Tutu, Desmond Mpilo 1931–
Desmond Mpilo Tutu 1931–
Archbishop, activist, writer
Investigated by the Eloff Commission
Advocated for New Constitution
Appointed Archbishop of Cape Town
Helped Heal the Wounds of Apartheid
South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu is a small man with great courage. Though any kind of violence shocks him, he has personally stood up to several tormentors in South Africa’s blood-spattered townships, once going so far as to save the life of a suspected impimpi, or police informer, from a fiery death inside a gasoline-doused tire. In addition, he has piloted the Anglican Church into political waters despite strong warnings about “clerical meddling in government” from more than one government officer; spoken up for the African National Congress (ANC) through its several bannings; and held on to his own belief in ultimate interracial harmony, even though events around him have pointed in other directions.
Raised Amid Apartheid
Tutu was born on October 7, 1931, in Klerksdorp, Transvaal, South Africa. Klerksdorp, Krugersdorp, and Ventersdorp—these small Transvaal mining towns were home to Desmond Tutu when he was a child. At the heart of each town was an upper stratum of white farmers, teachers, and mine managers, plus a white middle class of artisans and storekeepers. And on the outskirts were the slums known as townships, where black families lived in corrugated iron shanties or three-room concrete houses without sewage or electricity.
No place offered a way to burst through apartheid’s steel ceiling, so almost all these black families were poor. Desmond Tutu’s parents were no exception. His father was a sporadically employed school principal, while his mother, a domestic servant with no formal education, was a more reliable wage-earner. Like other teens, Desmond earned his own spending money by caddying at the whites-only golf course or selling peanuts at the train station.
Desmond Tutu was a high school student in Sophia-town when he met Father Trevor Huddleston, an English parish priest who became his greatest role model. A profoundly intelligent man, Huddleston strode through life bringing out the best in his poverty-stricken parishioners and encouraging them to stand up for themselves against oppression. He was rarely at rest, yet somehow he found time to visit Desmond Tutu every week when tuberculosis forced a twenty-month
At a Glance…
Born Desmond Mpilo Tutu on October 7, 1931, in Klerksdorp, Transvaal, South Africa; son of Zachariah (a school teacher) and Aletta Tutu; married Leah Nomalizo Shenxane, July 2, 1955; children: Trevor, Theresa, Naomi, Mpho. Education: Bantu Normal Teachers’ College, Pretoria; University of South Africa, BA, 1954; St. Peter’s Theological College, Johannesburg, LTh, 1960; King’s College, London, BD, 1965, MTh, 1966. Religion: Anglican.
Career: Madibane High School, teacher, 1955; Muncieville High School, Krugersdorp, teacher, 1956-57; St. Alban’s Church, Benoni, Johannesburg, curate, 1960-61; ordained priest, 1961; St. Alban’s Church, Golders Green, London, curate, 1962-65; St. Mary’s, Bletchingley, Surrey, curate, 1965-66; Federal Theological Seminary, Alice, Cape Province, lecturer, 1967-69; University of Lesotho, Botswana, and Swaziland, lecturer, 1970-72; World Council of Churches’ Theological Education Fund (TEF), England, associate director, 1972-75; St. Augustine’s Church, England, curate, 1972-75; dean of Johannesburg, 1975-76; bishop of Lesotho, 1976-78; South African Council of Churches (SACC), general secretary, 1978-85; bishop of Johannesburg, 1985-86; archbishop of Cape Town, 1986-96; chancellor, University of the Western Cape, 1988; Emory University, Atlanta, William R. Cannon Distinguished Visiting Professor of Theology, 1998-2000; Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, visiting professor, 2002.
Memberships: Truth and Reconciliation Commission, South African government, chairman, 1995-98.
Awards: Onassis Foundation, Athena Prize, 1980; Nobel Peace Prize, 1984; Emmanuel College, Boston, Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Award, 1988; Legion d’Honneur award, France, 1998; numerous honorary degrees.
Addresses: Office— P.O Box 1092, Milnerton, 7435, Cape Town, South Africa; c/o Desmond Tutu Peace Centre, P.O. Box 51632, Waterfront, 8002, Cape Town, South Africa.
interruption to his years at Western High School. Huddleston taught him to adopt the daily prayer routine from which he has never wavered and even brought him the schoolbooks he needed to graduate on schedule in 1950. Young Tutu then opted for the Bantu Teachers’ Training College rather than the medical school, which he would have preferred but could not afford. At the end of 1954, he graduated, expecting to spend the rest of his life guiding high school students through English and Xhosa literature.
Government policy decided otherwise. For half a dozen years, the Nationalists had been building a new regime in South Africa. Carefully tailored by the Minister of Native Affairs Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, the new order featured such guidelines as the Group Areas Act forbidding people of different races to live side by side; a tightened pass law requiring every black South African over the age of 16 to carry a travel/work permit, and a limit of 72 hours that blacks could stay in cities to look for work.
Verwoerd got around to altering black education in 1955, when Tutu was only one year into his career. The government plan, according to Verwoerd, would produce a black population suited for the manual labor needed by the nation’s mines and factories. So black teachers would now be permitted to teach only a scaled-back vocational syllabus, for which they would receive proportionately scaled-back salaries. Attempts to defy this ban, he added, would carry a heavy fine. With an eye on the ultraconservative voter who would later raise him to the prime minister’s seat, Verwoerd rammed his point home by removing the responsibility for black education from the provincial education departments and assuming it himself.
Resignations from black teachers came quickly. Tutu himself quit in 1958 rather than submit to the indignity of what he termed “education for serfdom.” The same year, noted Judith Bentley in Archbishop Tutu of South Africa, he entered St. Peter’s Theological College in Rosettenville, Johannesburg, with a fatalistic sense of destiny he later described as “being grabbed by God by the scruff of the neck in order to spread His word, whether it is convenient or not.”
“Grabbed by God”
He was ordained in December of 1960, at the end of a bitter year during which a pass-law protest by black protest groups had left the blood of 69 dead and 180 wounded soaking into the earth of a Transvaal township named Sharpeville. The tragedy brought on a wave of jailings, bannings, and brutal interrogations that left middle-of-the-road blacks quaking with fear and sorely in need of faith. As the newly-minted curate at St. Alban’s Church, Benoni, Tutu did not disappoint his own parishioners. He filled them with hope in a better future, preaching with the blood-and-thunder style that quickly became his trademark.
St. Alban’s gave way to a church of his own, but Tutu was there for a very short time. Verwoerd had now brought apartheid to the church, which therefore needed black academics to train black clergy. Tutu’s teaching experience, his two degrees, and his conscientiousness made him an ideal candidate for this duty, though his lack of a master’s degree had to be remedied. To fill this gap, his former seminary principal wrote a special note to the dean of King’s College at London University. The Tutu family—he had married Leah Normalizo Shenxane in 1955—set out for England in September of 1962.
While in Britain, the family traveled wherever they pleased, lived where it suited them, and entered each place without looking for the entrance marked “blacks.” They were warmly welcomed, first by the all-white St. Alban’s Church in Golders Green, where Tutu was a curate, and later by the Anglican congregation of St. Mary the Virgin in Bletchingley, Surrey, where he was sent after his 1965 graduation from King’s College. Tutu’s Bletchingley parishioners treated him at first with great respect, listening courteously to his sermons about interracial harmony and absorbing his warnings about the South African bulldozers which often demolished a flimsy township house in minutes. But by the time he left in 1967, courtesy had become friendship on equal terms—an achievement that would have been rare at home.
Tutu found great changes when he returned to South Africa to fulfill his promise of training black clergy. An economic boom and the 1966 murder of Verwoerd in the House of Assembly had increased support for the Nationalists. Verwoerd’s place was instantly filled by the former Minister of Justice, Balthazar Johannes Vorster, who had stepped up the forced relocation policy that segregated blacks in South Africa.
In line with Vorster’s decree, the seminary had been moved to Alice, a Western Cape town also housing the newly-tribalized Fort Hare University. Though Alice was far from his big-city roots, Tutu found a tranquil pleasure in teaching Greek and theology, sitting on education committees, and broadening his students’ horizons with a taste of the black theology that was a recent offshoot of the American black consciousness movement. He also took his turn preaching at the campus next door, where he did not hesitate to compare the lives of black South Africans to oppressed people in other parts of the world.
His words fell on fertile ground, for black consciousness had come to Fort Hare University with an impact that gave the students the courage to demand an end to inferior education. Tutu’s personal philosophy supported interracial dialogue rather than the students’ staunch black separatism, but he loyally supported them as the campus exploded into strikes, arguments between demonstrators and the white rector, and finally sit-ins involving 500 of the university’s 550 member student body. Then he was forced to stand helplessly by as whistling police whips and snarling dogs drove black students out of the Fort Hare campus.
Vorster had sterilized Fort Hare. Still, black consciousness spread, its message borne by the all-black South African Students’ Organization, and its leader a charismatic former medical student named Steven Biko.
Replaced a White Man
In 1972, after two years of teaching in Lesotho, an enclave lying within South Africa, Tutu was offered an associate directorship with the Britain-based Theological Education Fund (TEF), a twelve-year-old organization that had been formed to loosen the tie between Third World churches and their missionary founders by funding theological training for their clergy. The TEF needed an experienced negotiator who could assess church conditions in different parts of Africa, and they found the highly educated and poised Reverend Tutu ideal for the post.
He enjoyed the work, expecting to complete the full five years specified in his contract. But in early 1975 the elderly bishop of Johannesburg resigned, and Tutu was asked to replace his successor, a white dean.
As the dean of Johannesburg from 1975 to 1976, Tutu strove to integrate the area’s congregation. From the reticent brownstone exterior of St. Mary’s Cathedral, Johannesburg seemed impossibly far from the township Anglicans Tutu now tried to attract, but he succeeded in drawing the black population of Soweto closer by living there himself rather than in the official deanery in wealthy white Johannesburg. Ignoring any white parishioners who preferred to leave his resolutely multiracial congregation, he involved the remaining members in his integrated choir and other groups.
He also found time to renew his ties with Biko’s black consciousness group. While Tutu was in Britain, Biko had been jailed, but his philosophy of “Black man, you’re on your own!” had not been silenced, despite the bullyings of the security police. Instead, it was bubbling with a rage that was beginning to alarm the nonviolent Tutu when he walked through the streets of Soweto.
Soweto Erupted in Riots
By 1976 the fuse of black fury became dangerously short. It began to burn down early in the year, after black education was hastily revised to provide a larger labor pool for a burgeoning economy. Soweto students were unmoved by the absence of extra classrooms and the presence of unqualified new teachers, but they exploded into uncontrollable frenzy when they learned that English, their former medium of instruction, would now share honors with South Africa’s other official language, the hated Afrikaans.
Rumblings against the “language of oppression,” burst into outraged school boycotts by April. In early May, Tutu wrote to the prime minister to warn him that great trouble was on the way, but his letter was dismissed as propaganda. On June 16, 1976, the “language of oppression” met the language of fury via 15,000 Soweto schoolchildren. The township exploded into swirling clouds of teargas, stones, bullets, and fire that killed more than 600 Sowetans and left burnt-out hulks where the schools had been.
The next month, Tutu was consecrated as bishop of Lesotho, and he did not return to South Africa until 1977, when he was asked to speak at a funeral that shocked the world. The victim was black pride leader Steve Biko, who had died in custody. Biko was borne to his grave by 15,000 mourners. His coffin’s elaborate carvings and velvet pall could not hide the fact that his killers—the police—had smashed in the back of his head. Nor could Tutu’s most fervent prayers stop the murder of two black policemen, representatives of the hated apartheid regime.
Meddled in Politics
Biko’s death was a turning point for Tutu. The government had long ago made it clear that Church “meddling” in politics would not be tolerated, but Tutu had now come to the conclusion that there was no alternative if apartheid was to be conquered without bloodshed.
In 1978 he put his conviction into practice by accepting a position as general secretary of the South African Council of Churches (SACC), a ten-year-old organization with a decidedly political bent. “Troublemaking” activities, in full swing when Tutu arrived, included backing of the newly assertive trade unions, protesting the forced removals of the three million dispossessed people who had lost their homes since 1960, and supporting the families of detainees. Generous SACC grants to antiapartheid organizations like the South West African People’s Organization and the Zambiabased ANC were likewise unpopular with the government.
A SACC affiliation with the World Council of Churches gave Tutu international media exposure. Making the most of this opportunity, he used television talk shows to push for sanctions. In 1979 he told a Danish television host that Denmark should not buy South African coal. The South African government retaliated swiftly by revoking his passport; overseas engagements had to be hastily cancelled.
This same scenario was repeated more than once, boomeranging in South Africa’s face in 1982, when Tutu was unable to fly to New York to accept an honorary doctorate in theology from Columbia University. The government faced worldwide embarrassment when Columbia University president Michael Sovern broke a precedent for only the third time in his university’s 244-year history, presenting Tutu’s degree personally in Johannesburg.
Investigated by the Eloff Commission
The government found Tutu’s work with the SACC even more irritating than his outspoken views on sanctions. In 1981 Prime Minister P. W. Botha, Vorster’s successor, charged him with financial irregularities, to which he added a charge of inciting political unrest. He then appointed the Eloff Commission to probe the SACC.
Proceedings began in November. Tutu kept calm, accepting without protest the state’s triumphant revelation that the SACC’s previous director had misappropriated some R250,000 (R stands for the “rand,” which is South Africa’s monetary unit) in funds, R14,000 of which he had given Tutu towards the purchase of a house. (Tutu, who had thought this figure came from overseas donors, returned the money immediately.)
As expected, the state condemned SACC support of the ANC and other antiapartheid organizations and recommended a new law barring pleas for disinvestment in South Africa, but was otherwise unable to skewer the organization.
Won Nobel Peace Prize
By 1984 Tutu was in the headlines again, this time as South Africa’s second black Nobel Peace laureate. His predecessor, 1961 winner Albert Luthuli, had been restricted to his remote Zululand village immediately on his return from Norway. Tutu was luckier. Television had become a South African staple, revealing the plight of black South Africa for all the world to see. So instead of fading into obscurity as Luthuli had, he became a head-turner, creating increasing respect for the idea of economic sanctions against South Africa.
Tutu’s feat was not greeted with universal joy. There was silence from the South African government and sharp criticism in the Johannesburg Sunday Times from novelist Alan Paton, whose post-Holocaust novel Cry the Beloved Country had riveted attention on apartheid. “I do not understand how you can put a man out of work for a high moral principle,” wrote Paton, attacking Tutu’s support of sanctions. “It would go against my principles to … put a man—and especially a black man—out of a job.”
More violent opposition in the form of a bomb scare met the new laureate on the night of the ceremony itself, when the banquet hall had to be evacuated for 90 minutes. But bomb scares no longer unnerved Tutu. “It … tells you how desperate our enemies are,” he remarked in an interview for Drum magazine.
Advocated for New Constitution
In 1985 Tutu was elected bishop of Johannesburg. His 300,000-strong diocese was not a peaceful one, for the townships were reaching the crescendo of another great antiapartheid uprising. The trigger this time was the new South African constitution, which featured a parliamentary structure allowing for representation by the Indian and “colored” (mulatto, or mixed race) population groups, but no representation at all by blacks.
Black reaction was immediate and predictable. Factories and mines were silenced by strikes, to which 200,000 students added their own protests. Even Tutu commented bitterly that his several honorary doctorates gave him less power over his own future than any uneducated voter would have under the new constitution. It had become an intolerable situation.
Taking his usual multiracial approach, Tutu invited U.S. senator Edward Kennedy, a staunch antiapartheid supporter, to tour South Africa as an impartial witness. But the visit was not a success, for Tutu had failed to consider the vehement black separatism of Steve Biko’s supporters, now known as the Azanian People’s Organization (AZAPO). Kennedy arrived in January of 1985, spent a night in Tutu’s Soweto home, and toured the townships, which he pronounced “appalling.” However, he was able to achieve little else. Wherever Kennedy went, his footsteps were dogged by AZAPO supporters, whose shrieks of “white imperialism” and “trying to build support for his own presidential bid” drowned every word he said. In the end, even a long-awaited antiapartheid speech in Soweto Cathedral was prudently cancelled. AZAPO members were triumphant; Tutu was heartbroken. At a time when black South African unity was vital, he had found more antiapartheid support overseas than at home.
Appointed Archbishop of Cape Town
In 1986 Tutu was elected archbishop of Cape Town, a position which also made him the titular head of the Anglican Church in South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland, and Lesotho. As befitted the leader of almost 2 million Anglicans, he was enthroned in September of that year at a ceremony attended by more than 1,300 guests, among them Coretta Scott King, the widow of American civil rights martyr Martin Luther King, Jr.
Now South Africa’s highest-ranking Anglican cleric, Tutu participated boldly in the defiance campaign that marked the 1989 elections. Resigned to the mounting death toll, he led a march to a whites-only beach, joining supporters who were chased off with whips. He was teargassed along with other demonstrators while on his way to a church in Cape Town’s Guguletu township and was briefly arrested for protesting the capture of fellow clergymen.
The new state president of the Republic of South Africa, F. W. de Klerk, came to power in 1989 on the strength of his pledge to speed reforms and abolish apartheid. Sophisticated, well-traveled, and a keen observer, Tutu was not dazzled by these campaign promises. “Nine years ago, Pik Botha [then foreign minister] said… that we are moving away from discrimination based on race,” he told Maclean’s magazine in 1989, “and here we are still moving away from it under a constitution that excludes 73 percent of the population.”
Helped Heal the Wounds of Apartheid
Unmoved by violence from both black and white right-wingers, F. W. de Klerk worked hand-in-hand with black politicians to dismantle apartheid as swiftly as possible. At the end of 1993 came the announcement for which Tutu had worked and waited for so many years: democratic elections listing leaders from every color of South Africa’s racial palette had been slated for April 27, 1994. Nelson Mandela won the election to become first black president of South Africa, ending three centuries of white rule. Mandela pledged to work toward a reconciliation that would heal the scars of the former system of apartheid. In his inaugural address, Mandela said, “We saw our country tear itself apart in terrible conflict…. The time for the healing of wounds has come…. Never, never again will this beautiful land experience the oppression of one by another.”
To lead the “healing of wounds,” Mandela established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate crimes committed under apartheid. The commission scrutinized the political activities between 1960 and the date Mandela took office. Mandela appointed Tutu chairman of the commission. Tutu presided over the commission’s hearings that began in 1996. By the time the commission issued its final report in 1998, it had heard the testimony of 21,000 victims of apartheid. About the commission’s findings, Tutu said on many occasions that he was “appalled at the evil we have uncovered.” Nevertheless, Tutu said, “People need the opportunity to tell their story. In telling the story, there is a healing that happens. Without forgiveness there is no future.” Except for ongoing amnesty investigations, the commission ended its work on July 31, 1998.
Speaking a decade after the commission began its work, Tutu explained the underlying logic of the commission’s mandate for “restorative justice” in his Longford Lecture in 2004: “In the South African experience it was decided that we would have justice yes, but not retributive justice. No, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process was an example of restorative justice. In our case it was based on an African concept very difficult to render into English as there is no precise equivalent. I refer to Ubuntu/botho…the essence of being human. We say a person is a person through other persons. We are made for togetherness, to live in a delicate network of interdependence…. I would not know how to walk, talk, think, behave as a human person except by learning it all from other human beings. For ubuntu … the greatest good is communal harmony.… [T]he purpose of the penal process is to heal the breach, to restore good relationships and to redress the balance. Thus it is that we set out to work for reconciliation between the victim and the perpetrator.” Although full reconciliation in South Africa was predicted to need at least a generation to come to pass, Tutu gave examples of how such reconciliation has already occurred in South Africa and gave hope that it could occur elsewhere in the world.
In 1996 Tutu announced his retirement from his position as Archbishop of Cape Town. He remained active, however, taking visiting professorships at universities and lecturing throughout the world. With his wife, Tutu established the Desmond Tutu Peace Centre in 1998. The Centre’s mission was to foster peace and understanding throughout the world. By 2004, the Centre had established a leadership academy to train people in Tutu’s philosophies of peace. Although still a fledgling organization, the Centre promises to continue fostering Tutu’s legacy of moral leadership as he more fully embraces his retirement.
Selected writings
Crying in the Wilderness, Mowbray, 1982.
Hope and Suffering: Sermons & Speeches, Eerdmans, 1984.
The Words of Desmond Tutu, selected by Naomi Tutu, Newmarket Press, 1989.
The Rainbow People of God: The Making of a Peaceful Revolution, John Allen, ed., Doubleday, 1994.
An African Prayer Book, Doubleday, 1995.
No Future without Forgiveness, Doubleday, 2000.
God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Times, Doubleday, 2004.
Sources
Books
Battle, Michael Jesse, Reconciliation: The Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu, Pilgrim, 1997.
Bentley, Judith, Archbishop Tutu of South Africa, Enslow Publishers, 1988.
Du Boulay, Shirley, Tutu: Voice of the Voiceless, Eerdmans, 1988.
Glickman, Harvey, ed., Political Leaders of Contemporary Africa South of the Sahara, Greenwood Press, 1992.
Mungazi, Dickson A., In the Footsteps of the Masters: Desmond M. Tutu and Abel T Muzorewa, Praeger, 2000.
Sparks, Allister. The Mind of South Africa. Knopf, 1990.
Tlhagale, Buti, and Itumeleng Mosala, eds., Hammering Swords into Ploughshares: Essays in Honour of Archbishop Mpilo Desmond Tutu, Skotaville Publishers, 1986.
Tutu, Desmond Mpilo, Hope and Suffering: Sermons & Speeches, Eerdmans, 1983.
Tutu, Desmond Mpilo, The Words of Desmond Tutu, selected by Naomi Tutu, Newmarket Press, 1989.
Periodicals
Drum, February 1985, p. 34.
Ebony, June 1988, p. 168.
Economist, August 26, 1989, p. 31.
Maclean’s, March 13, 1989, p. 22.
Newsweek, September 26, 1977, p. 41; October 10, 1977; October 31, 1977, p. 57; October 29, 1984, p. 89; September 11, 1989, p. 34.
New York Times, November 14, 1977, p. 1; August 4, 1982, p. B4; January 1, 1985, p. 3; January 3, 1985, p. 3; January 6, 1985, p. 7; January 7, 1985, p. A3; January 13, 1985, p. 10; January 14, 1985, p. 3; April 15, 1986, p. A3.
Sechaba, December 1984, p. 16.
Sunday Times (Johannesburg), October 21, 1984, p. 35.
Time, September 15, 1986, p. 40. Unesco Courier, June 1990, p. 37. Washington Post Magazine, February 16, 1986, p. 8A.
On-line
“Archbishop Desmond Tutu: The Longford Lecture,” The Independent, http://argument.independent.co.uk/podium/story.jsp?story=492055 (April 12, 2004).
The Desmond Tutu Peace Centre, www.tutu.org (April 12, 2004).
—Gillian Wolf and Sara Pendergast
Tutu, Desmond 1931–
Desmond Tutu 1931–
Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, activist, writer
“To Spread His Word, Whether It Is Convenient or Not”
A Seasoned Negotiator Moves Up
The Church “Meddles” in Politics
The Most Reverend Desmond Mpilo Tutu
Democracy Dawns: Elections in 1994
South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu is a small man with great courage. Though any kind of violence shocks him, he has personally stood up to several tormentors in South Africa’s blood-spattered townships, once going so far as to save the life of a suspected impimpi, or police informer, from a fiery death inside a gasoline-doused tire. In addition, he has piloted the Anglican Church into political waters despite strong warnings about “clerical meddling in government” from more than one government officer; spoken up for the African National Congress (ANC) through its several bannings; and held on to his own belief in ultimate interracial harmony, even though events around him have pointed in other directions.
Klerksdorp, Krugersdorp, and Ventersdorp—these small Transvaal mining towns were home to Desmond Tutu when he was a child. At the heart of each town was an upper stratum of white farmers, teachers, and mine managers, plus a white middle class of artisans and storekeepers. And on the outskirts were the slums known as townships, where black families lived in corrugated iron shanties or three-room concrete houses without sewage or electricity.
No place offered a way to burst through apartheid’s steel ceiling, so almost all these black families were poor. Desmond Tutu’s parents were no exception. His father was a sporadically-employed school principal, while his mother, a domestic servant with no formal education, was a more reliable wage-earner. Like other teens, Desmond earned his own spending money by caddying at the whites-only golf course or selling peanuts at the train station.
Desmond Tutu was a high school student in Sophiatown when he met Father Trevor Huddleston, an English parish priest who became his greatest role model. A profoundly intelligent man, Huddleston strode through life bringing out the best in his poverty-stricken parishioners and encouraging them to stand up for themselves against oppression. He was rarely at rest, yet somehow he found time to visit Desmond Tutu every week when tuberculosis forced a twenty-month interruption to his years at Western High School. Huddleston taught him to adopt the daily prayer routine from which he has never wavered and even brought him the schoolbooks he needed to graduate on schedule in 1950.
Young Tutu then opted for the Bantu Teachers’ Training College rather than the medical school, which he would have preferred but could not afford. At the end of 1954, he
At a Glance…
Born Desmond Mpilo Tutu, October 7, 1931, in Klerksdorp, Transvaal, South Africa; son of Zachariah (a school teacher) and Aletta Tutu; married Leah Nomalizo Shenxane, July 2, 1955; children: one son (Trevor), three daughters (Theresa, Naomi, Mpho). Education: Graduated from Bantu Normal Teachers’ College, Pretoria; University of South Africa, B.A., 1954; St Peter’s Theological College, Johannesburg, LTh., 1960; King’s College, London, B.D., 1965, M.Th, 1966. Religion: Anglican.
Activist, cleric, educator, writer. Teacher, Madibane High School, 1955, and Muncieville High School, Krugersdorp, 1956-57; curate, St. Alban’s Church, Benoni, Johannesburg, 1960-61; ordained as Anglican priest, December 1960; priest, St. Philip’s Church, Alberton; curate, St. Alban’s Church, Golders Green, London, 1962-65, and St. Mary’s, Bletchingley, Surrey, 1965-66; lecturer, Federal Theological Seminary, Alice, Cape Province, 1967-69, and University of Lesotho, Botswana, and Swaziland, 1970-72; associate director, World Council of Churches’ Theological Education Fund (TEF), England, and curate, St Augustine’s Church, England, both 1972-75; dean of Johannesburg, 1975-76; bishop of Lesotho, 1976-78; general secretary, South African Council of Churches (SACC), 1978-85; bishop of Johannesburg, 1985-86; archbishop of Cape Town, 1986—; chancellor, University of the Western Cape, 1988—.
Awards: 27 honorary degrees from colleges and universities worldwide; Athena Prize, Onassis Foundation, 1980; Nobel Peace Prize, 1984; Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Award, Emmanuel College, Boston, 1988.
Addresses: c/o Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, Bishopscourt, Claremont, Cape Province 7700, South Africa.
graduated, expecting to spend the rest of his life guiding high school students through English and Xhosa literature.
Government policy decided otherwise. For half a dozen years, the Nationalists had been building a new regime in South Africa. Carefully tailored by Minister of Native Affairs Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, the new order featured such guidelines as the Group Areas Act forbidding people of different races to live side by side; a tightened pass-law requiring every black South African over the age of 16 to carry a travel/work permit, and a limit of 72 hours that blacks could stay in cities to look for work.
Verwoerd got around to altering black education in 1955, when Tutu was only one year into his career. The government plan, according to Verwoerd, would produce a black population suited for the manual labor needed by the nation’s mines and factories. So black teachers would now be permitted to teach only a scaled-back vocational syllabus, for which they would receive proportionately scaled-back salaries. Attempts to defy this ban, he added, would carry a heavy fine. With an eye on the ultraconservative voter who would later raise him to the prime minister’s seat, Verwoerd rammed his point home by removing the responsibility for black education from the provincial education departments and assuming it himself.
Resignations from black teachers came quickly. Tutu himself quit in 1958 rather than submit to the indignity of what he termed “education for serfdom.” The same year, noted Judith Bentley in Archbishop Tutu of South Africa, he entered St. Peter’s Theological College in Rosettenville, Johannesburg, with a fatalistic sense of destiny he later described as “being grabbed by God by the scruff of the neck in order to spread His word, whether it is convenient or not.”
“Grabbed by God”
He was ordained in December of 1960, at the end of a bitter year during which a pass-law protest by black protest groups had left the blood of 69 dead and 180 wounded soaking into the earth of a Transvaal township named Sharpeville. The tragedy brought on a wave of jailings, bannings, and brutal interrogations that left middle-of-the-road blacks quaking with fear and sorely in need of faith. As the newly minted curate at St. Alban’s Church, Benoni, Tutu did not disappoint his own parishioners. He filled them with hope in a better future, preaching with the blood-and-thunder style that quickly became his trademark.
St. Alban’s gave way to a church of his own, but Tutu was there for a very short time. Verwoerd had now brought apartheid to the church, which therefore needed black academics to train black clergy. Tutu’s teaching experience, his two degrees, and his conscientiousness made him an ideal candidate for this duty, though his lack of a master’s degree had to be remedied. To fill this gap, his former seminary principal wrote a special note to the dean of King’s College at London University. The Tutu family—he had married Leah Normalizo Shenxane in 1955—set out for England in September of 1962.
“To Spread His Word, Whether It Is Convenient or Not”
While in Britain, the family traveled wherever they pleased, lived where it suited them, and entered each place without looking for the entrance marked “blacks.” They were warmly welcomed, first by the all-white St. Alban’s Church in Golders Green, where Tutu was a curate, and later by the Anglican congregation of St. Mary the Virgin in Bletchingley, Surrey, where he was sent after his 1965 graduation from King’s College.
Tutu’s Bletchingley parishioners treated him at first with great respect, listening courteously to his sermons about interracial harmony and absorbing his warnings about the South African bulldozers which often demolished a flimsy township house in minutes. But by the time he left in 1967, courtesy had become friendship on equal terms—an achievement that would have been rare at home.
Tutu found great changes when he returned to South Africa to fulfill his promise of training black clergy. An economic boom and the 1966 murder of Verwoerd in the House of Assembly had increased support for the Nationalists. Verwoerd’s place was instantly filled by the former Minister of Justice, Balthazar Johannes Vorster, who had stepped up the forced relocation policy that segregated blacks in South Africa.
In line with Vorster’s decree, the seminary had been moved to Alice, a Western Cape town also housing the newlytribalized Fort Hare University. Though Alice was far from his big-city roots, Tutu found a tranquil pleasure in teaching Greek and theology, sitting on education committees, and broadening his students’ horizons with a taste of the black theology that was a recent offshoot of the American black consciousness movement. He also took his turn preaching at the campus next door, where he did not hesitate to compare the lives of black South Africans to oppressed people in other parts of the world.
Biko and Black Consciousness
His words fell on fertile ground, for black consciousness had come to Fort Hare University with an impact that gave the students the courage to demand an end to inferior education. Tutu’s personal philosophy supported interracial dialogue rather than the students’ staunch black separatism, but he loyally supported them as the campus exploded into strikes, arguments between demonstrators and the white rector, and finally sit-ins involving 500 of the university’s 550 member student body. Then he was forced to stand helplessly by as whistling police whips and snarling dogs drove black students out of the Fort Hare campus.
Vorster had sterilized Fort Hare. Still, black consciousness spread, its message borne by the all-black South African Students’ Organization, and its leader a charismatic former medical student named Steven Biko.
A Seasoned Negotiator Moves Up
In 1972, after two years of teaching in Lesotho, an enclave lying within South Africa, Tutu was offered an associate directorship with the Britain-based Theological Education Fund (TEF), a twelve-year-old organization that had been formed to loosen the tie between Third World churches and their missionary founders by funding theological training for their clergy. The TEF needed an experienced negotiator who could assess church conditions in different parts of Africa, and they found the highly educated and poised Reverend Tutu ideal for the post.
He enjoyed the work, expecting to complete the full five years specified in his contract. But in early 1975 the elderly bishop of Johannesburg resigned, and Tutu was asked to replace his successor, a white dean.
As the dean of Johannesburg from 1975 to 1976, Tutu strove to integrate the area’s congregation. From the reticent brownstone exterior of St. Mary’s Cathedral, Johannesburg seemed impossibly far from the township Anglicans Tutu now tried to attract, but he succeeded in drawing the black population of Soweto closer by living there himself rather than in the official deanery in wealthy white Johannesburg. Ignoring any white parishioners who preferred to leave his resolutely multiracial congregation, he involved the remaining members in his integrated choir and other groups.
He also found time to renew his ties with Biko’s black consciousness group. While Tutu was in Britain, Biko had been jailed, but his philosophy of “Black man, you’re on your own!” had not been silenced, despite the bullyings of the security police. Instead, it was bubbling with a rage that was beginning to alarm the nonviolent Tutu when he walked through the streets of Soweto.
Soweto Riots: June 1976
By 1976 the fuse of black fury became dangerously short. It began to burn down early in the year, after black education was hastily revised to provide a larger labor pool for a burgeoning economy. Soweto students were unmoved by the absence of extra classrooms and the presence of unqualified new teachers, but they exploded into uncontrollable frenzy when they learned that English, their former medium of instruction, would now share honors with South Africa’s other official language, the hated Afrikaans.
Rumblings against the “language of oppression,” burst into outraged school boycotts by April. In early May, Tutu wrote to the prime minister to warn him that great trouble was on the way, but his letter was dismissed as propaganda. On June 16, 1976, the “language of oppression” met the language of fury via 15,000 Soweto schoolchildren. The township exploded into swirling clouds of tear gas, stones, bullets, and fire that killed more than 600 Sowetans and left burnt-out hulks where the schools had been.
The next month, Tutu was consecrated as bishop of Lesotho, and he did not return to South Africa until 1977, when he was asked to speak at a funeral that shocked the world. The victim was black pride leader Steve Biko, who had died in custody. Biko was borne to his grave by 15,000 mourners. His coffin’s elaborate carvings and velvet pall could not hide the fact that his killers—the police—had smashed in the back of his head. Nor could Tutu’s most fervent prayers stop the murder of two black policemen, representatives of the hated apartheid regime.
The Church “Meddles” in Politics
Biko’s death was a turning point for Tutu. The government had long ago made it clear that Church “meddling” in politics would not be tolerated, but Tutu had now come to the conclusion that there was no alternative if apartheid was to be conquered without bloodshed.
In 1978 he put his conviction into practice by accepting a position as general secretary of the South African Council of Churches (SACC), a ten-year-old organization with a decidedly political bent. “Troublemaking” activities, in full swing when Tutu arrived, included backing of the newly assertive trade unions, protesting the forced removals of the three million dispossessed people who had lost their homes since 1960, and supporting the families of detainees. Generous SACC grants to anti-apartheid organizations like the South West African People’s Organization and the Zambia-based ANC were likewise unpopular with the government.
Stumping for Sanctions
An SACC affiliation with the World Council of Churches gave Tutu international media exposure. Making the most of this opportunity, he used television talk shows to push for sanctions. In 1979 he told a Danish television host that Denmark should not buy South African coal. The South African government retaliated swiftly by revoking his passport; overseas engagements had to be hastily cancelled.
This same scenario was repeated more than once, boomeranging in South Africa’s face in 1982, when Tutu was unable to fly to New York to accept an honorary doctorate in theology from Columbia University. The government faced worldwide embarrassment when Columbia University president Michael Sovern broke a precedent for only the third time in his university’s 244-year history, presenting Tutu’s degree personally in Johannesburg.
The Eloff Commission
The government found Tutu’s work with the SACC even more irritating than his outspoken views on sanctions. In 1981 Prime Minister P. W. Botha, Vorster’s successor, charged him with financial irregularities, to which he added a charge of inciting political unrest. He then appointed the Eloff Commission to probe the SACC.
Proceedings began in November. Tutu kept calm, accepting without protest the state’s triumphant revelation that the SACC’s previous director had misappropriated some R250,000 (R stands for the “rand,” which is South Africa’s monetary unit) in funds, R14,000 of which he had given Tutu towards the purchase of a house. (Tutu, who had thought this figure came from overseas donors, returned the money immediately.)
As expected, the state condemned SACC support of the ANC and other anti-apartheid organizations and recommended a new law barring pleas for disinvestment in South Africa, but was otherwise unable to skewer the organization.
The Nobel Peace Prize
By 1984 Tutu was in the headlines again, this time as South Africa’s second black Nobel Peace laureate. His predecessor, 1961 winner Albert Luthuli, had been restricted to his remote Zululand village immediately on his return from Norway. Tutu was luckier. Television had become a South African staple, revealing the plight of black South Africa for all the world to see. So instead of fading into obscurity as Luthuli had, he became a head-turner, creating increasing respect for the idea of economic sanctions against South Africa.
Tutu’s feat was not greeted with universal joy. There was silence from the South African government and sharp criticism in the Johannesburg Sunday Times from novelist Alan Paton, whose post-Holocaust novel Cry the Beloved Country had riveted attention on apartheid. “I do not understand how you can put a man out of work for a high moral principle,” wrote Paton, attacking Tutu’s support of sanctions. “It would go against my principles to…put a man—and especially a black man—out of a job.”
More violent opposition in the form of a bomb scare met the new laureate on the night of the ceremony itself, when the banquet hall had to be evacuated for 90 minutes. But bomb scares no longer unnerved Tutu. “It…tells you how desperate our enemies are,” he remarked in an interview for Drum magazine.
The New Constitution
In 1985 Tutu was elected bishop of Johannesburg. His 300,000-strong diocese was not a peaceful one, for the townships were reaching the crescendo of another great anti-apartheid uprising. The trigger this time was the new South African constitution, which featured a parliamentary structure allowing for representation by the Indian and “colored” (mulatto, or mixed race) population groups, but no representation at all by blacks.
Black reaction was immediate and predictable. Factories and mines were silenced by strikes, to which 200,000 students added their own protests. Even Tutu commented bitterly that his several honorary doctorates gave him less power over his own future than any uneducated voter would have under the new constitution. It had become an intolerable situation.
Edward Kennedy’s Visit
Taking his usual multiracial approach, Tutu invited U.S. senator Edward Kennedy, a staunch anti-apartheid supporter, to tour South Africa as an impartial witness. But the visit was not a success, for Tutu had failed to consider the vehement black separatism of Steve Biko’s supporters, now known as the Azanian People’s Organization (AZAPO). Kennedy arrived in January of 1985, spent a night in Tutu’s Soweto home, and toured the townships, which he pronounced “appalling.” However, he was able to achieve little else. Wherever Kennedy went, his footsteps were dogged by AZAPO supporters, whose shrieks of “white imperialism” and “trying to build support for his own presidential bid” drowned every word he said. In the end, even a long-awaited anti-apartheid speech in Soweto Cathedral was prudently cancelled. AZAPO members were triumphant; Tutu was heartbroken. At a time when black South African unity was vital, he had found more anti-apartheid support overseas than at home.
The Most Reverend Desmond Mpilo Tutu
In 1986 Tutu was elected archbishop of Cape Town, a position which also made him the titular head of the Anglican Church in South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland, and Lesotho. As befitted the leader of almost 2 million Anglicans, he was enthroned in September of that year at a ceremony attended by more than 1,300 guests, among them Coretta Scott King, the widow of American civil rights martyr Martin Luther King, Jr.
Now South Africa’s highest-ranking Anglican cleric, Tutu participated boldly in the defiance campaign that marked the 1989 elections. Resigned to the mounting death toll, he led a march to a whites-only beach, joining supporters who were chased off with whips. He was teargassed along with other demonstrators while on his way to a church in Cape Town’s Guguletu township and was briefly arrested for protesting the capture of fellow clergymen.
The new state president of the Republic of South Africa, F. W. de Klerk, came to power in 1989 on the strength of his pledge to speed reforms and abolish apartheid. Sophisticated, well-traveled and a razor-sharp observer, Tutu was not dazzled by these campaign promises. “Nine years ago, Pik Botha [then foreign minister] said…that we are moving away from discrimination based on race,” he told Maclean’s magazine in 1989, “and here we are still moving away from it under a constitution that excludes 73 percent of the population.”
Democracy Dawns: Elections in 1994
Unmoved by violence from both black and white right-wingers, F. W. de Klerk worked hand-in-hand with black politicians to dismantle apartheid as swiftly as possible. At the end of 1993 came the announcement for which Tutu had worked and waited for so many years: democratic elections listing leaders from every color of South Africa’s racial palette had been slated for April 27, 1994.
Selected writings
Crying in the Wilderness, Mowbray, 1982.
Hope and Suffering: Sermons & Speeches, Eerdmans, 1983.
The Words of Desmond Tutu, selected by Naomi Tutu, Newmarket Press, 1989.
Sources
Books
Africa South of the Sahara: 1993, 22nd edition, Europa, 1993.
Bentley, Judith, Archbishop Tutu of South Africa, Enslow Publishers, 1988.
Du Boulay, Shirley, Tutu: Voice of the Voiceless, Eerdmans, 1988.
Ferguson, Sinclair B., and David Wright, New Dictionary of Theology, Intervarsity Press, 1988.
Glickman, Harvey, editor, Political Leaders of Contemporary Africa South of the Sahara, Greenwood Press, 1992.
Pampallis, John, Foundations of the New South Africa, Humanities Press International, 1991.
Saunders, Christopher, Historical Dictionary of South Africa, Scarecrow Press, 1983.
Tlhagale, Buti, and Itumeleng Mosala, editors, Hammering Swords into Ploughshares: Essays in Honour of Archbishop Mpilo Desmond Tutu, Skotaville Publishers, 1986.
Tutu, Desmond Mpilo, Hope and Suffering: Sermons & Speeches, Eerdmans, 1983.
Tutu, Desmond Mpilo, The Words of Desmond Tutu, selected by Naomi Tutu, Newmarket Press, 1989.
Wasson, Tyler, editor, Nobel Prize Winners, H. W. Wilson, 1987.
Periodicals
Drum, February 1985, p. 34.
Ebony, June 1988, p. 168.
Economist, August 26, 1989, p. 31.
Maclean’s, March 13, 1989, p. 22.
Newsweek, September 26, 1977, p. 41; October 10, 1977; October 31, 1977, p. 57; October 29, 1984, p. 89; September 11, 1989, p. 34.
New York Times, November 14, 1977, p. 1; August 4, 1982, p. B4; January 1, 1985, p. 3; January 3, 1985, p. 3; January 6, 1985, p. 7; January 7, 1985, p. A3; January 13, 1985, p. 10; January 14, 1985, p. 3; April 15, 1986, p. A3.
Sechaba, December 1984, p. 16.
Sunday Times (Johannesburg), October 21, 1984, p. 35.
Time, September 15, 1986, p. 40.
Unesco Courier, June 1990, p. 37.
Washington Post Magazine, February 16, 1986, p. 8A.
—Gillian Wolf
Tutu, Desmond Mpilo
Desmond Mpilo Tutu
BORN: October 10, 1931 • Klerksdorp, South Africa
South African religious leader; politician; writer
As an archbishop of the Anglican Church in South Africa, Desmond Mpilo Tutu was one of the foremost opponents of the apartheid policies of that country's government in the 1970s and 1980s. Apartheid means "apartness" in the Afrikaans language, which is one of the official languages of South Africa. The word is most often used to refer to the former government policy of racial separation and discrimination directed against non-Europeans in the country. Discrimination is unfair treatment to a person or group because of perceived or real differences. At the time of Tutu's birth, this discrimination had been going on in South Africa since the region had become a Dutch colony in the seventeenth century. It continued after South Africa achieved independence as a nation in 1910. In 1948 apartheid became the official policy of the white South African government.
"Sometimes strident, often tender, never afraid and seldom without humour, Desmond Tutu's voice will always be the voice of the voiceless."
—Nelson Mandela as quoted on the University of the Witwatersrand Web site.
Under apartheid each person was assigned to a specific racial group: white, black, "coloured" (of mixed race), and Asian. Laws were passed to separate the races, with each assigned separate living areas and public facilities such as parks, restrooms, and beaches. A separate educational system was set up to ensure that blacks could not receive an education equal to that of whites. Travel for non-Europeans was severely restricted. Interracial marriage, or marriage between two people of different races, was strictly forbidden. Blacks had no representation in the nation's parliament, and only whites enjoyed full civil rights. The police had broad powers to arrest and imprison anyone who protested the government's policies.
Eventually the world community spoke out against apartheid. The policy officially ended in South Africa in 1990–91, when the laws were repealed and blacks were finally given an equal voice in the nation's government. One of the major figures who helped bring about this change was Desmond Tutu.
Birth and early life
Desmond Tutu was born on October 7, 1931, in the South African mining town of Klerksdorp. His father, Zachariah, was a schoolteacher. His mother, Aletta, was a domestic servant. Tutu's earliest recollections of discrimination date to his childhood, when white children regularly shouted racial insults at him and other black children. He saw firsthand the harsh results of government discrimination among the mine workers, who labored for low wages and typically lived in shacks with no running water or sanitary facilities. Tutu also felt the effects of discrimination at school, where, for example, the government provided free meals for white children, who often threw them away because they preferred the food that their mothers had packed for them. The black children, whose families lived in poverty, often went through the trash bins to scavenge the discarded food.
In 1943 Tutu's family moved to Johannesburg, South Africa's largest city, where Tutu enrolled in Johannesburg Bantu High School. (The Bantu are an African tribe.) In the city Tutu met Father Trevor Huddleston, a white priest who was an outspoken critic of racial discrimination. During this period Tutu contracted tuberculosis, an infectious disease that affects the lungs, and spent nearly twenty months in a hospital. Huddleston visited him nearly every day and would prove to be a major influence on Tutu's own opposition to apartheid. Apartheid became official after the 1948 election victories of the National Party, a political party whose members had run for office on a promise to separate the races.
Following his recovery Tutu enrolled in the school of medicine at Witwatersrand University, with the goal of becoming a doctor. He was forced to leave the university, however, because he and his family did not have enough money to pay tuition. He then enrolled at the Pretoria Bantu Normal College to train as a teacher and earned his diploma in 1953. He went on to earn a bachelor's degree from the University of Johannesburg in 1954. For the next three years he worked as a high school teacher in Johannesburg and in Krugersdorp. In 1955 he married Leah Nomalizo Shenxane, with whom he eventually had four children.
Tutu resigned from his teaching jobs in 1957 after the government revealed its Bantu Education Act, a plan to institute a new educational system for blacks that would be inferior to that provided for whites. At this point Tutu felt a calling from God and came to believe that he could best serve his people as a priest. He began to study theology (religion) with the Community of the Resurrection, the Anglican community in Johannesburg of which Father Huddleston was a member. The Anglicans are a sect, or branch, of Christianity.
Career in the Anglican Church
After being ordained, or officially made, an Anglican priest in 1961, Tutu worked in a number of small parishes (religious communities) first in South Africa, then in England. While working in England he earned a bachelor's degree in divinity in 1965 and a master's degree in theology in 1966, both from King's College in London. He then took a position in England with the Theological Education Fund, which required him to travel throughout Africa and Asia to award scholarship money from the World Council of Churches. During these years he also spent time in South Africa lecturing on theology. By the 1970s resistance to South African apartheid was growing, and in 1975 Tutu decided to return to his country permanently to help with the struggle for freedom from discrimination.
Tutu continued to rise in the Anglican Church. In 1975 he was appointed dean of St. Mary's Cathedral in Johannesburg, the first black ever to hold that position. In 1976 he became a bishop in Lesotho, a small country about the size of the U.S. state of Maryland that is entirely surrounded by South Africa. At the time the small nation was dominated by its larger neighbor so thoroughly that it was virtually a part of South Africa. Because of this it was one of the "homelands" designated by the South African government as a place where blacks could live. Throughout the late 1970s Tutu used his position to try to ease some of the racial tension that threatened both Lesotho and Soweto, a black township just outside Johannesburg. In trying to serve as a peacemaker, he took part in discussions with many different people about the racial problems dividing the country.
Opponent of apartheid
On June 16, 1976, a key event in the history of apartheid took place when a riot erupted in the Soweto township. A number of high school students protested the government's new policy requiring that classes at the schools be taught in the Afrikaans language. Afrikaans was the language of the Dutch settlers who had initiated the discrimination against black Africans, and the students rebelled against the idea of having to take classes taught in the language of their oppressors. Police arrived and responded with tear gas and gunfire. As the rioting spread, a number of government buildings were set ablaze. In the weeks that followed, protestors and government security forces clashed on numerous occasions. By the time the rioting ended, five hundred people were dead, most of them from gunshot wounds. Thousands were arrested, and thousands more fled the country.
The Soweto riots were a turning point in Tutu's life. Although he continued to call for peaceful protest and change, he became more militant in his outlook. He concluded that only intense pressure would force the government to change its policies. He resolved to use his influence and visibility to initiate talks between blacks and the government, and for the next fifteen years he spoke out publicly and forcefully against apartheid. In 1978 he became the first black secretary general of the South African Council of Churches, an organization of churches with thirteen million members collectively, 80 percent of whom were black. Tutu used his position on the council to promote antigovernment protest. In response, the government repeatedly harassed Tutu and other Council of Churches members, often charging them with small crimes they had not committed.
In 1979 Tutu challenged the government over a law called the Group Areas Act. The act gave the government the authority to forcibly move blacks from South African cities to tribal homelands. Throughout the 1980s some 3.5 million people were relocated by the government, a process that denied blacks access to better-paying jobs in the cities and left them to work on low-quality farmland. Tutu openly protested the act, comparing it to laws hostile to Jews that were passed by the Nazi leadership in Germany during the 1930s before World War II (1938–45).
In the fall of 1979 Tutu took part in a television interview in Denmark, during which he proposed that Denmark stop buying coal from South Africa as a way to protest apartheid. This was the first time that anyone had ever proposed using economic measures to try to force the South African government to change its policies. Over the next decade, people, organizations, and governments throughout the world began to boycott (refuse to buy) South African products. In the United States and other countries, many universities, local and state governments, and labor unions decided not only to stop investing funds in South African companies and companies that did business with South Africa, but also to withdraw funds that were already invested. During this period South African currency lost half of its value on the world market. In order to curb some of the unrest, the South African government allowed blacks to form labor unions for the first time.
Tutu's efforts to end apartheid were met with continued harassment. The South African government took away his passport, a move that often preceded imprisonment. Without his passport, Tutu could leave the country only with the government's permission. In 1982 he was denied permission to travel to the United States to accept an honorary degree from Columbia University in New York. In response the president of the university personally traveled to South Africa to present Tutu with the degree.
In 1984 Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which helped to further publicize his efforts. In the words of the commission that selected him, as quoted on the Nobelprize.org Web site, the prize was given "not only as a gesture of support to him and to the South African Council of Churches of which he is leader, but also to all individuals and groups in South Africa who, with their concern for human dignity, fraternity and democracy, incite the admiration of the world." Tutu used the recognition to draw more attention to the injustices committed by the South African government. He was eventually allowed to travel to the United States, where he addressed a congressional committee and urged the country to join the fight against racism. Thousands of Americans answered his call by holding protests at South African embassies in the United States.
Tutu continued to call for peaceful solutions to South Africa's racial problems, but tensions kept building. On several occasions protests erupted into violence, and hundreds of people were killed. In response to the violence, the South African president declared a state of emergency, which deprived black citizens of what few rights they had. Among the activities that were outlawed were funeral marches to cemeteries, which the government believed could turn into riots. On one occasion armed government security guards surrounded the funeral of a young woman who had been killed in the rioting. Tutu personally appeared to conduct the funeral service and to keep tempers from rising.
In September 1986 Tutu was elected as the archbishop of Cape Town and the primate, or leader, of the Anglican Church for all of southern Africa. He continued to pressure the governments of other nations to condemn South African apartheid and to impose economic penalties. Meanwhile, the state of emergency was maintained. The government continued to ban more activities, such as the signing of petitions calling for the release of the thousands of political prisoners being held, many of whom were minors (people under age 18). Even wearing shirts with slogans opposing the confinement of the prisoners was outlawed. Nevertheless, Tutu and many of his followers defied some of these laws.
Success
By the early 1990s South Africa had become an outcast among the nations of the world, and economic pressures on the government were threatening to destroy the country. It was during this decade that apartheid crumbled. This is largely because of the leadership of Tutu and other important South African figures, such as Nelson Mandela (1918–), who had been imprisoned for twenty-six years. At last, a new government, led by F. W. de Klerk (1936–), abolished South Africa's racist policies. The country's black majority, able to vote for the first time, elected Mandela as South Africa's first democratically-elected president in 1994. Tutu's dream had become a reality.
In the years that followed, Tutu continued to speak against human rights abuses throughout the world, such as those in the African nation of Zimbabwe and the Asian nation of Burma (Myanmar). In 1995 he was appointed chair of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This body was formed to investigate claims of human rights abuses under the nation's apartheid system. In 1996 Tutu retired from his position as archbishop of Cape Town to devote his energies to the work of the commission. In 1998 he stepped down as commission chair to accept a position teaching theology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2002 he accepted a job as a visiting professor at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His name reappeared in the news that same year when he expressed his intense opposition to the invasion of Iraq planned by the United States and Great Britain.
For More Information
BOOKS
Gish, Steven D. Desmond Tutu: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004.
Tutu, Desmond. God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time. New York: Doubleday, 2004.
WEB SITES
"Archibishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu."University of the Witwatersrand. http://www.wits.ac.za/histp/tutu_quotes_on.htm(accessed June 1, 2006).
"The Nobel Peace Prize for 1984."Nobelprize.org. http://nobelprize.org/peace/laureates/1984/press.html (accessed on May 26, 2006).
Tutu, Desmond
Desmond Tutu
Born: October 7, 1931
Klerksdorp, South Africa
South African antiapartheid activist and religious leader
In the 1980s Archbishop Desmond Tutu became South Africa's most well-known opponent of apartheid, that country's system of racial discrimination, or the separation of people by skin color. In 1984, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in South Africa.
Apartheid
South African apartheid allowed white Africans, who made up 20 percent of the population, to reserve for themselves about 87 percent of the land, most natural resources, and all meaningful political power. Black Africans who found themselves in lands reserved for whites were made citizens of one of ten homelands, which the white-controlled government (but virtually no one else) called nations. In order to remove black people from areas reserved for whites, the government kicked out many from their homes, though their families had in some cases occupied them for decades. Black South Africans in the Republic were forced into the lowest-paying jobs, denied access to most public places, and had drastically lower life expectancies than whites. Meanwhile, white South Africans had one of the highest standards of living in the world.
Black opposition to these conditions began in 1912 when the African National Congress (ANC) was formed. Until the 1960s it engaged in various peaceful campaigns of protest that included marches, petitions, and boycotts (refusing to purchase or participate in businesses)—actions which ultimately helped blacks little. In 1960, after police fired on a crowd at Sharpeville, South Africa, killing sixty-nine and wounding many others, and after the ANC leader Nelson Mandela (1918–) was imprisoned for life in 1964, many black Africans decided to abandon the policy of nonviolent resistance. Most ANC members, led by Oliver Tambo, left South Africa and launched a campaign of sabotage (destruction) from exile. The government increased its violence in return. In 1976, five hundred black students were shot during protests, and in 1977 and 1980 black leader Steve Biko (1946–1977) and trade unionist Neil Aggett were killed while in police custody. Beginning in 1984 violence again swept South Africa. By the time the government declared a state of emergency in June 1986, more than two thousand individuals had been killed.
Rise of Tutu
Against this backdrop Desmond Tutu emerged as the leading spokesman for nonviolent resistance to apartheid. Desmond Mpilo Tutu was born on October 7, 1931, to Zachariah and Aletta Tutu, in Klerksdorp, a town in the Transvaal region of South Africa. Tutu was born a Methodist but became an Anglican when his family changed religions. The Tutu family moved to Johannesburg, South Africa, when Desmond was twelve years old. In Johannesburg he first met the Anglican priest Trevor Huddleston who was strongly against apartheid and became Tutu's main role model. At the age of fourteen he contracted tuberculosis, a terrible disease which effects the lungs and bones, and was hospitalized for twenty months. He wanted to become a doctor, but because his family could not afford the schooling, he became a teacher.
When the government instituted a system of racially discriminatory education in 1957, a system that would separate black students from white students, Tutu left teaching and entered the Anglican Church. Ordained (declared a priest) in 1961, he earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1962 from the University of South Africa, and then a master's degree from the University of London. From 1970 to 1974 he lectured at the University of Lesotho, Botswana, and Swaziland. In 1975 he became dean of Johannesburg, a position from which he publicly challenged white rule. He became bishop of Lesotho in 1976, and in 1985 bishop of Johannesburg. A short fourteen months later, in April 1986, he was elected archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, the first black person to head the Anglican Church in southern Africa.
Begins the fight
By the 1980s clergymen (religious leaders) were among the most passionate opponents of apartheid within South Africa. Allan Boesak, a biracial minister, and Beyers Naude, head of the Christian Institute, were unusually outspoken. Naude was silenced in the late 1970s by being banned, a unique South African punishment by which the victim was placed under virtual house arrest (forced to stay at home by court order) and could not speak or be quoted publicly. Tutu's international recognition as a critic of apartheid came when he became first general secretary of the South African Council of Churches in 1978.
Nobel Prize
The problem faced by antiapartheid clergymen was how to oppose both violent resistance and apartheid, which was itself increasingly violent. Tutu was determined in his opposition, and he spoke out both in South Africa and abroad, often comparing apartheid to Nazism (a radical movement of racial superiority led by Adolf Hitler [1889—1945]) and communism (where a strong-handed government controls goods and services within a country). As a result the government twice revoked his passport, and he was jailed briefly in 1980 after a protest march. Tutu's view on violence reflected the tension in the Christian approach to resistance: "I will never tell anyone to pick up a gun. But I will pray for the man who picks up a gun, pray that he will be less cruel than he might otherwise have been.…"
Another issue Tutu faced was whether other nations should be urged to apply economic sanctions (limitations) against South Africa. Many believed that sanctions would hurt the white-controlled economy, therefore forcing apartheid to end. Others believed the sanction would hurt the black community more. Tutu favored sanctions as the only hope for peaceful change. He also opposed the "constructive engagement" policy of U.S. president Ronald Reagan (1911–). When the new wave of violence swept South Africa in the 1980s and the government failed to make fundamental changes in apartheid, Tutu pronounced constructive engagement a failure.
A new era
In 1989 F. W. de Klerk (1936–) was elected the new president of the Republic of South Africa. He had promised to abolish apartheid, and at the end of 1993 he made good on his promise when South Africa's first all-race elections were announced. On April 27, 1994, South Africans elected a new president, Nelson Mandela, and apartheid was finally over. Mandela symbolized South Africa's new freedom, since until 1990 he had spent twenty-seven years as a political prisoner because of his outspoken opposition to apartheid.
In 1997 Tutu received the Robie Award for his work in humanitarianism. The award came in the midst of Tutu's battle with prostate cancer, and shortly after the presentation he announced plans to undergo several months of cancer treatment in the United States. As head of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a group that investigates apartheid crimes, Tutu planned to set up an office in the United States, where he could continue his work throughout the rigorous cancer treatment. It was determined in October 1999 that the cancer had not spread to other parts of Tutu's body. In August 2001, Tutu returned to South Africa after spending two years in the United States undergoing cancer treatment.
Receiving the Robie was certainly not Tutu's first recognition: he was the second South African to earn the Nobel Peace Prize. The first was Albert Luthuli of the ANC, who received it in 1960 for the same sort of opposition to apartheid.
For More Information
Bentley, Judith. Archbishop Tutu of South Africa. Hillside, NJ: Enslow, 1988.
Du Boulay, Shirley. Tutu: Voice of the Voiceless. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1988.
Lantier, Patricia and David Winner.. Desmond Tutu: Religious Leader Devoted to Freedom. Milwaukee: G. Stevens Children's Books, 1991.
Lelyveld, Joseph. Move Your Shadow. New York: Time Books, 1985.
Tutu, Desmond. The Rainbow People of God. New York: Doubleday, 1994.
Tutu, Desmond Mpilo
Tutu, Desmond Mpilo
http://www.tutu.org