Bishop Tutu – ‘a voice crying in the wilderness’

Press, 19 August 1983, Page 15

Bishop Tutu - ‘a voice crying in the wilderness’

GLENN HASZARD

The Rt Rev. Desmond Mpilo Tutu, who will visit New Zealand from August 21 to 26, is passionately committed to “reasonably peaceful” change in South Africa. Bishop Tutu developed his awareness of the need for change in South Africa partly as a result of his education and partly through extensive overseas travel.

His early education was in South Africa, and he graduated with a Bachelor of Divinity and Master of Theology from Kings College, University of London. He also holds several honorary doctoral degrees from universities in England, the United States and West Germany. He has travelled to most countries apart from those in Latin America and in the Eastern bloc. He was born into a Christian family on October 7, 1931. His grandfather had been a minister of the Ethiopian Church of South Africa while his father was headmaster of a Methodist primary school.

Some insights into his experiences in South Africa were given in a testimony to the Eloff Commission of Inquiry in South Africa earlier this year. He is quoted in the June issue of “Ecunews,” the news service of the South African Council of Churches, as telling the commission that when he was a boy he often used to be taunted by white boys, who called him “pik.”

He suffered some severe illnesses during his youth, the first of which left his right arm half paralysed. The second was tuberculosis, which kept him confined to hospital for 20 months. During that time he was visited every week by a priest, Trevor Huddleston, who was later to write a book called “Naught for Your Comfort” and is now Archbishop of the Indian Ocean, and Bishop of Mauritius. Bishop Tutu wanted to become a doctor and was admitted to a medical school but could not get a bursary so he went to a Government college and graduated with a B.A.

In 1955 he married a school teacher and he himself took up teaching for three years, and then he left to train for the Anglican priesthood.

It was during this time, he says, that he learned that it is “impossible for religion to be sealed off in a watertight compartment that has no connection with the hurly burly business of ordinary daily living.” “Our encounter with God in prayer, meditation, the sacraments, and Bible study is authenticated and expressed in our dealings with our neighbour whose keeper we must be willy nilly.” He says he was taught by the Community of the Resurrection at the college that “when I look into the eyes of Jesus and see there the anguish he feels for those who are the least of his brethren, then I am constrained by this encounter to go and do something about the plight of those self-same brethren.” Desmond Tutu was made a deacon in 1960, the year of the infamous Sharpeville massacre when 69 people were killed when police fired on demonstrators. Two years later he began what was to become an extensive period abroad, mainly in England, completing his theological degrees. The experience made him realise for the first time just what was lacking in South Africa. “For a long time I used to worry when I saw a mixed couple walking hand in hand, apprehensive that the long arm of the law would pounce on them. I was being liberated by freedom. I was becoming more fully human not through a network of prohibitions and laws forbidding this and that but by living in a genuinely free society,” he told the Eloff Commission. At the end of 1969 he was appointed theology lecturer at a university in Lesotho. Two years later, he was back in England, this time as associate director of the theological education fund of the World Council of Churches, with responsibility for sub-Saharan Africa. His wife and

four children went with him. He spent much of the next 3% years travelling the world.

He told the commission that he deprecated apartheid especially because “it plays havoc with human resources that South Africa and indeed the world can ill afford.” In 1975 he was asked to become Dean of Johannesburg, and after much soul-searching the family gave up the good life in England “to make our small contribution to the liberation struggle.” “I believe firmly that the day whites in South Africa shed their self-doubt (camouflaged as bravado, etc.) then we will begin to move into the realm of healing our broken human relationships, shattered so blasphemously by apartheid, which was designed to make relationships between ordinary human persons impossible.” In 1978, Bishop Tutu became general-secretary of the South African Council of Churches. It is during these last few years that his views have been given extensive coverage in Western news media. He says he is committed to “reasonably peaceful” change.

“I say reasonably advisedly, because there has already been too much violence . . . because even when blacks use peaceful, non-

violent means they provoke untold intransigence and violence on the part of the authorities — teargas, bullets, police dogs, solitary confinement.”

He says he is motivated by unnecessary suffering of the majority peoples of South Africa when he calls on the international community to apply all the pressure it can to urge the South African Government to negotiate before it is too late and there is an unstoppable spiral of violence. “There can be no peace without justice and there can be no justice in South Africa whilst apartheid exists. I believe in a democratic, non-racial society and so I believe in majority rule ... I believe in adult suffrage, for that, we are told, is an unalterable feature of true democracy. I believe in a common citizenship for all South Africans in an unbalkanised South Africa.

“I am constrained by the Gospel of Jesus Christ to be perhaps as a voice crying in the wilderness calling back our people from the edge of the precipice before it is too late. I am not a politician. I am a Christian leader whom God has caught by the scruff of the neck and 4 had much rather obey God than man, whatever the cost.”