With the obvious exception of hors-concours Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was the best known figure in South Africa’s struggle against apartheid. His contribution to the transition from a white segregationist regime to a racial democracy was immense, just one step below that of the former president, who died in 2013.
Tutu died this Sunday morning (26), aged 90, according to the South African Presidency. The archbishop was diagnosed with prostate cancer in the late 1990s and, in recent years, has been hospitalized on several occasions to treat infections associated with cancer treatment.
“Ultimately, at age 90, he died peacefully at the Oasis Frail Care Center in Cape Town this morning,” said Ramphela Mamphele, interim president of Archbishop Desmond Tutu Intellectual Property Trust and coordinator of the Archbishop’s office, in a statement in Tutu family name. Details of the cause of death were not provided.
Over decades of militancy, Tutu has established itself as the South African moral conscience. He did not, after all, have the personal ties and political responsibilities that compelled Mandela to moderate his comments about the mistakes of the post-apartheid government.
Eternal outsider, first-rate phrasing and without a single mouthful, Tutu ended his life as a pop star, with his unmistakable smile and squeals of joy on festive occasions.
Not that it wasn’t hard when needed. In the 1970s and 1980s, as general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, an umbrella of Christian denominations in the country, he was the face of resistance to white rule.
Mandela, at the time serving time and banned by the government, was just a black-and-white photo, and the party he led, the African National Congress, was divided between exile and a shabby guerrilla that didn’t tickle the establishment.
“Until his release in 1990, Mandela was seen mainly as a combatant, not a pacifist. Tutu, in turn, was the one who provided the moral framework for the resistance against apartheid”, says William Gumede, professor at the School of Government from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and author of books on South African politics and history.
Tutu’s work in favelas, denouncing abuses by the security forces and defending the peaceful end of apartheid through international sanctions earned him the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize.
His conciliatory speech at times caused repulsion among young black leaders, who suffered in the flesh from the regime’s persecution and defended radicalization. “South African whites are ordinary human beings who are scared. Who wouldn’t be, being outnumbered 5 to 1?” he once said.
At the same time, he defined himself as a man of peace, but not an irreducible pacifist. He claimed to understand the reasons for the aggressiveness of young people and accepted that resistance to Gandhi had its limits. “Reconciliation is not saying peace, peace, peace, where there is no peace. You cannot reconcile in those who step on us. We must get up first,” he said.
He was born in 1931 in Klerksdorp, in the center of the country. He was educated on a religious mission, the only opportunity for social advancement for poor blacks at the time. His desire was to pursue a medical career, but the lack of resources to pay for his studies pushed him to the most economically viable option at the time, the Anglican Church, where he became a priest in 1961. gradually become recognized as one of the leading voices of the South African clergy.
The Nobel did not shield him from police repression, and even after being internationally recognized, he continued to be detained, albeit for short periods.
With a leftist profile in the conservative environment of the South African churches, he was never cautious in defending the social engagement of religious leaders. He saw, for example, points of contact between the work he was doing and Liberation Theology, then at the height of prestige in Latin America.
In an interview with leaf in 1985, he said that he was a great admirer of Dom Hélder Câmara, the “red bishop” of Olinda, and of the Brazilian Base Ecclesiastical Communities.
In the first half of the 1990s, with apartheid finally unraveling, Tutu campaigned for South Africa to remain united and resist pressure to split into two countries, one for blacks, one for whites. He is credited with creating the term “rainbow nation”, quickly adopted by the new government, as a slogan for a multiracial democracy.
In 1995, with Mandela as President of South Africa, Tutu was the obvious choice to head the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Nothing like it had ever been attempted anywhere in the world, and the idea seemed unorthodox.
People were encouraged to admit mistakes and confess to crimes, including murders, in public sessions, but without being punished for doing so. The important thing was for the truth to come out, so that the country could move forward.
“It was an imperfect arrangement, and he knew it, but he said: if it’s not perfect, let’s try to make the best of this situation,” says Professor Gumede, who was part of the team that drafted the Commission’s final report and worked directly with Tutu.
Aware of symbolism, he held several sessions of the Commission at the Regina Mundi church, in the Soweto neighborhood, which had served as a shelter for young people fleeing the police during the apartheid years. There, amidst glass still bearing shot marks and a black statue of Mary, countless testimonies were taken. As Tutu defined it years later, “an infected wound was opened and cleaned, and balm was poured into it.”
Crucially, he resisted government pressure and included in his work atrocities committed by black movements as well. It hasn’t spared even an icon like Winnie Mandela, who in the 1980s and 1990s led gangs of teenagers who vindicated blacks “infiltrated” by the government.
At that point, the distance between Tutu and the country’s new leadership was settled. He has become an increasingly impatient critic of government corruption and inefficiency.
At the end of his life, he maintained the routine of not running away from controversies and advocating for progressive causes. He emphatically defended, for example, the ordination of gay priests by the Anglican Church.
In 2010, he accepted to be part of an experiment in the US, and had his DNA mapped in a project to identify genetic similarities between the races. He was also enthusiastic about hosting the World Cup in South Africa, and his excited appearances in the yellow jersey of Bafana Bafana, the local team, became famous.
He announced his retirement in 2010, but he still published a children’s book with stories from the Bible and continued to write articles in which he defended his “rainbow nation” and harassed the government. That year, in an interview with The New York Times, he admitted the difficulty in withdrawing from public life. “I wish I could shut up. But I can’t, and I won’t.”
.
