Desmond Tutu, South Africa’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning activist for racial justice and retired Anglican archbishop of Cape Town. Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a prominent figurehead in the campaign against apartheid.
Despite bloody violations committed against the black population, as in the Sharpeville massacre of 1961 and the Soweto rising in 1976, Tutu adhered to his nonviolent line. Yet he would not blame Nelson Mandela and his supporters for having made a different choice. After the fall of apartheid, he took part in the Truth and Reconciliation process to heal the wounds of apartheid. Desmond Tutu has become a leading global humanitarian and ambassador of goodwill.
Bishop Desmond Tutu was born in 1931 in Klerksdorp, Transvaal. His father was a teacher, and he himself was educated at Johannesburg Bantu High School. After leaving school he trained first as a teacher at Pretoria Bantu Normal College and in 1954 he graduated from the University of South Africa. After three years as a high school teacher he began to study theology, being ordained as a priest in 1960. The years 1962-66 were devoted to further theological study in England leading up to a Master of Theology.
From 1967 to 1972 he taught theology in South Africa before returning to England for three years as the assistant director of a theological institute in London. In 1975 he was appointed Dean of St. Mary’s Cathedral in Johannesburg, the first black to hold that position. From 1976 to 1978 he was Bishop of Lesotho, and in 1978 became the first black General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches. Tutu is an honorary doctor of a number of leading universities in the USA, Britain and Germany.
His elevated position in the church enabled him to advocate for an end of apartheid while granting him a certain degree of protection from the South African authorities. With most of the leaders of the anti-apartheid movement jailed or in exile, Tutu become the movement’s de facto head, and a leading spokesperson for the rights of Black South Africans. His unstinting efforts to draw national and international attention to apartheid’s discrimination earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. The awards committee said it was meant, “not only as a gesture of support to him and to the South African Council of Churches of which he was a 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’s critical view of Marxist-oriented communism and the governments of the Eastern Bloc, and the comparisons he drew between these administrations and far-right ideologies like Nazism and apartheid brought criticism from the South African Communist Party in 1984. After the transition to universal suffrage, Tutu’s criticism of presidents Mbeki and Zuma brought objections from their supporters; in 2006, Zuma’s personal advisor Elias Khumalo claimed that it was a double standard that Tutu could “accept the apology from the apartheid government that committed unspeakable atrocities against millions of South Africans”, yet “cannot find it in his heart to accept the apology” from Zuma.
Tutu authored or coauthored numerous publications, including The Divine Intention (1982), a collection of his lectures; Hope and Suffering (1983), a collection of his sermons; No Future Without Forgiveness (1999), a memoir from his time as head of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time (2004), a collection of personal reflections; and Made for Goodness: And Why This Makes All the Difference (2010), reflections on his beliefs about human nature. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Tutu received numerous honours, including the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom (2009), an award from the Mo Ibrahim Foundation that recognized his lifelong commitment to “speaking truth to power” (2012), and the Templeton Prize (2013).
Tutu died from cancer at the Oasis Frail Care Centre in Cape Town on 26 December 2021, aged 90. South African president Cyril Ramaphosa described Tutu’s death as “another chapter of bereavement in our nation’s farewell to a generation of outstanding South Africans who have bequeathed us a liberated South Africa.”
