“My phone has conked out. Can you please come and fix it for me?” This brief request one Saturday morning in St Faith’s chapel at Westminster Abbey saw me heading across Dean’s Yard to the home we’d prepared for the Nobel peace laureate — and archbishop emeritus — Desmond Tutu and his wife Leah, while he was on sabbatical in London a few years ago.
To save them trekking from floor to floor, we’d installed phones on each. Immediately, I saw the cause of the problem: the phone on the ground floor was off the hook. But I didn’t want to make the archbishop seem foolish. So I picked up the phone, fiddled with it a bit, held it to my ear, blamed the infamous intermittent fault and assured him that there was now a good dialling tone.
But he wasn’t fooled. “I’ve been shown up by the white man again,” he shouted up the stairs to his wife. “I always knew that these British phones were racist, only responding to white people!”
As I laughed my way back home through the abbey’s cloister I couldn’t help but marvel at the way in which, after all he’s suffered, the archbishop could still turn racism into a joke. But I really shouldn’t have been surprised because, for this perhaps best-known of all clerics the world over, who celebrated his 80th birthday in Cape Town on Friday, his whole life is a reminder of the healing and transforming role that laughter plays in human living.
Who else, amid the anti-apartheid struggle, and the ongoing fight against racism anywhere and everywhere, would risk turning it into a joke? Certainly clergy like myself tend to be very wary of doing so, given the levels of political correctness that seem to prevent such humour these days. But not a Tutu.
‘Racism: It’s just a pigment of the imagination!’
He did it time and again in those long years of struggle when pointing to his long nose and suggesting that it frankly made him more different from his fellow white South Africans than his black skin colour. “Racism,” he’d say, those eyes twinkling, “it’s just a pigment of the imagination!” Just as at other times, he’d simply quote the yearly exchange between the then MP for the Johannesburg suburb of Houghton, the late Helen Suzman, and the minister for racial affairs. She’d ask which South Africans had been reclassified in racial terms over the past year. The minister would reply at length along the lines of “20 blacks have been classified coloureds; 12 coloureds, black; six whites, coloured; five Chinese, Indian; two whites, black”.
Audiences knew both the pain behind the list — people often being reclassified to get or remain legally married — and also the madness of families where siblings were differently classified as coloured or black on the basis of a pencil pressed into their hair to see which they seemed to be. People invariably laughed. Indeed, the archbishop can get people rolling in the aisles in a way few others can. But the audiences were almost always full of white people who were of course being taught — often without knowing it — to learn to laugh at the idiocy they supported with their votes, because learning to laugh at it was the first step to changing attitudes.
Laughter is as necessary as any other spiritual quality, indeed it’s more transformative than most. In the Bible Sarah and Abraham laugh at God, God laughs from the heavens and everyone’s invited to be “fools for Christ”. It’s a form of discipleship with a long lineage and, as Desmond Tutu reminds us, a bright future. – guardian.co.uk