Desmond Tutu

Chapter 1 · The Priest Who Raised His Hat

A township childhood and twenty months in a tuberculosis ward

1931 – 1955 · Klerksdorp · Johannesburg

Desmond Mpilo Tutu was born on 7 October 1931 in Klerksdorp in the Transvaal. His father was a teacher, his mother worked as a domestic servant and later as a cook at a school for the blind. The family moved to Johannesburg when he was twelve.

He told one story more often than any other. Walking with his mother, he saw a tall white man in a priest's cassock raise his hat to her — a Black domestic worker — as they passed. The priest was Trevor Huddleston, an Anglican monk who worked in Sophiatown and became a fierce opponent of apartheid. Tutu said the gesture astonished him and stayed with him for the rest of his life.

At fourteen he contracted tuberculosis and spent around twenty months in hospital. Huddleston visited him almost every week. Tutu later said the illness taught him patience and gave him a great deal of time to read.

He wanted to be a doctor and was accepted to study medicine, but the family could not raise the fees. He trained as a teacher instead and taught for three years.

In 1953 the government passed the Bantu Education Act, deliberately designed to give Black children a limited education fitting them only for subordinate work — its architect said openly that there was no place for the Bantu above certain forms of labour. Tutu resigned in protest rather than teach it. Looking for another way to serve, he entered the Anglican priesthood and was ordained in 1961.

Why this matters

Tutu's route to the priesthood came from refusing to deliver an education system designed to limit Black children — a political act before it was a religious vocation.

You have met the young man before the collar. What would you ask him?

Ask Desmond

• “Why did the priest raising his hat matter so much?”
• “What did twenty months in hospital give you?”
• “Why did you resign over Bantu Education?”
• “Would you rather have been a doctor?”
• “What did apartheid mean day to day for your family?”

Chapter 2 · Speaking When Others Could Not

A letter to the prime minister, weeks before Soweto

1966 – 1984 · London · Lesotho · Johannesburg

Tutu studied theology in London from 1962 to 1966, and later said that living in a country where he did not have to carry a pass or step off the pavement changed what he thought was normal. Returning to South Africa meant relearning humiliation.

In 1975 he became the first Black Dean of Johannesburg. In May 1976 he wrote to Prime Minister John Vorster warning that Black frustration was reaching a point of explosion and pleading for change. Vorster dismissed it as political propaganda. Six weeks later police opened fire on schoolchildren protesting compulsory teaching in Afrikaans, and the Soweto uprising began.

From 1978 he was General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, and the position made him the most prominent anti-apartheid voice inside the country. The ANC was banned, Mandela was imprisoned, and the leadership was in exile or under restriction. A cleric was harder to silence.

He used it. He campaigned internationally for economic sanctions and disinvestment, arguing that pressure from outside was the alternative to a bloodbath. The government confiscated his passport twice and threatened him repeatedly.

He was equally forceful about violence within the movement. In July 1985, at a funeral in Duduza, he pushed into a crowd that had set upon a man accused of being a police informer, physically shielded him, and got him out alive. He denounced 'necklacing' — killing suspected collaborators by placing a burning tyre around them — as something that would destroy the movement's moral case.

He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.

Why this matters

Tutu's argument for sanctions was made at personal risk and against the position of the South African government and several Western leaders, and it became one of the most effective external pressures on apartheid.

You have the years of speaking out. What would you ask him?

Ask Desmond

• “What did you warn Vorster about in 1976?”
• “Why did you call for sanctions when they would hurt Black workers too?”
• “Why did you intervene to save an accused informer?”
• “What did being a priest protect you from?”
• “How did living in London change what you would accept?”

Chapter 3 · The Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Amnesty in exchange for the whole truth

1995 – 1998 · Cape Town · East London

After the 1994 election, Mandela appointed Tutu to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Its design was a deliberate third way between the Nuremberg model of prosecuting the defeated and a blanket amnesty that would bury everything.

The bargain was this: individuals who applied for amnesty had to make full disclosure of politically motivated crimes in public, and could be refused if they concealed anything or if the act was disproportionate. Victims and families were given hearings, broadcast nationally, at which they described what had been done to them and often, for the first time, learned where bodies were buried.

Over seven thousand amnesty applications were received; around a tenth were granted. More than twenty thousand statements from victims were taken.

Tutu ran the hearings in a way no lawyer would have. He opened with prayer, and on the first day he put his head on the table and wept openly while a witness described his torture. Critics said it compromised the commission's judicial character. Tutu argued that a country cannot process that kind of testimony as though it were an administrative process.

His framing was the southern African concept of *ubuntu* — that a person is a person through other people, that humanity is bound together, and that the perpetrator is dehumanised by the act as well as the victim. Restoring the community, on this view, requires the truth to be told publicly rather than requiring punishment.

The criticisms are serious and were made at the time: killers walked free, reparations to victims were minimal and slow, and many families felt the exchange was made on their behalf without their consent.

“My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.”

— Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness, 1999

Why this matters

The South African commission became the model for transitional justice worldwide, and the argument about whether truth without punishment is justice has been repeated in every country that has copied it.

You have the commission. What would you ask him?

Ask Desmond

• “Why offer amnesty rather than prosecute?”
• “What does ubuntu mean, and how did it shape the hearings?”
• “Why did you weep in public during testimony?”
• “What do you say to families who got no justice?”
• “Can there be forgiveness without punishment?”

Chapter 4 · Criticising the New South Africa

Turning on the government he helped create

1998 – 2015 · Cape Town · Johannesburg

Tutu had coined the phrase Rainbow Nation to describe the new South Africa, and he spent the following two decades pointing out how far it fell short.

He attacked President Thabo Mbeki's denial of the link between HIV and AIDS, which is estimated to have cost hundreds of thousands of lives through delayed treatment. He condemned the 1999 arms deal and the corruption around it. He criticised the growth of a politically connected Black elite while township poverty persisted, saying that the gravy train had merely stopped long enough for some to get on board.

He was blunter still about President Jacob Zuma, and in 2013 said publicly that he would not vote for the ANC, the party of the liberation he had campaigned for.

He was equally willing to be unpopular within his own church. He was one of the earliest senior Anglican leaders to campaign for the full inclusion of gay and lesbian people, comparing homophobia to racism and saying in 2013 that he would not worship a God who is homophobic and would rather go to the other place. His daughter Mpho, an ordained priest, later relinquished her licence to officiate in South Africa after marrying a woman.

He campaigned for the right to assisted dying, on the grounds that a dignified death is part of a dignified life.

His criticism of Israeli policy in the occupied territories, and his use of the word apartheid to describe it, drew sustained condemnation and accusations of unfairness, which he rejected while continuing to condemn antisemitism explicitly.

Why this matters

Tutu's willingness to attack the liberation movement he had supported established a model of the moral critic who does not become a partisan of the new order.

You have the critic in the new country. What would you ask him?

Ask Desmond

• “Why did you say you would not vote ANC?”
• “What did Mbeki's AIDS policy cost?”
• “Why did you compare homophobia to racism?”
• “Why use the word apartheid about Israel and Palestine?”
• “Why campaign for assisted dying?”

Chapter 5 · The Arc

Laughter, anger, and a simple funeral

2010 – 2021 and after · Cape Town

Tutu retired from public life in 2010, though not completely. He remained part of the Elders, a group of former leaders convened by Mandela to intervene in conflicts, and continued to speak on climate change, arguing that it should be fought with the same tools that beat apartheid — divestment, boycott and public pressure on those who profit.

He was, by every account, one of the funniest people in any room. His laugh was famous, he danced at services, and he used comedy deliberately to disarm hostility. He also said, more than once, that he was not naturally brave, that he was frightened often, and that he simply could not bear to keep quiet.

He was treated for prostate cancer from 1997 and lived with it for over two decades.

He died on 26 December 2021, aged ninety. His funeral instructions were characteristically specific: the cheapest available coffin, a plain pine box, no lavish spending, and donations rather than flowers. He was aquamated — a water-based alternative to cremation chosen for environmental reasons — and his ashes were interred at St George's Cathedral in Cape Town, the church from whose pulpit he had denounced the apartheid state.

His theological position, stated repeatedly, was that God is not neutral: that God takes the side of the oppressed, that oppression is blasphemy because every person carries the divine image, and — the line he used most often against apartheid's supporters — that they had already lost, and should come and join the winning side.

Why this matters

Tutu demonstrated that religious authority could be used as a political instrument against a state that claimed Christian legitimacy for itself — the argument that most unsettled apartheid's defenders.

You have the whole arc. What would you ask him at the end?

Ask Desmond

• “Why did you use humour so deliberately?”
• “Were you ever frightened?”
• “What did you mean by telling the government they had already lost?”
• “Why did you want such a simple funeral?”
• “Can the methods that beat apartheid work on climate change?”

What Desmond changed

Tutu was the most visible domestic opponent of apartheid during the years its leaders were imprisoned or banned, and his campaign for international sanctions contributed materially to the regime's isolation. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission he chaired became the model for transitional justice processes worldwide.

A debate that continues

The commission remains contested: supporters argue it prevented a cycle of revenge and produced an unmatched public record, while critics hold that it allowed perpetrators to escape justice and delivered almost nothing to victims in reparations.

Keep exploring — ask Desmond

• “How do you keep speaking when the state is listening?”
• “What did the hearings teach you about human beings?”
• “What has South Africa still not confronted?”

Related lives

• Nelson Mandela — Madiba · Father of the Nation
• Martin Luther King Jr. — Reverend · Nobel Laureate · Prophet
• Mahatma Gandhi — Mahatma · Father of the Indian Nation

Related themes

Apartheid and South Africa · Transitional justice · Religion and political resistance