Remembering Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Mpilo Tutu

Anglican priest. Family man.  Anti-apartheid and human rights activist.  Nobel peace prize laureate.  An icon of South African and Christian leadership. Through it all, a moral compass and servant of God. While my encounters with him were few, I am greatly inspired by his life and immense contributions. It’s a privilege to reflect on this and his rich legacy.  

At the time of his passing at age 90, Archbishop Tutu was married to Nomalizo Leah Tutu, for 66 years. Their professional evolution was unconventional, and in his words, circuitous. Prior to being a priest, Tutu was a teacher. He and Leah met when he was teaching in his first school, and she was studying at teachers college. In 1955, the Bantu Education Act was introduced, one of the offensively racist apartheid laws that allocated inferior and separate education to black students. Archbishop Tutu and Leah did not want to participate in this system, so they resigned from the teaching world and retrained. Tutu as a priest, and Leah as a nurse.

Some of the seeds for his choice might be found in Tutu’s teen years in the 1940s when an Anglican priest named Trevor Huddleston became a mentor to him. Huddleston had come to South Africa from England with the Community of the Resurrection and served in the township of Sophiatown, a black cultural hub where he became part of the wider anti-apartheid struggle. In Huddleston’s parish, Tutu became a server for several years, and he credits Huddleston with early spiritual influence. Huddleston first caught Tutu’s attention when the priest respectfully doffed his hat at Tutu’s mother. 

In the early 1970s, Tutu was director of a fund for theological education. He travelled extensively throughout Africa, and in particular, the newly independent Southern African nations. This was how my father, a Canadian Anglican priest, first connected with Tutu, initially in Malawi and then Uganda. According to John Allen, Tutu’s biographer and press secretary for many years, this travel and exposure was instrumental in further shaping Tutu’s theological views—integrating emerging African theology with African American and liberation theology and exploring the relationship of these with the South African black consciousness movement. This broad exposure also shaped his anticipation of what a post apartheid South Africa could and shouldn’t be. 

In 1975, Tutu was appointed as the first black Dean of Johannesburg, and he began to be prominent in the anti-apartheid movement. Allen describes how Tutu wrote to the then notorious Prime Minister Vorster warning him that he feared violence in the townships with the ongoing repression. A few months later, the worst imaginable happened. Black school children of Soweto, peacefully demonstrating against Bantu education, were massacred by the South African police.  With Tutu’s foresight, charisma and gift of evangelism, he led prayer sessions in Soweto, at the same time challenging his white congregation in Johannesburg for their ‘deafening silence’ in the wake of the uprising. The June 16th uprisings catalysed early global anti-apartheid response, and mere months later, Tutu was elected Bishop of Lesotho.

It was at this time my adoptive parents John and Patricia Thompson, and we four children, had returned from eight years in Eastern Africa, and most recently three years in Uganda, where my father had been teaching at the theological college in Mukono outside of Kampala. My mother, also a theology graduate, taught and parented. We were recalled due to fears of Idi Amin’s increased repression. Tutu, newly in his role as Bishop of Lesotho, visited Canada in 1977, there being strong relations under Canadian Primate Archbishop Ted Scott between the Anglican Church of Canada and the Church of Southern Africa. (Archbishop Scott would later be appointed to the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group).  Hearing that my father was available, Tutu invited him to work with him in Lesotho, to train people in leadership roles to be self-supporting priests. Bishop Tutu’s warmth was magnetic, and my three younger siblings and I were excited at the invitation. He warned us: There are no trees in Lesotho! We had a rhyme of ‘Bishop Tutu from Lesotho’ that we repeated as a soundtrack for our move (Lesotho is pronounced Le-sue-too). 

Lesotho is the heart-shaped nation landlocked in the middle of South Africa, and we arrived, a mixed-race family, legislated at that time in South Africa not to exist. My adoptive parents white, my brother and I black, and our two younger siblings white. Lesotho in the ‘70s and ‘80s had a hothouse dimension, with many activists in exile from apartheid, as well as academics from across Africa teaching at the university and theological college in Roma.  Bishop Tutu and Leah would return to Johannesburg in 1979.  Despite few trees my family put down roots in Lesotho, and it was our family home for eight years. 

Archbishop Tutu and Leah have four children—Mpho Andrea, Naomi Nontombi, Theresa Thandeka and Trevor Thamsanqa, all of whom have families of their own. Over their childhood, the Tutu children attended a boarding school in Swaziland called Waterford Kamhlaba, the founder also inspired by Father Trevor Huddleston who had written an article in the ‘50s entitled “And the Church Sleeps On,” challenging the church and educators more broadly on the need for quality education in South Africa. Although secular, Waterford was the first multiracial school in Southern Africa, and was founded in opposition to apartheid. My parents followed in the Tutus’ footsteps and sent my brother and me to this school. We were gifted not only a quality education, but the opportunity to learn about apartheid, be taught African history and geography, and participate in community service. It was an indelible and empowering experience and the exact opposite of the thin gruel of Bantu education that Tutu detested. In school assemblies and commemorations (such as June 16th) we prayed the prayer that Tutu made famous and that has been prayed the length and breadth of the continent: “God bless Africa, guard her children, guide her rulers and give her peace.”

The 1980s were the height of the apartheid regime, and Bishop Tutu and family returned to Johannesburg. In this period, as journalist David Robinson puts it, “Tutu’s natural (environment) … was in the midst of the great stand-off between an increasingly angry young black population and the brutal white-led security forces.”  As Allen’s biography recounts: “It was an era when the leadership of the liberation movements was banned, jailed or in exile, and here was this person who was saying what most black South Africans felt. Tutu really was public enemy number one, when Mandela was out of sight, out of mind. He had this extraordinary power to communicate.” Tutu decried the systemic, racial oppression of apartheid, called for the release of Nelson Mandela, and strongly urged the international community to impose sanctions. Ultimately, sanctions would have a crippling effect on the state and create a window for dialogue.  Tutu’s bravery was constant, in the face of threats to himself and his family, and even assassination attempts on his own life.

What supported this steadfastness? The Most Reverend Dr Thabo Makgoba, current Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town and primate of Southern Africa, speaks of Tutu as “a deeply spiritual person whose alpha and omega—his starting point and his ending point— was his relationship with our Creator. He took God, God’s purpose and God’s creation deadly seriously. Prayer, the Scriptures and his ministry to the people God entrusted to his care were at the heart of his life.” Archbishop Makgoba adds, “He believed us all to be in the image of God, and [that we] should be treated as such.”

Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 1984.  The award recognized his unifying leadership and the courage and patience of all South Africans who were opposing the apartheid regime. 

When our family moved back to Canada in the mid-‘80s to a parish in Barrie, Ont., I joined anti apartheid groups in Toronto. Tutu visited Canada on several occasions in the ‘80s, meeting with Anglican church leadership and significantly beyond, conscientizing and informing on realities in South Africa and encouraging Canadians and Canadian politicians to impose economic and political sanctions on South Africa.  As Tutu famously stated, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”     

In 1990, four months after being released from prison, Nelson Mandela briefly visited to Canada to ensure sanctions were redoubled and to broker understanding for the ANC as a government in waiting.  I was thrilled to make the welcome speech to Nelson and Winnie Mandela at a rally in Queen’s Park. These milestone visits by Tutu and Mandela affirmed the interconnectedness of Canadians and Southern Africans in supporting South Africa’s liberation. At this time discussions were also catalysed in the committees I was in about racism in Canada, and when and how the spotlight should swing in a Canadian direction.

South Africa’s historic, first non-racial national elections were held in 1994. Tutu helped in midwifing this long evolution, ministering as Archbishop, ministering to ANC leadership as part of this, and as well as brokering stays of peace and nonviolence in the conflict (that checkered South Africa from 1992-94) between the Inkatha Freedom Party and ANC supporters. Importantly, in this period, Tutu coined the term ‘Rainbow Nation’ initially to describe who was attending the ever-growing rallies for liberation, and later to describe South Africa in a way that captured the hopes and dreams of the emerging new nation. ‘Rainbow Nation’ gave language to the metamorphosis from apartheid’s black and white divisions to post-apartheid possibility.  

In an interview, Tutu shared two days in his life that win the prize for ‘best day.’ One was the birth of his son Trevor. The other was the day he introduced Nelson Mandela as President of the Republic of South Africa to the South African people. After this gleaming event, Tutu recounts in his biography that he thought he was stepping down from a national leadership role.

However, his last and five-year mantle, at the request of President Mandela, was chairing the ground-breaking Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) whose mandate was to provide “a way to come to terms with apartheid past and try to achieve the ideal of reconciliation.” Archbishop Tutu’s belief was that a strong future required the truth about the past to be appropriately aired. The three elements of the process were confession, forgiveness and restitution. I experienced, back in South Africa starting my career, how the stories and testimonies were shared broadly and diversely and talk of the TRC was everywhere.

No one in South Africa nor the world could claim not to know about apartheid. No longer “were victims forced to carry the burden of memories without public recognition and support.” Tutu’s frustration with the TRC once it was over, was with an element that he could not control – notably with the lack of restitution. Restitution (restoring materially in some measure to those who had been disenfranchised) was the critical third leg of the process and was never meaningfully provided. 

After the TRC, Tutu continued to strongly advocate for rights more broadly: LGBTQ rights in the church and in society, rights of Indigenous and First Nations people in South Africa, Canada and elsewhere, calling out failings of the successive and current South African government and drawing attention to environmental issues. With this all, some say that the understanding and vision for reconciliation may be his greatest and most lasting contribution of all.  As Canadians and Christians, how do we steward those gifts?

On a visit to South Africa with my then 14-year-old son Ezra in 2018, I was so happy to see Archbishop Tutu again. In the stone church of St. Peter’s in Hermanus where the morning service was held, we heard his voice before we saw him. Unmistakable and resounding in prayer. May his voice and his values, so expressive of the Anglican faith, echo long as we find ways to live his legacy.