Archbishop Desmond Tutu, South Africa’s voice of conscience during apartheid, is once more at odds with authority over the moral direction of the country as he approaches his 75th birthday.
Ten years on from his retirement as archbishop of Cape Town, the indefatigable cleric has lost none of his ability to make those in power squirm as he points out their shortcomings.
The great and the good of the multiracial South Africa will be on hand to fete the Nobel laureate at a lavish birthday party in Johannesburg on Saturday.
But Tutu appears in no danger of embracing the establishment in his twilight years, and instead continues to shine the spotlight on the mounting problems facing the country 12 years after the end of white rule.
”What has happened to us?” Tutu asked last month of modern-day South Africa, the country for which he coined the phrase ”Rainbow Nation”.
”Perhaps we did not realise just how apartheid has damaged us so that we seem to have lost our sense of right and wrong. We have achieved our goal. We are free … We have an obligation to obey the laws made by our own legislators. We should be dignified, law abiding citizens … proud of our freedom won at such great cost,”
he said.
Tutu has clashed frequently with the governments of Nelson Mandela and his successor Thabo Mbeki.
He has repeatedly questioned the response to the HIV/Aids pandemic and what he dubbed ”a culture of sycophancy” towards Mbeki, leading the president to snap back and brand him a populist.
ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma was declared unfit to lead the country by Tutu following his admission during a rape trial that he had unprotected sex with an HIV-positive family friend half his age.
Foreign leaders have also been on the receiving end of Tutu’s sharp tongue, including Robert Mugabe who was called a ”caricature of an African dictator”. The veteran Zimbabwean president in turn called him ”an evil little bishop”.
International recognition of Tutu’s contribution to the struggle against apartheid — which he had described as ”evil and unchristian” — came in 1984 when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Born into a poor family, Tutu dreamed of becoming a doctor specialising in tuberculosis research, according to an authorised biography by his former press secretary John Allen.
Tutu suffered from the disease as a child, and also had polio.
His family could not afford to send him to university, and he instead trained as a teacher on a government scholarship.
After a short stint as a teacher, his anger over the inferior education offered to black children prompted him to become a priest.
”It wasn’t for very highfalutin ideals that I became a priest,” Allen’s book quotes him as saying. ”It was almost by default.
”I couldn’t go to medical school … The easiest option was going to theological college.”
Tutu became the first black dean of St Mary’s Cathedral in Johannesburg, later serving as Bishop of Lesotho and then as the first black general secretary of the South African Council of Churches.
He became a familiar figure around the world as both an outspoken critic of the government and as a frequent leader of protests in the townships.
He became Archbishop of Cape Town in 1986, placing him at the head of the Anglican Church in South Africa.
After the country’s first multiracial elections in 1994, Mandela appointed Tutu to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which sought to unearth the truth about apartheid-era human rights violations.
Tutu was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1997, and was treated again in 1999 and this year.
Allen describes Tutu as a ”rabble-rouser for peace”, saying he suffered from a ”compulsion … to speak out when he believed people to be suffering as a result of injustice, no matter how unpopular it made him”. – Sapa-AFP