With his implacable faith and irrepressible spirit he made an inspiring hero. In a South Africa gripped by the brutality of apartheid, he harnessed his effeverscent yet indomitable personality with the weight of his church to galvanise world support for democracy and human rights.
Desmond Tutu, the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, will turn 75 next month. He cuts an elf-like figure, this old man who survived the liberation struggle and went on to win a Nobel prize for his efforts in the name of peace, and who remains a sharp thorn in the sides of the wayward or unscrupulous.
Without the stature and handsome gravitas of Nelson Mandela but sharing his friend’s refusal to rest on his ageing laurels, Tutu remains an embattled figure in the new South Africa, whose political leaders, he says, are betraying the ideals of the anti-apartheid struggle.
Being a nation’s conscience is not a comfortable job and in recent years Tutu has annoyed and angered many, from white South Africans and President Thabo Mbeki to Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and even Mandela himself. Now, sitting in his characteristically modest office in Cape Town’s working-class Milnerton district, he is happy to do it again. Keenly aware it will throw fuel on an already raging controversy, Tutu repeats a demand he made in a recent lecture, urging former deputy president Jacob Zuma to abandon his campaign to become the next leader of the African National Congress, and eventually President. ”I pray that someone will be able to counsel him that the most dignified, most selfless thing, the best thing he could do for a land he loves deeply, is to declare his decision not to take further part in the succession race of his party,” says Tutu.
Although Zuma was acquitted of rape, Tutu says he had disqualified himself from leadership by sleeping with an HIV-positive woman, 30 years his junior, without using a condom. Further, he had not reined in his supporters who vilified the woman who made the rape charge.
”I for one would not be able to hold my head high if a person with such supporters were to become my president, someone who did not think it necessary to apologise for engaging in casual sex without taking proper precautions in a country that is being devastated by the horrendous HIV/Aids pandemic.” Zuma’s supporters wasted no time in lashing out at Tutu, demanding that Tutu provide his own sexual history before casting stones at Zuma.
Tutu, who says he has a ”hotline” to God which compelled him to make many historic stands during the anti-apartheid struggle, shakes his head sadly when speaking of such bitter criticism. ”I am just sorry for them. They are proving what I was saying, that the supporters of this person [Zuma] do not want to give the respect to others that they claim for themselves,” he says, adding tartly: ”I will not engage in a ding-dong with them. It is not a question of sexual histories. It is the irresponsible example he set for the nation.”
Tutu still walks with his customary bounce and greets visitors with verve, but appears tired when seated and in thought. Having recovered from prostate cancer in 1997, his life is run at the demanding pace of a head of state: this week he is in New York at the United Nations calling for better understanding between the West and Islam, then it’s off to Los Angeles for a glittering celebration of his legacy and back to Cape Town for his birthday on 7 October.
Tutu says he finds his current role of ”nagging” South Africa to live up to its glorious history as difficult as tilting at the apartheid regime.
”I realised this right at the beginning, after freedom came. So soon after winning the first election [1994] the new government raised their salaries. I criticised that and it caused trouble. Later when I said to Madiba [Mandela] that he was setting a bad example for not making a decent woman of Graca Machel and he should marry her, that angered people,” said Tutu. ”It is so easy to be criticised for being unpatriotic.”
A few months ago Tutu said that the white minority did not appear to be grateful for how magnanimous black people had been to them after apartheid. ”That got me into a bit of hot water,” he confesses. Then there was his criticism of President Mbeki’s reluctance to battle the scourge of Aids and of the policies that have propped up Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. ”My heart aches because I had the highest regard for President Mugabe. He was the brightest star in our firmament. It is unbelievable what he continues to do to destroy a country we were so proud of,” he says.
But he insists his criticisms are his effort to hold South Africa true to the selfless heroes of the battle against apartheid. ”In the struggle, people overwhelmingly were altruistic. They were clear they were striving not to subjugate anybody but to throw off the shackles of oppression and injustice, to usher in a new age of freedom for everyone.
”I naively believed that come liberation these ideals and attitudes would automatically be transferred to how you operated in the new dispensation. And there’s no question at all, it is a very disillusioning moment when you discover that we jettisoned very, very quickly those high ideals and this sense that you were there for the sake of a struggle and not for your own aggrandisement. The most devastating thing is discovering that we are ordinary, we are so human. We have succumbed to the same kind of temptations. We are not a special breed. We have feet of clay.”
Weary and vexed as he is over such issues as corruption, crime and Aids, Tutu still raises a ringingly optimistic view of his nation’s future.
”We are regarded with awe and admiration for showing the world that it is possible for those who had been involved in bloody conflict to evolve into comrades; to undergo the metamorphosis of the repulsive caterpillar into the gorgeous butterfly by opting for the path of forgiveness and reconciliation instead of retaliation, retribution and revenge. Let us become what we are, the rainbow people of the God, proud of our diversity, celebrating our differences that make not for separation and alienation but for a gloriously rich unity.” – Guardian Unlimited Â