HE loves to laugh and his remarks are punctuated with funny voices and dramatic pauses. For a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu is a hoot.
But amid the jokes and high-fives, Tutu offered wisdom, charity and strength on Monday to students at the city’s African American Academy and to visitors from TT Minor Elementary School and the John Stanford International School.
Tutu was honoured with the Nobel Prize in 1984 for helping lead the nonviolent battle against apartheid in his native South Africa.
The advantage of that, he told an audience of several hundred students, is that people will listen to you. The honour won him an invitation to the White House, though then-US President Ronald Reagan previously ”wasn’t interested in meeting me,” Tutu said.
”It was important because it opened doors that had previously been closed,” Tutu said, responding to a student’s question. Though the message may not change, once a person is a Nobel laureate, ”they treat you like an oracle.”
And the prize was important to his people ”because up to that time it looked like apartheid” – legally sanctioned racism – ”was winning.”
Students also asked about South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which offered forgiveness to those who confessed to wrongdoing – including murder – under apartheid. Tutu served as chairman for the hearings that followed South Africa’s first all-race elections in 1994. More than 6 000 people applied for amnesty.
Forgiveness is not easy, he said, but the alternative can be an endless cycle of violence. ”Then you have what you have in the Mideast,” Tutu said. ”And it goes on and on and on.”
Tutu visited to mark the opening of the Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation USA, which is designed to work with universities nationwide to create leadership academies emphasizing peace, social justice and reconciliation.
Before his address on Monday, Tutu had a round-table discussion with 16 local teenagers who received the foundation’s inaugural Desmond Tutu Emerging Leaders Award.
The students – some American-born, others from Vietnam or the Congo or with strong roots in their ethnic communities ? have worked in tutoring, Aids-HIV awareness and advocacy for social justice.
More than 1 000 people crammed into a church on Sunday to greet Tutu at the start of his four-day visit. On Tuesday he is being presented with an honorary degree from the University of Washington and on Wednesday he will speak to a community group.
Links
Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation: www.tutufoundation-usa.org
Desmond Tutu Peace Centre in Cape Town, South Africa:
www.tutu.org – Sapa-AP