Desmond Tutu

Desmond Tutu: The Conscience of a Divided Nation

In May 1976, a newly appointed Anglican churchman wrote to the Prime Minister of South Africa to warn him that apartheid would end in racial violence. B. J. Vorster ignored the letter. Weeks later Soweto erupted. Desmond Tutu spent the next twenty years being right in public, at considerable personal cost, and then spent the twenty years after that insisting that being right was not the same as being finished.

Klerksdorp and the Long Road to Ordination

Tutu was born on 7 October 1931 in Klerksdorp, in what was then the Transvaal. His father, Zachariah Zelilo Tutu, was of amaFengu Xhosa heritage; his mother, Aletta Dorothea Mavoertsek Mathlare, was Motswana. He attended Madibane High School, entering in 1945, and trained as a teacher at Pretoria Bantu Normal College, qualifying in 1951. He taught English at Madibane from 1954 and moved the following year to Krugersdorp High School to teach English and history. In June 1955 he married Nomalizo Leah Shenxane; they would have four children — Trevor, Thandeka, Naomi and Mpho Andrea.

Teaching under the Bantu Education system was a dead end for a man of his convictions, and he left it for the Church. He was ordained deacon in 1960 and priested in December of the same year. Then came an unusually cosmopolitan theological education for a Black South African of his generation: a theology degree with honours from King's College London, including Hebrew, followed by a master's there in 1965–66 with a dissertation on Islam in West Africa, and a period in 1966 at St George's College, Jerusalem, studying Arabic and Greek. He returned to teach at the Federal Theological Seminary in 1967 and lectured at the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland from 1970.

First Black African in Every Chair He Sat In

His rise through the Anglican hierarchy was a sequence of firsts, each one a small demolition. Elected Dean of St Mary's Cathedral, Johannesburg, in March 1975 and installed that August, he became the first Black African to hold the post. In July 1976 he was consecrated Bishop of Lesotho. In February 1985 he became Bishop of Johannesburg — again the first Black African — and on 7 September 1986 Archbishop of Cape Town, head of the Anglican Church in Southern Africa, a position he held until 1996 and which, again, no Black African had held before.

His theology was already explicitly political. "Black theology has to do with whether it is possible to be black and continue to be Christian," he said in 1973, arguing that "the liberation of the black man is the other side of the liberation of the white man." It was a formulation calculated to unsettle both the regime and the comfortable.

The Pulpit as Political Weapon

From March 1978 to 1985 Tutu was General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, and he used the office as a national platform for a message the state had banned everyone else from delivering. He advocated international economic sanctions against his own country, endorsed boycotts and civil disobedience, testified on behalf of imprisoned anti-apartheid activists and insisted throughout on non-violent resistance — a position that drew fire from militants as well as from Pretoria.

The government retaliated with the instrument it used on people it could not jail without international scandal: it took his passport in March 1980, returned it in January 1981, then confiscated it again and withheld it for seventeen months.

The Nobel Peace Prize, 1984

In 1984 Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize, the second South African to be honoured after Albert Luthuli in 1960. The award transformed him from a domestic irritant into an internationally protected figure and gave the sanctions campaign a voice that Western governments could no longer dismiss. He treated the prize money — some 192,000 dollars — as belonging to the movement rather than to himself, dividing it between his family, the staff of the South African Council of Churches and a scholarship fund for exiles. He was awarded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize in 1986, was made a Fellow of King's College London in the late 1970s, and collected honorary doctorates from the University of Kent, the General Theological Seminary and Harvard.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission

When apartheid finally fell and the 1994 election produced Nelson Mandela's coalition government, Mandela chose Tutu to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the body charged with investigating human rights abuses committed by pro-apartheid and anti-apartheid groups alike. That last clause was the hard part, and Tutu's insistence on it — that the liberation movements be examined as rigorously as their oppressors — defined both the commission's moral authority and the resentment it generated. Through the second half of the 1990s the commission gave victims of apartheid a public forum in which to speak and to seek redress. In 1994 he published *The Rainbow People of God*, the phrase that came to describe the country he hoped was being assembled.

An Awkward Elder

Tutu retired as Archbishop of Cape Town in 1996 and from public life in 2010, and in neither case did he stop talking. He criticised the presidents his own movement produced, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, with the same directness he had once aimed at Vorster. He opposed the Iraq War. He described Israel's treatment of the Palestinians as apartheid, a comparison that made him permanently controversial abroad.

Within his own church he was, by the standards of global Anglicanism, radical. He secured approval for the ordination of women priests. He campaigned for LGBT rights and appointed gay priests to senior positions, positions that put him at odds with much of the Anglican Communion and with a good deal of African public opinion. On this he was as immovable as he had been on sanctions: the logic that made racial discrimination intolerable made every other kind intolerable too.

Cape Town, Boxing Day 2021

Tutu turned ninety in October 2021. He died on 26 December 2021 at a medical centre in Cape Town, where he had been receiving treatment for prostate cancer, aged ninety.

He had spent seven decades arguing that a country could be told the truth about itself and survive the telling. South Africa's willingness to attempt that experiment — imperfectly, incompletely, but publicly — remains the most concrete monument he has.