The late Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, who died in Cape Town on Sunday was a household name not only in South Africa but around the world thanks to his freedom fighter role which transcended his pulpit.
Tutu was born in 1931 in the mining town of Klerksdorp, some 170 kilometres to the west of Johannesburg.
Tutu’s family joined the Anglican Church in 1947 and that same year Tutu fell ill with tuberculosis while studying at a secondary school near Sophiatown, Johannesburg.
He befriended a priest and served in his church after recovering from illness in the same year.
The white National Party launched apartheid in the run-up to the 1948 national elections.
It won popular support among white voters-only who wanted to maintain their dominance over the black majority.
And in 1955, Tutu married Nomalizo Leah Shenxane and began teaching at a high school in Johannesburg where his father was the headmaster.
He quit the teaching job three years later, saying he did not want to be part of a teaching system that promoted inequality against black students.
Tutu turned to the priesthood, and in 1962 he moved to Britain to study theology at King’s College London.
Returning home in 1966, he started teaching theology at a seminary in the Eastern Cape province. At this time, his views against apartheid became known.
In 1975, Tutu became the first black Anglican Dean of Johannesburg, and in 1980 became the general secretary of the South African Council of Churches.
This was the period he led a delegation of church leaders to a meeting with Prime Minister PW Botha, urging him to end apartheid.
Although nothing came of the meeting, it was a historical moment where a black leader confronted a senior white government official. And an angry Botha government were left with no choice but to confiscate Tutu’s passport, thereby effectively barring him from travelling abroad.
In 1984 Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to bring about the end of white minority rule, and a year later he became the first black Bishop of Johannesburg.
This was the time he publicly endorsed an international economic boycott of South Africa – and civil disobedience as a way of dismantling apartheid.
In 1986 Tutu became the first black person appointed as Bishop of Cape Town and head of the Anglican Church of the Province of Southern Africa.
With other church leaders, he mediated conflicts between black protesters and government security forces in the country.
Four years later, in 1990, a new man in the State House by the name of President FW de Klerk unbanned the main liberation movement, the African National Congress (ANC), and announced plans to free anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela from prison after 27 years of incarceration.
A year after the release of Mandela, apartheid laws and racist restrictions were repealed and power-sharing talks started between the state and 16 anti-apartheid groups.
In 1994, after Mandela swept to power at the helm of the ANC in the country’s first democratic elections, Tutu coined the term “Rainbow Nation” to describe the coming together of various races in post-apartheid South Africa.
Mandela used that phrase, Rainbow Nation, in his inauguration speech at the Union Buildings, the seat of the South African government.
That same year Mandela asked Tutu to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was set up to listen to, record, and in some cases grant amnesty to perpetrators of human right violations under apartheid.
Tutu retired from the church to focus solely on the commission in 1996, and continued his activism, advocating for equality and reconciliation. He was later named Archbishop Emeritus.
A year later he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He has since been hospitalised multiple times to treat recurring infections.
The Dalai Lama inaugurated the annual Desmond Tutu International Peace Lecture but did so via satellite link after the South African government denied the Tibetan spiritual leader a visa to attend in 2011.
No doubt Pretoria denied him the entrance visa due to China’s sensitivities to Dalai Lama’s presence in the country. China is one of South Africa’s biggest traders.
In 2013 Tutu made outspoken comments about the ANC. He said he would no longer vote for the party because it had “done a bad job addressing inequality, violence and corruption.”
Dubbed “the moral compass of the nation”, Tutu declared his support for gay rights, saying he would never “worship a God who is homophobic” in 2013.
In 2021, a frail-looking Tutu was wheeled into his former parish at St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town, which used to be a safe haven for anti-apartheid activists, for a special thanksgiving service marking his 90th birthday.
On 26 December 2021 Tutu died in Cape Town, aged 90 and has received fitting tributes to many in his country and beyond including President Cyril Ramaphosa and UK’s Queen Elizabeth.
NM/jn/APA