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Desmond Tutu, Anglican bishop of Johannesburg, rises like a crimson cross above the many-headed mass of humanity. “Freedom, freedom…,” he has the black mourners of a funeral service chant in the dusty stadium of Kwathema, a black community east of Johannesburg. The small, gray-haired churchman with the insistent voice is not afraid to openly challenge the white-supremacist government and it’s head, Willem Botha. Tutu is the first black man to have been ordained a bishop of the Anglican Church—and this, moreover, in the most important diocese of Johannesburg. In the past months he has increasingly become the spokesman for South African blacks, even overshadowing the murdered (1977) freedom fighter and student leader, Steve Biko. President Botha evidently already fears the bishop as an antagonist. This, presumably, is why he rejected the bishop’s offer to discuss the possibility of containing the escalating racial war, though, of course, as he let it be known, he was always open for talks with anyone willing to forego violence and civil disobedience. In any case, he was already scheduled for a meeting with a delegation of the Anglican Church, Tutu was welcome to join them. Though most blacks admire the courage of their “spokesman” Tutu, many adherents of the more radical ANC criticize him because, with his sermons of non-violence, he has gained no real ground in the effort to secure equal rights for blacks. “I’m surprised young people in South Africa listen to a person like me,” said the bishop, “because our lack of results tends to undermine our credibility.”
This moment seems now to have come. Vorster also failed in the past to seize the opportunity and negotiate with a black leader who also understood the language of whites. The fifty-three-year-old Tutu is the son of a teacher who led a Methodist school in Klerksdorp in the Transvaal and later converted to Anglicanism. His family lived in a house without electricity, but did manage to have three rooms with running water and an indoor toilet for the five-member family. His mother helped earn their living by cleaning for whites. After holding posts as superintendent in Johannesburg and bishop in Lesotho, he was named General Secretary of the 13 million-member South African Council of Churches (SACC)—a position that also gave him political weight. The SACC represents twenty-three churches and eleven religious denominations. Tutu used the office to agitate against racial discrimination. “I did not become human in the deepest sense through a network of laws and thou-shalt-nots, but through living in a truly free society,” says Tutu. His stays in England have shaped this spirited churchman. Wherever he goes, he knows how to appear in the best light. And he knows how to hold his listeners with lively speech full of expressive gestures. When his church coworkers celebrated this Nobel Prize laureate last October, he joked. “My wife is completely confused. She told me recently she wouldn’t be surprised if she woke up one morning, and, instead of me, she found the Pope lying next to her.” Indeed, his Excellency, or God’s Fool, as he is called because of his love of drama, has a sense of humor—as well as charisma. Not infrequently Bishop Tutu, in silk vestments and elegant Italian loafers, has fought his way through a mob to throw himself protectively over some victim about to be lynched. When this bishop, who enjoys the good life, the life of an honorary white man (as his enemies put it) speaks to blacks, they listen. “You are not the sub-humans the white man calls you. Don’t believe that kind of blasphemy.”
President Botha dubs his antagonist “a demagogue in bishop’s robes.” Till now Tutu’s popularity has protected him from the “ban.” Even before the government imposed this state of emergency, it could deny troublesome opponents the right to free assembly through this measure as well as the right to be quoted and the right to travel. Tutu had to surrender his passport twice—in 1980, after calling for a boycott of South African coal in Denmark, and again in 1981 when, during a European and American tour, he demanded economic sanctions against Apartheid in South Africa. With his commanding appearances, Tutu has even upstaged the popular Zulu Chief Gatsha Buthelezi during recent weeks. This leader of the largest South African ethnic group favors a “politics of the possible” and rejects boycotts as a form of political pressure. Such strategies, argues the chief, would only result in greater hardships for blacks.
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Subjects: Human
Rights I Democracy I Parties
I Examples I
Europe
I
Globalisation
I United Nations
I Sustainability
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