Few figures of the 20th century united Christian faith and the fight for justice like Desmond Tutu. An archbishop, a preacher quick to laugh and a relentless critic of injustice, he confronted one of the harshest regimes of the modern world without ever taking up a weapon.
He was born in 1931 in Klerksdorp, the son of a teacher and a domestic worker, and grew up under apartheid. At 15 he contracted tuberculosis and spent about 18 months hospitalized, where he became friends with Anglican priest Trevor Huddleston, who visited him almost every week.
He trained as a teacher, but in 1957 he gave up teaching in protest against the Bantu Education Act, a law that imposed inferior schooling on Black children. He then turned to theology, was ordained a priest in 1960, and in 1962 moved to the United Kingdom to further his studies at King’s College London.
Back in South Africa, he took on increasingly prominent church positions, until becoming Secretary-General of the South African Council of Churches in 1978. From there he used the ecumenical pulpit as a platform for peaceful resistance, calling for sanctions against apartheid when many other voices were being silenced.
In 1984 he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership of the nonviolent campaign against apartheid. In 1986 he became the first Black Archbishop of Cape Town, a post he held until 1996.
With the end of apartheid, Nelson Mandela invited him to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in 1995. There Tutu argued that only public confession and forgiveness, not vengeance, could heal the country, and he coined the phrase Rainbow Nation to describe the new South Africa. The model, however, drew significant criticism: many victims and human rights organizations considered the amnesty granted in exchange for public confession insufficient, since most of those responsible for apartheid-era crimes were never prosecuted.
His prophetic voice was not always welcomed. His comparisons between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and South African apartheid angered Jewish leaders, who accused him of bias, and his open advocacy for the inclusion of LGBT people in the church put him on a collision course with more conservative sectors of the Anglican Communion, including beyond South Africa.
He died in 2021 at age 90, after living with prostate cancer for more than two decades, having been diagnosed in 1997. He left behind the testimony that Christian faith can confront injustice without hatred, and that reconciliation, however painful and imperfect, is always a more fruitful path than vengeance.
