Desmond Tutu (1931-2021): Spirituality, Revolution and Reconciliation

The passing of former Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town,  Desmond Tutu, on December 26, 2021, marks another milestone in the history of the ecumenical “Church Struggle” against apartheid in South Africa.[1] This era, starting somewhere in the late 1950s and gaining momentum in the 1960s, reaching its peak in the heady days of the 1980s as a broad coalition of community organizations, trade unions and religious organizations came together, broadly working in parallel with – at times uneasily aligned to – established liberation movements like the African National Congress (ANC), the  Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and the  South African Communist Party (SACP), finally forced the National Party government to negotiate a transition to democracy, attained in 1994.

Some key figures, like Catholic archbishop of Durban, Denis Hurley OMI, and Dutch Reformed theologian C. F. Beyers Naudé, have died; others like Reformed pastor Allan Boesak and the Dominican Albert Nolan are now retired or semi-retired. What has passed is a certain era where Christian churches together took a principled stand , working with people of all faiths and none, and helped to bring down an evil regime and give birth to a democratic state.

One of the key figures in this was Desmond Tutu,[2] key because in many respects his convictions and personality crossed Protestant and Catholic denominational boundaries, moving between traditional and liberation theologies, between a revolutionary commitment and a reconciling spirit. Revolution and reconciliation in Tutu were rooted in his theology (Biblical, Anglican, Black and African), a theology embedded in his spirituality, itself a product of his remarkable life. This article, in the form of  a mini-biography, will try to explore the connections between these strands and Tutu’s life.[3]

The education of Desmond Tutu

Born in Klerksdorp, a town west of Johannesburg in what was then the Transvaal Province, on October 7, 1931, Desmond Mpilo Tutu was initially baptized as a Methodist. He embraced Anglicanism in his youth, largely under the influence of a remarkable order of British Anglican monks, the Community of the Resurrection.[4] A 19th century outcome of the Anglo-Catholic revival, the order founded by Bishop Charles Gore combined Benedictine-style monasticism, emphatically  Catholic worship and theology, and a commitment to social justice (sometimes described as “sacramental socialism” or Christian socialism), whether in urban British slums or the wider British Empire.

Tutu in his teens was particularly close to Father, later Archbishop, Trevor Huddleston, a member of the Community of the Resurrection and a fearless campaigner against apartheid from the 1940s onward. Tutu imbibed this High Anglicanism, deep reverence for the sacraments, particularly the Mass,[5] as well as a deeply incarnational theology that saw every  person, regardless of race, class or gender as an  imago Dei and beloved of God. This may be seen as the roots of his life’s spirituality, one that incidentally made him warmly disposed to Roman Catholics in particular.

On finishing school and unable to afford university fees to study medicine, Desmond Tutu trained as a teacher at a state teacher-training college in Pretoria, for which he had to work to pay  back the three year bursary. While teaching in Johannesburg, he completed a B.A. degree by correspondence at the University of South Africa, and married Nomalizo Leah Shenxane in 1955, all the while deeply involved in his Anglican parish. This involvement led him to consider a priestly vocation. Feeling called to priesthood, and accepted by the Anglican Diocese of Johannesburg, he trained at St Peter’s Theological College in Rosettenville, Johannesburg, a seminary run by the same Community of the Resurrection  which he had  known since childhood.

Ordained deacon in 1959, priested at St Mary’s Cathedral in 1960, after two years of parish ministry he gained a scholarship from the World Council of Churches’ Theological Education Fund to study theology at King’s College, University of London. Between 1962 and 1966, he completed Honors  and Masters Degrees in theology. Kings in the 1960s was famous for its middle of the road Anglican theology, one that was deeply rooted in historical-critical biblical studies, patristics, and (perhaps significantly) a growing openness to interfaith dialogue. In college worship it was also “high church.” Tutu often would sit in its Chapel, contemplating the reserved Blessed Sacrament, a practice already instilled in him, and one that would continue through his life. During this time he also served as curate in a number of parishes. It was here, some biographers claim[6] that he lost whatever apartheid-induced deference or bitterness toward white people he may have imbibed during his youth. His work in parishes also brought him into contact with English experiments in ecumenism, particularly between Anglicans, Catholics and Methodists. It also made him convinced that apartheid was a Christian moral issue, a denial of the humanity of persons created and loved by God. He concluded that he as a Christian and a priest could not but resist it.

Supporting ‘Black Theology’

Returning to South Africa he took up a lecturing post at the ecumenical Federal Theological Seminary in the Eastern Cape Province in 1967.[7] FedSem, as it was called, was an ecumenical experiment, a union of Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregationalist seminaries, and a kind of oasis of non-segregated communal living in South Africa. It was not a place to win the National Party regime’s favor, and was constantly under observation. It was a time of theological and political ferment – the Black Consciousness Movement was growing and its religious dimension – “black theology” – was spreading throughout  the seminaries. Black Consciousness,[8] led by a charismatic former medical student (and incidentally an Anglican layperson) Stephen Biko, proclaimed that black South Africans (Africans, Indians and Coloreds[9]) needed to build up a sense of solidarity and pride, with a view to ultimately freeing themselves from white domination. Because such domination was mental as much as political and economic, even when interacting with anti-apartheid white people, part of this “freeing of self” meant temporary separation from even liberal white organizations. Black Theology applied this to theology. Just  as from the 1950s onwards African theology had tried in the postcolonial era to see how Christ spoke specifically to Africans, black theology in South Africa explored how Christ could be liberating to the oppressed. Tutu, who knew many fellow Anglican clergy in this movement, broadly welcomed black theology, though unlike some he saw it as an expression, or a “subset,” of the wider African Theology movement that was sweeping through postcolonial Africa. 

In 1970, Tutu moved with his family to Roma, Lesotho, to teach theology at what would become the National University of Lesotho. Soon afterward, he accepted a post with the same international Theological Education Fund that had funded his studies in England. Based again in Britain, his job as director of the Africa section of the Fund took him around the continent. He saw the desire for independence, experienced African Theology firsthand, and also saw how even in those heady days, unpleasant signs of authoritarianism and corruption were emerging in some countries.  

 Ecclesial missions

This role with the fund (1972-1975) ended when he was appointed Dean of St Mary’s Anglican Cathedral in Johannesburg, the first black incumbent of one of the most important positions in Southern African Anglicanism. In early 1976 he was nominated bishop of Lesotho. Shortly after accepting the position, he warned the  then Prime Minister John Vorster that the situation in the black community was volatile and that violence might erupt if the state did not start to dismantle apartheid.[10] His tone was conciliatory and tried to appeal to Vorster’s Christian faith and his Afrikaner volk’s cultural experience of being oppressed by British rule in the past, to convince the government to move toward ending white supremacist rule. Significantly, his letter ends with St Francis of Assisi’s prayer for peace, which is an indication of another step in Tutu’s journey toward embracing a Franciscan spirituality while in Lesotho; he became in fact a member of the (lay) Anglican Third Order of the Society of St Francis. His appeal was ignored – and, as he had predicted, on June 16, 1976, the student uprising began in Soweto, near Johannesburg, spreading across the country until it was violently suppressed.

But Tutu’s tenure in Maseru, Lesotho, would not last long. Though he was thoroughly dedicated to his diocese and clergy, he was constantly in touch with what was going on in South Africa. When Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko was murdered in 1977 while detained without trial by the security police, he was the obvious choice to preach at the funeral. In this and subsequent memorials he declared: “God called Steve Biko to be his servant in South Africa – to speak up on behalf of God… a man of real reconciliation, truly an instrument of God’s peace, unshakeable in his commitment to the liberation of all South Africans, black and white.”[11]

In 1978 he was elected Secretary General of the South African Council of Churches (SACC), an organization of South African Protestant churches affiliated to the World Council of Churches. The SACC was one of the most vocal Christian voices of anti-apartheid opposition, working closely with the Catholic Church (which  would affiliate in the 1990s) and connected to grassroots resistance movements that had emerged out of Black Consciousness and the burgeoning black trade union movement of the 1970s.[12] These connections between the SACC and the Catholic Bishops Conference (SACBC) were in many respects complementary. The SACC had a loud voice, as befitted an organization that did not directly bind any of its affiliates to what it said. The SACBC tended to be less “noisy,” more reasoned in its language, but was expert at running youth and student organizations like the Young Christian Students (YCS) and Young Christian Workers (YCW) – both of them in practice ecumenical – that trained a generation of young people who later became leaders in civil society organizations and trade unions.[13] Desmond Tutu was an obvious choice to lead the SACC.  He was already  an outspoken opponent of the regime, yet also a voice calling for non-violence and negotiation, who also had  an understanding of  white fears concerning majority rule.

Tutu’s tenure at the SACC was also marked by a determination on his part that a spiritual (some might even say mystical) dimension should mark the lives of those working for it. He instituted for staff bible studies, daily prayers (including at times the Angelus at midday), retreats and a monthly staff Eucharist. Most notable for the SACC was the way he was forced to handle an attempt by the apartheid state to label it an “affected” (i.e. communist-infiltrated) organization, which if the state could prove was the case would lead to it being banned. Tutu’s responded strongly to attacks on the SACC by the government . Speaking on October 11, 1979, he observed, “We want to remind them [the State] of a few things. First of all, they must stop playing at being God…they are still just mere mortals. And we are tired of having threats leveled  against us. Why don’t they carry them out?… [Secondly, the] Church has been in existence for nearly 2000 years. Tyrants and others have acted against Christians during those years… Those tyrants  belong now to the flotsam and jetsam of forgotten history – and the Church of God remains… If they take the SACC and the Churches on, let them just know they are taking on the Church of Jesus Christ.”[14] Tutu faced down the apartheid state. And it backed off.

Central figure in the campaign against apartheid

With these and other similar examples of boldly taking on the state, Tutu became a global figure of opposition, campaigning for worldwide pressure to end apartheid, advocating economic sanctions as a means to force an increasingly stubborn regime to come to the negotiating table. Fierce as a biblical prophet, yet always open to the first signs of his enemies’ conversion and above all calling all to the negotiating table, this effort to establish  a way out of what many observers believed would end in a chaotic racial civil war led to his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. In his Nobel Lecture that December he observed: “There is no peace in Southern Africa. There is no peace because there is no justice. There can be no real peace and security until first justice is enjoyed  by all the inhabitants of that beautiful land. The Bible knows nothing about peace without justice, for that would be crying ‘peace, peace, where there is no peace.’ God’s Shalom, peace, inevitably involves  righteousness, justice, wholeness, fullness of life, participation in decision-making, goodness, laughter, joy, compassion, sharing and reconciliation. When will we learn that human beings are of infinite value because they have been created in the image of God, and that it is a blasphemy to treat them as if they were less than this and to do so ultimately recoils on those who do this? In dehumanizing others, they are themselves dehumanized. Perhaps oppression dehumanizes the oppressor as much as, if not more than, the oppressed. They need each other to become truly free, to become human. We can be human only in fellowship, in community, in koinonia, in peace. Let us work to be peacemakers, those given a wonderful share in Our Lord’s ministry of reconciliation. If we want peace, so we have been told, let us work for justice. Let us beat our swords into ploughshares.”[15] Tutu’s underlying theology, rooted in Scripture and the sense that all people are shaped in the  imago Dei, is summed up in the speech.

Archbishop of Cape Town

Desmond Tutu stepped down from the SACC when he was appointed Bishop of Johannesburg in 1985. This would last a year. In 1986, by a two thirds majority of votes from laity and clergy representatives in Cape Town and with the unanimous support of the Anglican bishops, he was appointed the first black archbishop of Cape Town, since 1847 the mother see of southern African Anglicanism.[16] Taking up this post, while refusing to get state permission to reside in a “white” area, he transformed the archdiocese. He encouraged consultative governance, created an Institute of Spirituality, and pressed on with his anti-apartheid activities. And each day he would start with morning Eucharist.

He was relieved when in 1990 the liberation movements were no longer subject to a ban , Nelson Mandela was released and the negotiations that would bring about South African democracy began. Mandela in fact spent his first night of freedom as a guest at Tutu’s residence in Cape Town. This was for Tutu  a sign that the public and political life he had lived for decades was coming to an end.

He did not  believe that any clergyperson should run for public office, or even be an active member of any political party. To the shock of some of his friends and to the ire of many activist clergy (Anglican and non-Anglican, many of whom considered him their archbishop too), he pushed through legislation prohibiting such activities throughout the Church in southern Africa, not just in his diocese! His reasoning was clear: in a politically divided society, where the local church was itself politically divided, a priest publicly identified with a party could not normally be a focus of parish unity. Some called this hypocrisy. After all, Mandela had been his guest – and they were friends. No-one doubted who Tutu voted for in the 1994 elections. Before that he had been clearly on the side of the “struggle,” which by the late 1980s was led by the ANC and the civic organizations closely tied to it. But Tutu never framed his activism in partisan terms, always framing his activities and speeches in terms that referred current events back to the Gospel and its values, against which any and all activities – even by those in the struggle – had to be judged. In the mid-1980s he had denounced the increase  in popular violence, including the practice of mobs murdering  blacks suspected of being  collaborators with apartheid. On one occasion he had weighed in at a funeral to save one such suspected collaborator  from being “necklaced.”[17]

Moreover, though he was close to Nelson Mandela, he was unafraid and unashamed to criticize Mandela when he, or successor presidents, or the ANC as a whole acted against the values that underpinned the new democracy. This included the party/government’s failures to serve the needs of the poor, as well as its increasing tendency to corruption and mismanagement.

After the 1994 freedom election, Tutu started to scale down his public role. He always felt that it had been thrust on him by circumstances not  of his choosing, or under his control. A new democratic order meant for him the much desired move out of politics, into a full ministry – one that would include speaking up for the Gospel if needed, but not (as had been the case) serving as a surrogate leader of the struggle against apartheid. In 1996, aged 65, he retired as archbishop; in a move unprecedented in southern African Anglican history, on retirement he was given a special title, “archbishop emeritus.” His plan was to move away from Cape Town for a while, possibly to spend time as a visiting professor overseas, to give his successor space.

Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

But it was not yet to be. Mandela asked him to render one last great service to the country  by chairing between 1996 and 1998 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.[18] The new government was caught up in dealing with the past. Collective amnesia – forgetting apartheid – was unthinkable; a Nuremberg-type tribunal was impossible, because of the negotiated settlement and transition, and the need not to provoke a potential post-liberation conflict. The solution was a truth commission, led by persons of integrity who were both clearly anti-apartheid to the core but not overtly tied to the new ruling ANC.

Tutu was the obvious choice, and he took to it with characteristic vigor. Though just the Chair with a diverse team, the conduct of the TRC, particularly the harrowing hearings about atrocities  that crossed racial and ideological divides, and the statistically less than frequent moments of forgiveness and reconciliation, bore the mark of Tutu. One Muslim observer called the process a secular sacrament of confession. Tutu would not have used such language explicitly but as the nation watched the hearings live on television few could doubt that something like a public confession was happening.

In his memoir of the events,[19] Tutu’s sense of the process and his particular agenda in it – not simply generating a true account of gross human rights atrocities but also trying to promote national healing through confession, repentance and forgiveness – is clear. Although exhausting and at times heartbreaking, Tutu believed that the TRC was the best way forward for South Africa, mainly out of his theological convictions: “There is a movement, not easily discernible, at the heart of things to reverse the awful centrifugal force of alienation, brokenness, division, hostility, and disharmony. God has set in motion a centripetal process, a moving towards the center, toward unity, harmony, goodness, peace and justice, a process that removes barriers…[Through Christ on the Cross] [Christ] with outflung arms, thrown out to clasp all, everyone, everything…None is an outsider, all are insiders, all belong. There are no aliens, all belong to one family, God’s family, the human family.”[20] This ultimately was what Desmond Tutu wanted the TRC to achieve. In truth it was a very mixed outcome, but one he considered worthwhile.

The TRC over, Tutu contemplated retirement. Yet despite health issues – he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1997 – he did not vanish from public life. In between medical treatments, he guest-lectured in United States universities, wrote extensively, spoke up whenever he believed that the hard won democracy in South Africa seemed under threat (in many cases from corrupt members of the government and the  ruling party) and became a vocal supporter of a wide variety of human rights causes, including Palestinian rights in Israel, the cause of his old friend the Dalai Lama and – controversially to many, including many in Africa – gay rights.

These commitments were not an attempt of a retired activist clergyman to find a new cause, but were to him a natural extension of his theological anthropology. Tutu’s God is all-loving, welcoming and inclusive of people regardless of race, sex or gender orientation. God accepts everyone as they are and to quote the title of one of his books we are “made for goodness,”[21] made to love and be loved regardless of what adjectives are placed before our  name. For these reasons he had earlier strongly supported women’s ordination. Though he officially announced that he was retiring from public life in 2010, he would continue to speak up for human rights causes – economic and gender justice, Palestinian rights, ecological sanity, among others  to the end.

Conclusion

What might one make of his life’s work? None of this was just being fashionable – it was rooted in his carefully thought out Anglican theology. His theology, quite unsystematic – a theology done ‘on the fly’ between services and rallies, public talks and debates, rather than some kind of Anglican summa – might well be described as a mixture of the deeply justice-oriented “sacramental socialism” of an Anglo-Catholici variety, the liberal Anglican insistence on right reason and commitment to a scientific worldview,[22] coupled  with the commitment to finding common ground (in a decidedly Anglican via media). All of this was infused with a spirituality rooted in Scripture, the Eucharist and the  other sacraments, and in sustained prayer.

Why might this matter to us as Latin or Eastern Rite Catholics? I use this form of expression  deliberately since Desmond Tutu would have called himself a Catholic too, in terms that ecumenists following the Second Vatican Council might call a spiritual but not formal communion with Rome. He got on well with his Catholic counterparts in Johannesburg and Cape Town and elsewhere, particularly Denis Hurley of Durban who was often the unofficial “face” of Catholic opposition to apartheid. They agreed on many things (political issues in particular), and agreed to disagree on some theological points. In many respects this was a reflection of the “struggle ecumenism” that marked the time of  apartheid, but sadly disappeared much sooner than apartheid’s legacy has.

Openness to enemies and friends, and to believers and unbelievers of all shades, marked Tutu’s ministry, together with  his deeply held trust in the goodness and victory of God: “The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ puts the issue beyond doubt: ultimately goodness and laughter and peace and compassion and gentleness and forgiveness and reconciliation will have the last word…”[23] Or as that great English mystic Julian of Norwich put it, “All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

DOI: La Civiltà Cattolica, En. Ed. Vol. 6, no.5 art. 1, 0522: 10.32009/22072446.0522.1

[1] . Cf. J. W de Gruchy – S. de Gruchy, The Church Struggle in South Africa, London, SCM, 2005; C. Villa-Vicencio, Trapped in Apartheid, Maryknoll NY, Orbis Books, 1988; P. Walshe, Prophetic Christianity and the Liberation Movement in South Africa, Pietermaritzburg, Cluster Publications, 1995.

[2] . Among the Tutu biographies, see S. du Boulay, Tutu: Voice of the Voiceless, London, Penguin 1989; J. Allen, Rabble-Rouser for Peace: The Authorised Biography of Desmond Tutu, London, Rider 2006; S. D. Gish, Desmond Tutu: A Biography, Westport, Greenwood Press, 2004.

[3] Parts of this article have appeared as an obituary in America magazine: “A South African Jesuit remembers Archbishop Desmond Tutu”, December 27, 2021, at www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2021/12/27/desmond-tutu-jesuit-catholic-242126.

[4] . A. Wilkinson, The Community of the Resurrection: A Centenary History, London, SCM, 1992.

[5] . I use the terms that Tutu, Huddleston and the Community of the Resurrection would use.

[6] . Notably S. du Boulay, Tutu: Voice of the Voiceless, op. cit., 60.

[7] . Cf. P. Denis – G. Duncan, The Native School that Caused All the Trouble: A History of the Federal Theological Seminary of Southern Africa, Pietermaritzburg, Cluster Publications, 2011.

[8] . Cf. S. Biko, I Write What I Like, Chicago,  University of Chicago Press, 2002.

[9] . A self-designation for a community numbering a few million people of mixed European, Asian and African heritage.

[10] . “Open Letter to Mr. John Vorster (6 May 1976)”, in D. Tutu, Hope and Suffering: Sermons and Speeches, Grand Rapids, W B Eerdmans, 1984, 28-36.

[11] . D. Tutu, “Steve Biko – A Tribute”, in Id., Crying in the Wilderness: The Struggle for Justice in South Africa, op. cit., 1982, 62f.

[12] . Cf. W. de Gruchy – S. de Gruchy, The Church Struggle…, op. cit.; P. Walshe, Prophetic Christianity…, op. cit.

[13] . For a comparison of SACC and SACBC, see T. A. Borer, Challenging the State: Churches as Political Actors in South Africa 1980-1994, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1998.

[14] . D. Tutu, “In Defense of the SACC”, in Id., Crying in Wilderness…, op. cit., 51f.

[15] . D. Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, December 11, 1984 (www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1984/tutu/lecture/).

[16] . P. B. Hinchliff, The Anglican Church in South Africa: An Account of the History and Development of the Church of the Province of South Africa, London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1963.

[17] . A. Cowell, “Bishop Tutu saves man from Crowd”, in The New York Times (www.nytimes.com/1985/07/11/world/bishop-tutu-saves-man-from-crowd.html), July 11, 1985. To be “necklaced” was to have a car tire hung around your neck which was  then set on fire.

[18] . Cf. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 7 Volumes, Cape Town, Juta & Co, 1998; E. Doxtader – C. Villa-Vicencio (eds), To Repair the Irreparable: Reparation and Reconstruction in South Africa, Cape Town, David Philip, 2004; C. Villa-Vicencio – W. Verwoerd (eds), Looking Back Reaching Forward: Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Cape Town, University of Cape Town Press, 2000.

[19] . Cf. D. Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness, New York, Doubleday, 1999.

[20] . Ibid., 265.

[21] . D. Tutu – M. Tutu, Made for Goodness: And why this makes all the difference, London, Rider, 2012.

[22] Cf. J. Habgood, The Concept of Nature,  London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 2002.

[23] . D. Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness, op. cit., 267.