South African Anglican Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu died Dec. 26 at age 90. Tutu often seemed a man of contradictions. He was a political leader who was staunchly nonpartisan, a religious leader who rejected dogmatism, a man clothed in the regalia of the powerful who never stopped being critical of those in power.
But the man called South Africa’s moral compass was consistent in his commitment to the indivisibility of humanity, encompassed in the philosophy of “ubuntu.” Ubuntu, which Tutu explained with the phrase “my humanity is bound up in yours,” is a radical commitment to human interdependence and complementarity. While the idea of ubuntu has sometimes been deployed as an easy platitude, Tutu took it as provocation in his broad fight for justice. Forever a gadfly, Tutu said of his own activism, “I wish I could shut up, but I can’t, and I won’t.”
A life of protest
Tutu began his professional life as a teacher with his wife, Leah. Both resigned in protest over the 1953 Bantu Education Act’s provisions for primarily vocational training for Black African students. He then studied to become an Anglican priest. Tutu entered public political life through his service as general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, which sent a delegation to then-Prime Minister P.W. Botha to urge an end to the apartheid system.
Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his leadership in the anti-apartheid struggle. He stood apart from other anti-apartheid leaders in his non-affiliation with any particular movement or party. Unlike his religious counterparts who joined the struggle against minority rule elsewhere in southern Africa, such as Abel Muzorewa of Zimbabwe, Tutu never pursued political office, saying he was “not tough enough for the hurly-burly of politics” and insisting he was first and foremost a religious leader.
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Justice and reconciliation
Tutu was a leader, both inside the church and outside it. He served as chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which was tasked with writing a report detailing the effects of apartheid. In this role, he is credited with coining the moniker “rainbow nation” to describe South Africa, both because of its unifying symbolism and because of its resonance within the Christian religion. Tutu stood at the heart of what I argue is the contradiction of the South African transition from apartheid to multiracial democracy: Was the moment a break from the past, or a reckoning with it? In championing both the rainbow symbolism as a new covenant after disaster and the TRC’s historical recording of the violence of both apartheid and the struggle against it, he took seriously the idea that both could be true in a way that few other leaders of any political faction did.
During TRC proceedings, he sparred with both apartheid and anti-apartheid leaders in pursuit of a full reckoning. He argued that the evils of apartheid were cross-racial, both in violence against the majority population of Black, Colored (a formal category under apartheid) and Indian South Africans and in the damage to the White population, in stunting their morality and humanity. “Apartheid damaged us all,” he said, “not a single one of us has escaped.”
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None of this is to say, however, that Tutu was neutral on questions of racial justice and rights. In 2011, he called for a wealth tax on all White South Africans to redress the unequal economic legacies of apartheid. He condemned both xenophobic and gender-based violence in South Africa as “national emergencies.” He was a committed advocate for LGBTQ+ communities, famously saying that he would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven. This stance earned him criticism from many southern African leaders, including Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. He was an outspoken critic of the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians.
Tutu also fiercely criticized the ruling African National Congress (ANC). In his 2004 address for the Mandela Annual Lecture, Tutu said:
In 2013, Tutu wrote an editorial in the South African Mail and Guardian in which he stated that he could no longer vote for the ANC as a matter of conscience because although it had been a liberation movement, once in power, it allowed corruption and had failed to make progress on racial and economic inequality or violence. His autonomy from the ANC again made him stand out from his generation of anti-apartheid activists, many of whom have become increasingly intolerant of criticism of the former liberation movement.
Later that year, these statements led to Tutu being left off the official guest list for the funeral of his friend, former president and ANC partisan Nelson Mandela. (Tutu ultimately agreed to attend after a public outcry over the snub.) Undeterred, he continued to criticize the government for the rest of his life. Despite the rift, many ANC officials have issued laudatory statements for the former archbishop upon his passing. Others, especially from factions of the ruling party associated with former president Jacob Zuma, have taken to social media to criticize Tutu.
Arch, as Tutu is affectionately called by many South Africans, will be remembered for many things: his convictions, his public displays of grief at the pain of his country, his independence of thought and his infectious laughter. Tutu’s life work defied simple characterizations, but his legacy is his radical commitment to the indivisibility of humanity and the work needed to achieve that vision.
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Carolyn E. Holmes is an assistant professor of political science and public administration at Mississippi State University and author of The Black and White Rainbow (University of Michigan Press, 2020).
