Home Christian News Desmond Tutu, Archbishop, Activist and Apartheid Foe, Is Dead at 90

Desmond Tutu, Archbishop, Activist and Apartheid Foe, Is Dead at 90

In fact, as a child, Tutu was baptized a Methodist, but he later converted to Anglicanism with the rest of his family in Klerksdorp, South Africa, where he was born. Tutu, the son of a schoolteacher, wanted to become a physician, but with no money or scholarships available, he enrolled in a teacher-training program.

His career as a teacher was short-lived. After resigning from his teaching post in protest of the government’s educational policies toward Blacks, Tutu turned to the priesthood and to the church.

His would be a career of firsts. In 1975 Tutu was named the first Black Anglican dean of Johannesburg and in 1976 he was elected bishop of Lesotho, an independent African country encircled by South Africa. Two years later he became the first Black general secretary of the South African Council of Churches. Tutu used his post as general secretary as a platform to peacefully advance the anti-apartheid movement.

In 1984, the Anglican bishop was teaching in New York on sabbatical when he learned that he won that year’s Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent crusade against apartheid. His fellow Black South Africans bestowed a rapturous welcome on the laureate when he returned home and it was to them Tutu dedicated his prize.

“This award is for you, the 3 1/2 million of our people who have been uprooted and dumped as if you were rubbish,” said Tutu in a speech delivered at the headquarters of the South African Council of Churches.

It was a stellar year for Tutu. Just one month after winning the Nobel Prize, he was elected the first Black Anglican bishop of Johannesburg. There were expectations that Tutu’s episcopacy would squelch his passion and protest. That never happened.

In 1996, a decade after he was elevated to Anglican archbishop of Cape Town and primate of much of southern Africa, Tutu laid aside the staff of his episcopate, but he did not abandon the work that consumed much of his adult life — bringing freedom and healing to a racially fractured South Africa.

Tutu’s quest for a free South Africa put him on the front line of politics and protest, but he often dismissed claims that he had political ambitions. He would respond to the curious by saying: “It just so happens that I am myself black, but the most important thing about me is that I am a Christian leader in South Africa at a critical period in its history. I have been given the ministry of reconciliation.”

Content with being “the priest,” even in the new South Africa, Tutu was determined to maintain what he called a “critical distance” from the government that being “the politician” wouldn’t allow. Said Tutu: “If it is evil, it is evil, and I’m going to tell you so.”

In the mid-1990s, Tutu was chosen to head South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Despite his illness and cancer treatment, Tutu kept watch over the commission as victims, perpetrators, the police and the country’s former president aired the misdeeds of the era he fought against.

As the world watched the commission’s proceedings, television cameras often caught the quick-witted Tutu sobbing audibly over the recounting of some horrible atrocity that was being disclosed.

Years later, he continued to preach about the need for reconciliation and forgiveness.

“(F)orgiving is a gift to the forgiver as well as to the perpetrator,” he told RNS in an interview in 2014, when he co-authored “The Book of Forgiving” with his daughter Mpho Tutu. “As the victim, you offer the gift of your forgiving to the perpetrator who may or may not appropriate the gift but it has been offered and thereby it liberates the victim.”

Tutu was presented with top honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009 from then-President Barack Obama.

“As a man of the cloth, he has drawn the respect and admiration of a diverse congregation,” reads the medal’s citation. “He helped lead South Africa through a turning point in modern history, and with an unshakeable humility and firm commitment to our common humanity, he helped heal wounds and lay the foundation for a new nation.”