One, if not the only relieving moment of last week’s depressing post-summit maunderings was to turn on the television just in time to catch Archbishop Desmond Tutu in sumptuous form. Our celebrated cleric was giving his acceptance speech for an honorary degree awarded him by Pretoria University. He used the occasion to deliver some scathing comments about the
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R40-billion arms deal, the disgraceful government fiasco still attending the Aids crisis, and the crass indulgence of the presidential airliner. When political infections run riot, His Grace is not known for keeping counsel.
The more I see Desmond Tutu the more he seems the exact opposite of what early missionaries intended to accumulate in the way of African Christians. When the John Campbells of the London Missionary Society proselytised their way through the innocent wilderness that was Africa of the early 1800s, they were very stingy with the salvational light they’d brought with them. “That dark and benighted continent” was the object of the attentions of men who, for the greater part, were the harbingers of malevolent Scottish Calvinism, the dull fundamentalist codes of which they believed were best suited for the instruction of Africa’s pagan tribalists. The missionaries’ narrow dogma was spiritual chaperone to the other colonisers. You subjugate their bodies, we’ll despoil their minds.
Christianity, of course, took vigorous root in Africa. But what Campbell and his fellows could never have imagined were the vivid hybrids that were to seed and flourish, the way the Christian faith was to produce some vehemently individual descendants. Of this incendiary breed is our Archbishop.
I have only once met Desmond Tutu. A revue of mine in the early 1980s had attracted the attentions of a “publications committee”. Two sketches in the show were banned outright. One was where a somewhat enraged Afrikaans Dominee found himself having to marry a white woman to a black man. The sketch was a satirical gift. “Do you take this madam to be your lawful wedded wife? Do you promise to love, honour and obey her?” and “Now give me the ring .. and your pass …” and so forth.
In the other sketch, a CSIR “scientist” introduced what he termed the Bonsai Bantu. By genetic tinkering he had produced a race of miniature black people, each about 20cm high. “South Africa’s large racial problem hereby becomes a small racial problem,” explained the scientist as he expanded on the benefits of reducing the stature of those whom you would subjugate. The satirical intention was to parody the tendency of “liberal” whites to speak of their black servants as if they were domestic pets. The all-white publications committee deemed the first sketch blasphemous and both sketches “liable to incite hostility between races”.
In some anger I cold-called Bishop Tutu and asked for help. Would he appear as an expert witness before the Publications Appeal Board? He agreed, saying, “I don’t think I need a passport to go to Pretoria” — at the time he was denied one. Having seen the show, he repaired with us to the hearing. In a memorable quarter hour extempore statement, Desmond Tutu soundly berated the committee for its arrogance in trying to set itself up as an arbiter, not only in religious matters, but in deciding what comedy or satire was “suitable” for black people. He spared no horses. Without any debate the Appeal Board overturned the bannings.
Back in my performing days I had much fun with song parodies, particularly of Noel Coward’s delightful I Wonder What Happened To Him. In its original, a couple of old “India hands” speculate in their London clubs as to what had become of various luminaries of British rule before partition. In some shows I had much fun writing and singing my own versions of what elderly South Africans some years hence might also nostalgically be asking each other. Watching Archbishop Desmond giving his acceptance speech last week, I tried to remember what I sung about the same worthy some years back. A look though some old scripts found this:
As we all know, our Archbishop is still with us and his speech at Pretoria University last week was yet another illustration of a mind profoundly independent and incorruptable. Desmond Tutu would be the first to admit he can’t take a stroll across the waters. What he can do, as once again evidenced in his acceptance speech, is to stomp all over what he perceives are the brazen delinquencies of the power mongers who like to rule.Whatever became of old Tutu
Who was known for the warmth of his smile?
He was famous in London, New York and Lesotho,
Where he spoke of apartheid so vile.
Well, it’s terribly sad
But his luck turned quite bad,
It was all the result of a whim.
Seems he drove down to Muizenberg late in the day,
Then he went for a walk, after having a pray;
And was hit by a speedboat while crossing False Bay.
I Wonder What Happened To Him!
For which, bless you, Desmond Tutu.
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby