Bishop Tutu Calls for a Return to Human Rights

Desmond Tutu is not a reticent man. This is
unsurprising-as a religious leader and one of the foremost human
rights advocates of the last 30 years, he has given endless
speeches, talks, and interviews, in addition to writing seven books
and countless sermons and essays. What is perhaps a little
surprising, however, is his unflagging good cheer; recently he
spoke with me from 6,000 miles away in gray Belfast, and yet it
felt as though at any moment he might reach across the Atlantic,
grab me by the shoulder, and shake some sense into me.

Tutu was born in 1931 in Klerksdorp, in the South African state
of Transvaal. Though early in life he wanted to be a doctor, his
family could not afford a medical education, and so Tutu followed
his father into teaching. After graduating in 1954 from the
University of South Africa, he took a job as a high school
instructor in Johannesburg; he resigned after just three years in
protest of the newly instituted Bantu Education Act, an apartheid
law that discriminated against black students. Tutu began to study
theology and was ordained an Anglican priest in 1960. After a
couple of years of further study in England, during which he earned
a master’s degree in theology, Tutu returned to South Africa to
teach that subject. In 1975 he was appointed Dean of St. Mary’s
Cathedral in Johannesburg, the first black to hold that position.
After a two-year sojourn as Bishop of Lesotho, from 1976 to 1978,
Tutu became the first black secretary general of the South African
Council of Churches.

It was in this capacity that Tutu entered, in the early 1980s,
onto the world’s stage. He began writing and lecturing against
apartheid, which he denounced as “evil and un-Christian.” The
eloquence and equanimity with which he espoused nonviolent
resistance to that racist institution brought him increasing renown
both in and out of South Africa, and in 1984 he was awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. But Tutu’s contributions to
South Africa did not end with apartheid’s fall in 1994; he went on
to head the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an extraordinary
and widely lauded panel that investigated human rights abuses,
provided victim support, and granted amnesty to human rights
violators. Nothing like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had
been seen before; it set a global model for countries trying to
come to terms with legacies of political violence.