The Conscience of the Nation

In an article written for Catholic News Service in Washington, GUNTHER?SIMMERMACHER looks at the life of Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu might seek to turn off the spotlight that has shone on him for the past three decades, but as he approaches his 80th birthday on October 7, he has not been able to withdraw from public life completely.

The former Anglican primate of southern Africa now lives with his wife in the middle-class Cape Town suburb of Milnerton. Neighbours are used to seeing the diminutive archbishop on his brisk morning walks. Their greetings are met with a friendly wave of the hand, but the archbishop does not stop for a chat. Extrovert as he appears in public, the private Archbishop Tutu is reserved and, indeed, shy.

Once always available to the media, the archbishop now denies interview requests. He still writes occasionally and speaks at selected public events. When he does so, his comments on current issues invariably make headlines. In this way, he still serves as the conscience of the nation.

That role has lost him many friends among those who fought with him against apartheid. The supporters of ex-President Thabo Mbeki could not forgive Archbishop Tutu’s strong criticism of government policies denying AIDS, and supporters of President Jacob Zuma would prefer the archbishop keep quiet about issues such as corruption.

After the archbishop called for a South African academic boycott of Israel in response to what he sees as that country’s human rights abuses against Palestinians, Jewish groups in South Africa and Israel accused him of anti-Semitism. And in August, the archbishop was called a racist by some white South Africans when he suggested that they should pay a wealth tax as a sign of repentance for having benefitted from apartheid.

It was apartheid and his prophetic witness against it that propelled Archbishop Tutu to international prominence when he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, a few weeks before he was named the first black Anglican bishop of Johannesburg.

His episcopal position afforded him some protection from the brutal regime of P.W. Botha and, like several other Christian leaders, he used his privileged position to speak out against the injustice of apartheid. With his charisma and conciliatory but firm statements, the archbishop became a spokesman for the struggle, at home and abroad. There were more radical clergy  many of them, including Catholic priests, were detained and even tortured but the untouchable archbishop frustrated the regime the most.

Like Catholic Archbishop Denis Hurley of Durban on whose shoulders we stood, as Archbishop Tutu once put it he condemned apartheid as a heresy. The blasphemy of apartheid, Archbishop Tutu said repeatedly, is that it can make a child of God doubt that he or she is a child of God.I believe that everyone is a saint until the contrary is proven, he said in a 1989 interview.

Archbishop Tutu has always emphasised God’s love and encouraged an active prayer life. God loves you not because we are lovable. No, we are lovable precisely because God loves us, he once wrote.

Coming from the High Anglican tradition, Archbishop Tutu’s spiritual life is in many ways close to Catholicism. At one point the baptized Methodist considered becoming a Catholic priest. Instead he married Nomalizo Leah Shenxane, a Catholic, and went on to become an Anglican minister. When he headed the South African Council of Churches in the late 1970s, he instituted a daily 7 a.m. Eucharist and the Angelus at noon  Hail Mary and all.

Had he become a Catholic priest, he probably would have been in frequent conflict with the hierarchy, and not because of his political eengagement ofwhich many Anglican clergy also disapproved. Archbishop Tutu has expressed liberal views on topics such as homosexuality and bioethics.

He was an early supporter of the ordination of Anglican women and has said that the procedure of electing the archbishop of Canterbury, the primate of the Anglican Communion who is recommended by the British prime minister and appointed by the monarch, is neither democratic and nor representative.

Archbishop Tutu’s social and political engagement is rooted in the mandate of the Gospel to stand with the poor and oppressed. During apartheid, he subscribed to the principle of nonviolence in the struggle.

By the late 1970s he and other church leaders, including the Catholic bishops of South Africa, concluded that apartheid could be fought peacefully by means of international economic sanctions.

Calling for sanctions was not without dangers, because agitating for economic sabotage was outlawed under the stringent Terrorism Act. Historians now increasingly conclude that South Africa’s weak economy and pressure from business were decisive factors in the death of apartheid.

The other factor was, of course, political protest. Archbishop Tutu was instrumental in staging the event that, in 1989, signaled the death of apartheid. During protests on the day of the final apartheid elections in early September that year, police in Cape Town killed more than 20 people, many of them innocent bystanders. In response, Archbishop Tutu called a protest march. After negotiations, new President F.W. de Klerk allowed the march to go ahead, the first such concession under apartheid. The march drew an unprecedented multiracial crowd of 35,000 rainbow people, as the archbishop named them that day, and was replicated throughout South Africa. De Klerk later said it helped push apartheid over the cliff.

The rainbow metaphor to describe the South African nation stuck after democracy became a reality in April 1994. Archbishop Tutu has remained the most ardent advocate for the Rainbow Nation, even as racial divisions still mark South Africa’s public discourse.

After 1994, Archbishop Tutu and anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela became agents for reconciliation. As head of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the 1990s, the archbishop and his colleagues on the commission worked toward the very Christian cycle of confession, penitence and forgiveness. The commission has served as a model for reconciliation in several damaged societies how effective it was as a tool for national reconciliation remains a matter of dispute.

As he enters the ninth decade of his life, the man who once admitted that he loves to be loved is held dear by millions all over the world. His legacy will long survive the faithful servant of a loving God.CNS