Rabble-rouse for Peace

by Gunther Simmermacher · December 2, 2006

RABBLE-ROUSER FOR PEACE: The Authorised Biography of Desmond Tutu, by John Allen. Random House, Johannesburg. 2006. 481pp.

Reviewed by Gunther Simmermacher

Desmond Tutu is arguably the second most famous and admired South African. The Anglican archbishop emeritus public image has mutated over the years. Once he was, depending on ones perspective, the struggles most potent and celebrated advocate or white South Africas public enemy number one, as his biographer recalls. Today he is acknowledged as a national treasure by most and as an irksome critic by some others. One constant is that he has acted as this nations principal national conscience.

It has been the privilege of journalist John Allen to have been close at Tutus side throughout the crucial years of his ministry, as the archbishops and then the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions press secretary. As an intimate aide, Allen has been privy to unique insights into Tutus work and character, and so is an obvious choice to pen an authorised biography, as this book is dubbed.

This is a blessing and something of a curse: a blessing, for it provides this biography with nuances an outsider might not pick up, and a curse because Allens close friendship with his subject by nature inhibits an absolutely forthright critical appraisal, much as he tries to apply due critique and aims to eschew obsequiousness.

Rabble-Rouser for Peace, a most apt title, provides an admirable portrait of a man who has had much influence in defeating the apartheid regime and shaping todays South Africa.

Born in 1931 into an inter-ethnic Methodist family in Klerksdorp, young Desmond grew up in simple circumstances. As a youngster, he moved to Johannesburg where he came into contact with the Anglican Community of the Resurrection, an Anglo-Catholic missionary congregation which included Fr Trevor Huddleston.

After qualifying as a teacher, the young Tutu virtually stumbled into his ministerial vocation. By then he had married Nomalizo Leah Shenxane remarkably in a Catholic church, owing to Leahs religious upbringing. Catholicism was not foreign to him. An evaluation of the seminarian Tutu who in line with his fellow High Anglicans maintained a rigorous regime of prayer and customs familiar to Catholic clergy notes the young mans flirtations with the Roman fever. How might South African history have proceeded had Tutu caught that particular fever? In the event, he became a High Anglican priest.

As a student, teacher and young priest, Tutu was not inordinately engaged in politics. This changed when in 1970 he witnessed unconscionable police brutality during a protest at Fort Hare university, where he was a chaplain. Soon after that, he was appointed associate director of the Theological Education Fund of the World Council of Churches in London, a job that required wide travels throughout Africa. These were a formative experience for Tutu, who began to develop a personal African theology, one that remains useful in the present dialogue on inculturation. The London stint also gave the Tutus an alternative experience to apartheid, a vision of what could be in the land of their birth.

Returning to South Africa in 1975, Tutu no longer would bow to docile acceptance of apartheids racial order; his prophetic vocation began. Almost immediately, he was nominated bishop of Johannesburg, but lost after a protracted vote. The eventual winner, Dr Timothy Bavin, appointed him dean of the cathedral, the first black man to hold that position. Allen writes without undue hyperbole: It was not apparent at the time, but [Tutu] had begun one of the most extensive, high-pressure, prominent public ministries of any church leader of his generation.

Within less than a year, just after the explosion of student protests in June 1976, Tutu became bishop of Lesotho. He shook up the diocese and left two years later reluctantly and on the urgings of his fellow Anglican bishops to assume the position of secretary-general of the South African Council of Churches.

Allens account of how Tutu approached that job is instructive of the clerics spiritual configuration, one not widely known. At the councils Johannesburg headquarters, Khotso House, Tutu introduced staff prayer meetings, retreats and the like. His daily prayer routine remained one of disciplined devotion, including 7am eucharist and the Angelus at noon Hail Mary and all.

For all his social concerns, he put God first. Indeed, his social and political engagement was based on what he discerned to be the mandate of the Gospel. Tutu subscribed to non-violence in the struggle as a preferential option. By the late 1970s he and other church leaders concluded that peaceful means of fighting apartheid were still possible: by means of international economic sanctions.

The notion of sanctions had been introduced almost two decades earlier by African National Congress leader and Nobel peace laureate Albert Luthuli. Calling for sanctions was a precarious gambit by now, because agitating for economic sabotage was outlawed under the stringent Terrorism Act.

Tutu first came to wider international attention in 1980 when Pretoria withdrew his passport. It was restored the following year, and Tutu travelled widely, obtaining censures of apartheid from the US ambassador to the United Nations and Pope John Paul II, among others.

As Tutus profile grew and he did much to maintain it as an articulator of South Africas oppressed so did opposition to him among many white South Africans, including not a few Anglicans and even some of his fellow bishops.

With the rise to prominence of Allan Boesak, a Cape Town clergyman from the Coloured wing of the racially segregated Dutch Reformed Church, Tutu received a populist counterfoil. Where Boesak immersed himself directly in struggle politics, Tutu acted as the Christian conscience, a role similar to that played by Archbishop Denis Hurley (who, alas, merits only one fleeting mention in this book).

Buti Tlhagale, today Catholic bishop of Johannesburg, regarded Tutu and Dr Nthato Motlana as the two key figures in Soweto. Again, Tutu saw Motlana as the political personality, describing himself in such terms: Im not a thinker, I cant analyse. Im a feeling person; maybe I get inspirations.

On September 3, 1984 the Vaal Triangle blew up in political protest (with bloody repercussions which would lead to the declaration of successive states of emergency). A month later, Tutu was in New York when he was revealed as that years Nobel Peace Prize winner a fortuitous circumstance which ensured maximal exposure for the struggle.

The award naturally incensed the Botha government, but also drew a bitter response from author Alan Paton and from the South African Communist Party, which objected to Tutus comment that compared communism to apartheid and Nazism.

The Nobel prize opened doors for Tutu. Allens account of his meetings with world leaders, particularly his discordant relationship with US President Ronald Reagan, is fascinating.

In February 1985 Tutu became bishop of Johannesburg, and a year later archbishop of Cape Town and thus primate of Anglicans in southern Africa. As an archbishop, Tutu was thoughtful and strict, but not always present, spending half his time outside the archdiocese.

Politically he continued to agitate, forming with Boesak and Catholic Archbishop Stephen Naidoo a trinity of church negotiators in defusing crises in Cape Town. After police shootings in Cape Town on election night in September 1989, in which more than 20 people were killed by the police, Tutu unilaterally called a protest march a symbol of defiance during apartheid starting at Cape Towns Anglican St Georges cathedral. After negotiations, new state president FW de Klerk allowed the march to go ahead, the first such concession under apartheid.

The march drew a crowd of 35000 rainbow people (as Tutu dubbed them that day) and was replicated throughout South Africa. According to de Klerk, it helped push apartheid over the cliff.

The final chapters follow Tutu through the interim period leading up to the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as first democratically elected president of South Africa, his dramatic chairmanship of the TRC, his peace efforts in Africa and beyond, and his public run-ins with the likes of Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Mangosuthu Buthelezi.

Rabblerouser is assiduously researched. Allen expertly draws from archival material and extensive interviews he conducted with a wide range of people. The reader is frequently reminded of the latter labour when quotes are referenced in the narrative to interviews with the present writer, a phrase that the pedantic reader might after repetition find intrusive.

Allens narrative style evokes his subjects character: it is thoroughly entertaining, inspiring, uncomplicated and thought-provoking.

An authorised biography by its nature cannot represent the definitive life of its subject. Rabblerouser, however, comes as close to attaining that quality as one might hope for.