Archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu
Archbishop Emeritus and Nobel Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu turned 90 on 7 October. His version of Christianity allows us no place to hide, particularly when it comes to forgiveness, something he has found at great personal cost. Writer and author *Michael McGirr pays tribute to one of the great spirits of our age.
Desmond Mpilo Tutu retired as Archbishop of Cape Town as long ago as 1996. But his message has far from aged. Tutu has always had a disturbing gift for language. He once said ‘Europe became rich because it exploited Africa’, a statement, like many he has made, which doesn’t bend the knee to anyone. He said ‘If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.’ His version of Christianity allows us no place to hide.
He has a wonderful comic skill and full-bodied laughter is his signature. He also has an ability to touch people because of the way in which he himself has always been vulnerable. In 2014 he and his daughter Mpho (also an Anglican priest) published The Book of Forgiving: the fourfold path for healing ourselves and our world. This is an area in which any reader might expect Tutu to speak with authority. After all, from 1995 until 2000, he was the chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a position from which he saw how tangled and complicated forgiveness can be.
But Tutu writes about forgiveness with no podium, only with deep humility. He speaks as one who still has much to understand and who hopes for the grace to be open to the light ahead of him more than the darkness behind. He is a wonderful teacher because he is a passionate learner. He talks about the difference between forgiveness and weakness. In fact, they are opposites. He also explains that forgiveness is not a simple story with a beginning, middle and end. It is often rather more like putting a puzzle together.
Desmond Tutu is confronting when he speaks about his own need for forgiveness. In particular, he tells the story of making the decision in 1975 to return to South Africa to take up a position as Dean of St Mary’s Cathedral in Johannesburg. For three years, he had been working in London in the field of Theological Education for the World Council of Churches. His wife, Leah, and their four children had enjoyed the freedom England offered. ‘It was an oasis from the constant prejudice, violence and chaos we had come to know at home.’ Indeed, Tutu had studied and ministered in England in the early sixties so the country felt like home.
Yet in 1975 Tutu felt drawn to a prominent position that he would be the first black person to fill. It would enable him to continue the outspoken work for which he was already known; indeed, it would expose him to the attention of an abusive regime. Most of us would admire the courageous step Tutu took and the sacrifice he was prepared to make. Yet after forty or more years, he sees the decision as one that requires the forgiveness of his family who had to endure a much tougher life because of it. ‘It was one of the times that most strained our marriage.’ His children now had to make a long and uncomfortable journey to boarding school in Swaziland because Tutu was unable to accept the injustice and absurdity of the Bantu education system then in force. Earlier in his life, Tutu had left the teaching profession to face an uncertain future rather than be complicit in a method of education which was a disguised form of imprisonment.
Tutu has written about the hard lessons he learnt from his father, a school teacher. Tutu’s parents were from different language and cultural groups: his father was a Xhosa-speaker and his mother a Motswana. The family was forced to relocate on many occasions. The eldest child died in infancy and young Desmond contracted polio which could well have cost his life as well. Such struggles may have laid bedrock beneath the boy’s character. Yet Tutu recalls other struggles: ‘There were so many nights when I, as a young boy, had to watch helplessly as my father physically and verbally abused my mother.’ It’s significant that Desmond’s path to ministry was partly initiated by seeing the respect a white man showed his mother. That man was Anglican priest Fr Trevor Huddleston.
His father was a drinker and Tutu, as an old man, can still recall the fear he saw in the eyes of his mother, a woman who worked long hours as a cook and cleaner. Tutu believes that his journey to forgive his father is not about condoning violence or injustice. It is about his own need for freedom. Those who are unable to forgive continue to be bound by the perpetrator. In The Book of Forgiving he and Mpho write: ‘Without forgiveness, we remain tethered to the person who harmed us. We are bound to the chains of bitterness, tied together, trapped. Until we forgive the person who harmed us, that person will hold the keys to our happiness, that person will be our jailor. When we forgive, we take back control of our own fate and our feelings. We become our own liberator.’
It’s this belief that Tutu brought to his ground-breaking work as chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The Commission was often criticised, especially because of its willingness to offer amnesty even to murderers who told the full story of what they did. Steve Biko’s family thought this was insufficient. Others labelled it the ‘Kleenex Commission,’ suggesting that any crime could be paid for in tears. One of Mandela’s biographers, Martin Meredith, has roundly attacked Tutu for the leniency he showed in dealing at the Commission with Mandela’s estranged wife, Winnie, whose tragedy was deeply troubling.
Nevertheless, Desmond Tutu stuck to his beliefs which were nothing if not generous. He did not want the Commission to be one-sided as the Nuremberg Trials had been, so members of the African national Congress (ANC) were also summoned. He showed understanding of the situation of white people who claimed not to have had much knowledge of what was really happening during the apartheid years. He mourns the decisions made by white policemen who experienced nightmares for years after taking part in the violent repression of blacks. He sees a modicum of integrity in the arguments of white lawyers that the law was paramount even if it was a law they did not themselves support. In his account of the Commission, No Future Without Forgiveness, Tutu makes a simple but powerful case against his detractors. He wanted to belong to a nation of survivors, not victims:
There may indeed have been moments when God may have regretted creating us. But I am certain that there have been many more times when God has looked and seen all these wonderful people who have shone in the dark night of evil and torture and abuses and suffering; shone as they demonstrated their nobility of spirit, their magnanimity as they readily forgive … It has filled people with new hope that despair, darkness, anger, resentment and hatred would not have the last word; hope that a new situation could come about when enemies might become friends again, when that dehumanised perpetrator might be helped to recover his lost humanity… God believes in us. God depends on us to help make this world all that God wants it to be.
In retirement, Archbishop Tutu continues to lend his voice to the cause of justice in places as far apart as Ireland, Australia and the Solomons. He continues to speak with passion about God. He says ‘we humans can tolerate suffering, but we cannot tolerate meaninglessness.’
*Michael McGirr works for Caritas Australia. His new book, Ideas to Save Your Life, will be published in November by Text.
This article is adapted from Heroes of the Faith – 55 men and women whose lives have proclaimed Christ and inspired the faith of others, edited by Roland Ashby. (Published by Garratt Publishing). The book is a compilation of articles which first appeared in The Melbourne Anglican.