, did it kind of open up a new flow of meaning and purpose and direction and this is what I'm here to do?

Well, the purpose came later.

It was first the sense of power.

We can change things, right?

And then, of course, the purpose of change was to make for a world where no one would be identified as a non something, which meant that was the first step in the fundamental transformation of relationships of people, the people of South Africa.

And in fact, this is the real beauty of the journey we traveled.

As soon as we had done that, we realized that we also are liberating white people from this superiority complex, which is a burden.

To the extent that you treat someone as inferior, you have to prop up this artificial superiority, which is also a burden.

There is a sense in which the transformative process we went through didn't just liberate us and our power to shape the future.

It Liberated those white people who were ready to be liberated.

And there were not many, because liberation came with consequences.

If you are no longer having someone who's your doormat, then you are going to have to be ordinary like everybody else.

And you can imagine for this apartheid system, it didn't dawn on them that what the principal had just done was the beginning of the end, because, I mean, erroneously, they thought we had bought into the apartheid narrative of black people must be one side and white people the other side.

It didn't bother us what they thought.

We knew what we wanted.

So that sense of purpose.

Yes.

But then we realized that we can't do this alone.

There are only about 15 of us at the University of Natal that had been having these conversations.

But then there was a world out there of black students in other campuses which were less open than ours.

And so that was the beginning of Steve Biko's journey across campuses across the country and his neglect of his medical studies, which is why, a year later, he was excluded from school.

But he didn't bother.

That was not.

He didn't want to be a medical student, but his mother had thought he was too politically conscious to be safe.

And so medical school was supposed to be a safe haven for him.

Little did she know that in that safe haven were to be born an idea that would shape the very short life of her son.

And so again, we decided, we have to call a meeting of black students across the country.

So we went back to the same principal and said, you know what?

We would like to call other black students to a conference.

He said, sure thing.

How much will it cost?

He gave him some figure, and there he was.

I mean, the system itself funded the first meeting of the South African Student Organization, which was the founding organization of the black consciousness movement.

And I'm sure years later, when this principal, who became the minister of finance in the National Party, when he looked back, he must have asked himself, what were you smoking?

Well, if you can figure it out, send us some.

Okay.

Really?

Yeah.

We need to put it in the drinking water.

That's wonderful.

Man Feeler.

Gosh, I have so many questions, but I'm.

I'm.

You're on a roll.

Would.

Is.

Would you like to follow up on what you've been saying?

Well, perhaps that will help surface other questions, because the distinguishing feature of our black consciousness movement was that we were not simply looking to transform our inner selves, which was obviously fundamental, because mental slavery is the obstacle to any other transformational process that can happen.

So one needs to free the mind, the heart and the body from being defined by others and from accepting barriers to becoming that which you have been created to become.

But once that happens, the question is then how do you make sure that this consciousness translates into practical manifestations?

So we had big conversations about the practical manifestations of the black consciousness philosophy.

Did you record those meetings, Mambila?

We didn't, because that time we didn't have tape recorders.

We didn't have.

We were as poor as church mice.

But what we did do is we recorded the evolution of the black consciousness movement in a book which was published after Steve died called I Write what I Like, which were articles which appeared every month in the first SASO newsletter, which were reflections of what we're thinking about, what we're talking about, what were the issues that we're talking about.

And so yes, it is recorded retrospectively, but from articles that were written in the middle of the night with one finger that Steve used to type with.

And I'll be sitting there and reading from the notes we had been discussing.

And that's how those newsletters were written.

And then we used the, we didn't have the printers, we would use the psycho styling machine with all that ink and mess, but we did.

And then we put it together, staple them together, distribute them.

And that's how the movement was formed and perpetuated.

And, and did you have a, one of my all time heroes, American Heroes connection with Martin Luther King Jr. And the work that he'd done in the United States and, and his, I guess he was dead by the time this started going.

But very, a very short period.

Was there a connection with that, with him?

Well, what you have to remember is that in the 60s, the apartheid government prohibited any publication that would touch on matters like Martin Luther King would do, let alone Malcolm X, let alone the black power movement.

But guess what?

One of the 15 was the son of two university lecturers and so had access to the university library.

Uhhuh.

So we got all of the news about what was going on in the black power movement, Martin Luther.

We even in the end got tapes of the I have a Dream speech, tapes of Malcolm X's speeches, tapes of the Black power movement, the Angela Davis is of this day right there on campus.

And of course they didn't know it was happening.

Did you start at some point start to realize that the principles that you were espousing and developing weren't just for black people?

And did they start to change white folks or whoever other folks who were associated with you were they started looking at this and going, look what they're doing.

Oh my God.

You know, maybe, you know, I have to start with me.

Was there any of that kind of.

Of.

Of bleed over into people besides, I guess, black South Africans who were starting to kind of wake up at the same time or because of this?

Absolutely.

Particularly a few white students who were our contemporaries.

And some of them I'm still friends with, people like Horst Kleinschmidt, people like Jeff Badlinder, who's now a big shot advocate, and a few others.

But for the majority, which is an important issue about transformation, they heard the message.

They were petrified of the implications of.

And so it didn't change their lives because they didn't dare to change their life.

They were scared that they would be persecuted if they changed.

No, they were scared of losing their privileges.

In the same way today we have climate change.

We know all the science about climate change.

We know that this chasing after growth, economic growth, is ruinous, not just for the planet, but for ourselves.

But we continue.

Why?

Because the incentives are for continuing with business as usual.

So knowing and doing are two different things.

Now it goes back to what did we do with the consciousness that we had.

We agreed that that consciousness will mean nothing unless it has got practical manifestations.

And so we took a decision as students that we have to practice what we preach in terms of mobilizing people to restore their own dignity, to free themselves from fear, and to treat one another with respect and to build black solidarity.

So we decided that if you are a lawyer during the weekend, find a place where you can talk to people who need legal advice.

If you are a doctor or a medical student like me, work in the poorest clinics and get to know and talk to people about the things that ail them because they are not sick because of a virus.

They are sick because of the socioeconomic system.

The same thing with teachers, which is why June 76 happened, because the students who had been thrown out of university became private teachers in the schools, in high schools across the country, and they started conscientizing those students.

And we also.

One of the practical manifestations of black consciousness was that we believed in intergenerational conversations.

So not only among students at university level, but high school, and of course our parents and the workers.

So we mobilize workers, our parents, faith communities, and voila.

Because it wasn't about, this is what you must do to be free.

It was about how do you work to free yourself from the sense that you are less than and the good Thing with South Africans, black and white, is that they are highly religious, spiritual people.

So when you speak to them about our ancestors must be hanging their heads in shame to see how you have accepted being treated as inferior to others when in fact you come from a great heritage.

And.

And we're all God's children.

And how can you treat any of God's children as if they're less than.

Exactly.

It just.

It just makes absolutely no sense.

And I think that that point needs to be, I don't know, talked about more so that we can awaken the religious sensibilities that needs to be wakened along those lines still, you know, and in our country, in the United States anyway, it's like, well, in my country.

As well, I mean, the apartheid in the sense of white supremacy is alive and well.

And it doesn't help that the post apartheid government successfully, I mean, successively have failed to live up to the ideals of the freedom that so many people lived and died for.

And that simply reinforces white supremacists to say, you see, we told you that black people cannot govern.

It's got nothing to do with color.

It's everything to do with the values.

And the unfortunate thing that happened to my country is in the aftermath of the release of Mandela, there was too much focus by ANC people on owning Mandela as theirs, whereas Mandela was beyond the anc, but also not learning the lessons of the internal struggles since they had been in exile or in jail.

In fact, Mr. Mandela said this to me because I used to visit him towards the end of his period in jail every second weekend.

And he said to me, mampela, we are coming back to a country we no longer know.

So what we need is to have a panel of experts who will help us to understand the various aspects of the current South African reality.

So as we negotiate, we can negotiate towards something that's informed by understanding and knowledge of the complexities.

Guess what?

His peers from abroad who are seeing themselves in the union buildings said, we have our own people.

Well, look at us now.

Because what happened is that the negotiated settlement was a very low ask.

If you don't know that there is a whole big vault full of diamonds and you ask for a few pennies that you see on top of the cupboard, that's what you get.

And so we had a wonderful opportunity which we could have used, because the people I went to ask to be on this panel were not going to be there as consultants.

They wanted to be there as citizens making their contribution, their expertise in the economy, in finances, in education, health, infrastructure, everything that you could think of and imagine where we could have been.

Because one of the fundamental mistakes made in the political settlement was to focus on the politics and forget that politics should be about the governance of resource allocations and the structures we build around the socioeconomic dispensation in the country.

So now we've got political freedom, but nothing else.

And the few post apartheid policies that they put in place, like black economic empowerment.

This is not the United States where black people are minority.

This is an African country which was not about empowering Africans.

It should have been about how do we restructure the economy so it becomes an economy that's focused on well being for all and healthy ecosystems.

We miss that boat, you know, in.

Our country, fdr, Roosevelt, the way he dealt with that, he just had a progressive tax system.

So the more money you had, the more you got taxed.

And that broke up some of that, you know, just a few handful of people controlling everything.

And now we've gone to the point, oh, you can't tax rich people because they're so wonderful and, and gifted.

And that would be like putting them to shame.

And so we've again, we've allowed this huge imbalance in the United States, as you mentioned.

I don't know if it was.

Listen to a talk that you, I was listening to earlier or in this talk that, that you have 10% of the people that own 90% of everything.

And how can democracy, how can a just society exist under those kind of conditions?

It's impossible.

But we had a live example at the time of our transition, which was the reunification of Germany.

We should have taken a leaf out of that because Helmut Kohl was not a revolutionary, but he was a very wise man.

He understood that too big a degree of inequality makes human community impossible.

So to build one Germany, he convinced the German people that those on the west have to lift those on the East.

And it's going to be done not for five years, not for 10 years, but it was done for two decades.

And look at it now.

You go into Berlin, you can't tell me where's east and West.

But I had the fortune of visiting Berlin in 1991.

It was shocking.

It was like, so where to?

And all of those areas of Johannesburg then which were in a bad state compared to something, or Alex and Santon.

But here we have Alex and Santon in with a worse Alex 30 years after the end of a party than it was at the time of the transition.

So what we needed in South Africa was to agree that all of us are going to contribute.

Those who earned a certain amount, they have to contribute an additional tax for this.

But the government had to allocate resources, including land and infrastructure investments, education, all of those basic things, to make sure that we can truly speak of one human family of South Africa.

No, we didn't do that.

We left intact white schools, we call them model C schools.

We left intacts corporations that had extracted so much from South Africa, we even allowed them to externalize their assets to London to wherever they wanted on our watch because there was no understanding of what was possible.

Did you understand it back then or is this something that you, in retrospect, that you've looked back and you learned that you did wrong at that point because you were always, from what I can tell, pretty close to that, I don't know, the founding fathers and mothers of modern democratic South Africa.

You were right there.

Did you understand that at the time when the transition from apartheid to democracy was happening?

Absolutely.

The reason Mandela asked me is because I had written a book with Professor Francis Wilson called Uprooting Poverty the South African Challenge, which was published in 1989.

So even if they'd done nothing else but just look at what that book was recommending and the subsequent publication we had about children on the front line and what needed to be done because children had been in the front line of the struggle since 1976.

Sower to uprising.

They didn't do any of that.

So I don't say I was an expert.

That's why I when Mandela asked for experts, I didn't put myself there.

I went and found the experts, the Francis Wilsons of this day and the many others who were in the various areas where we could have done this and people suggested this even post 94.

But we have a man who is super smart.

But unfortunately, smartness and wisdom are not necessarily coexistent in some people.

And so then President Tabumbegi refused to listen to any advice because he thought he knew everything that needed to be known.

And that was science.

So these were, it sounds like multidimensional failings, but at root they were very much human failings.

And you're talking about ignorance, you're talking about.

And subsequently, it sounds like the corruption that came in with that government.

There was a lot of greed and so forth.

How do you see the human elements here?

What was missing and what can we learn from about what we need to.

Capacities we need to develop?

Because you gave.

It was such a powerful story of the inner transformation you went through the empowerment that came and then the recognition this has to be extended in our lives and into the community.

So I'm wondering what do you see as the human faults that led to the lack of success here?

The human fault started with the focus on who is going to be in.

Power, seduction of power, rather than how.

Do we transform our society so that there is well being for.

And so the black consciousness movement, instead of being seen as a catalyst for the spiritual and psychological liberation, which is essential if you have multi generational trauma, as South Africa and most of the continent had, you need to go through that and you are all schooled in this.

But the likes of Tabon, Becky and many of the people who were not here when we were going through this process, they didn't attach much value to this consciousness race.

They just saw us as upstarts who were disturbing the traditional liberation organizations.

So it's short sightedness and the love of power that prevented the post 1994 leadership minus Mandela.

And to his credit, and to their credit, people like Mr. Walter Sisulu, whom I also got to know, they understood, they were wise, they understood the power of this liberation of the mind and the spirit of people, so that they could assume the responsibilities of citizenship, not as vassals or as people to whom, as the ANC language says you can deliver.

To what are you delivering?

You are a servant of the people and not the master of the people.

But that never got to be discussed in their ranks.

And so we are the poorer for having lost out on the momentum of self liberation.

But here's the good news.

Young people have come to grips with the fact that this is not the freedom that they thought their country deserved.

And we are seeing a resurgence of young people who are not wanting to replace the ANC in power.

They want fundamental transformation of the country, including the politics that have now become so focused on parties to refocus politics on citizens as the sovereigns, the owners of the democracy.

And all politics has to be about how do citizens want to see their role in shaping the future that they would like their grandchildren to enjoy.

And so I'm here full of hope because I can see it.

It may not necessarily get to the stage which we could have gotten to had we not lost these 30 years.

And may I also add that the corruption that we have become world renowned for, including coining this state capture, comes from a people who are not liberated spiritually and mentally.

There is no way, if you are a fully conscious human being and understand that to be human is to be relational.

You are connected to others, you are interdependent with others, and you are part of the web of life.

You cannot take away milk from the mouths of babies.

You cannot take away money that's supposed to be building infrastructure for ordinary people.

It happens because you have not yet become a free person who understands that what's important is to be more of whom you were created to be, and not having more, which is a sign of inner emptiness.

Stay tuned for Part two, in which this dialogue expands to a global perspective and Mampila Ramphele explores the implications of apartheid for our global situation and contemporary global challenges.

Today's episode was brought to you by Iwake Technologies.

Visit the Deep Transformation website to find out more about ioWake's audio tools designed to wake us up, grow us up as a part of our daily deep transformational practice.

Thank you for joining us.

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the Deep Transformation podcast and we greatly appreciate your comments, suggestions and questions.

Thank you for all you are and all you do from John Roger and the Deep Transformation Team.

SA.