Tutu was ‘a feeling person’ who got ‘inspirations’

Desmond Mpilo Tutu, who died on 26 December at the age of 90, was the most visible face of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and abroad during the turbulent 1980s. By the time of his death he had become one of the world’s most beloved figures, noted for his warmth, joviality and preternatural ability to charm and openly engage almost everyone he met.

Born on 7 October 1931 in the mining town of Klerksdorp, he took a long and indirect path to becoming the man who in 1984 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his vocal opposition to apartheid. The son of a Xhosa teacher, Zachariah Zelilo Tutu, and a Motswana domestic worker, Aletta Dorothea Mathlare, Tutu was marked by ill health in early life. He contracted polio as a child, which resulted in the atrophy of his right hand, an affliction that he carried with him for the rest of his life.

Tutu’s father would sometimes drink excessively and beat his mother. In spite of this Zachariah managed to provide enough for his family to ensure that while they were poor, they were “not destitute either.”

Aletta would remain her son’s single greatest influence. As he told his biographer John Allen, “I resemble her in many ways. She was stumpy, and she had a big nose like mine. And I hope that I resemble her in another respect: [she] was very, very gentle and compassionate and caring, always taking the side of whoever was having the worst of an argument.”

The family settled in the West Rand township of Munsieville in the late 1940s. The teenage Tutu moved to Johannesburg where he was taken under the wing of the Anglican priest Trevor Huddleston after becoming a server in the Church of Christ the King in Sophiatown.

In 1947, during his third year at the Johannesburg Bantu High School, Tutu suffered a near-fatal bout of illness after he contracted tuberculosis and was hospitalised in Rietfontein for 18 months, thanks to Huddleston’s intervention. The hospitalised Tutu experienced what he would later describe as his earliest “God-moment,” when during a particularly difficult day he “went to the bathroom and I was vomiting blood and I said, ‘God, if it means I am going to die, OK; if I am going to live, OK…’. Through having said that I experienced a strange sort of peace.”

He initially wanted to become a doctor and gained admission to medical school at the University of the Witwatersrand. However, because of prohibitive student fees, instead he obtained a government scholarship to study teaching at the Pretoria Bantu Normal College in 1951. There he was chair of the college’s debating society, where he first met the young lawyer Nelson Mandela. Tutu also took a number of correspondence courses through the University of South Africa, where he met Robert Sobukwe, who gave him advice on sitting his exams, and where he graduated in the same class as Robert Mugabe.

After obtaining his Transvaal Bantu Teacher’s Diploma in 1954, Tutu returned to Johannesburg to take up a post as an English teacher at the Madibane High School in Western Township. In 1955 he transferred to Krugersdorp High School to teach English and History. During this time he began a courtship with Nomalizo Leah Shenxane, a friend of his sister Gloria’s. Shenxane was studying to become a teacher. They married in July 1955, and settled in Munsieville where their first son was born in April 1956.

The couple named him Trevor Armstrong Tamsanqa after Trevor Huddleston, Louis Armstrong and a brother that Desmond’s parents had lost in infancy. Their first daughter Thandeka Theresa Ursula was born six months later.

From teacher to preacher

In 1955, after the government’s introduction of the Bantu Education Act, the Tutus decided that they could not participate in a system designed to ensure the intellectual suffocation of Black South Africans and resigned from teaching. Tutu looked to the church as one of the few options still available to educated Black men of his generation. It was from practical necessity rather than evangelical devotion that in 1956 he found himself admitted to St Peter’s Theological College in Rosettenville, Johannesburg, to pursue a degree in theology. Leah retrained as a nurse in what was then known as Sekhukhune Land.

Tutu’s time at St Peter’s coincided with the increased repression of the apartheid government and equally intense protest against it, culminating in the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960. He and his fellow students, though shocked by events, remained cloistered, not participating in anti-apartheid activities and remaining on the whole “a very apolitical bunch.”

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In August 1960, the Tutus’ third child, Naomi, was born and in December of that year Tutu was ordained as a priest. His first church posting was as an assistant curate at St Alban’s Parish in Benoni.

After he was accepted to further his theological studies at King’s College, London, Tutu and his family departed for England in September 1962. He was supported by the white establishment of the Anglican Church, which recognised the importance of securing positions of authority within the church for its Black members.

Later, Tutu would often recall that while there were certainly deep racial divides in British society at the time, he and Leah were mostly oblivious to these and impressed by the glaring differences between the freedoms of movement and expression that they enjoyed on the streets of London and those they had been denied at home. They would often take advantage of the politeness of British policemen simply to ask for directions so that they could enjoy the respect of being referred to as “Sir and Madam” by men in uniform.

They spent the next four years in England, during which time their daughter Mpho was born in 1963, and Tutu briefly held a position as an assistant curate at a church in Surrey while completing his Master’s degree.

In 1967 he returned to South Africa, taking up a teaching position at the Federal Theological Seminary (Fedsem) in the Eastern Cape. There Tutu became a visible supporter of the nascent Black Consciousness Movement. Tutu’s political consciousness had begun to stir but his full immersion in anti-apartheid activism would have to wait as he left in 1970 to take up a teaching post at the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland in Roma, Lesotho.

In 1972 Tutu left once again for England, where he began a new job as the African director of the Theological Education Fund, the body that had funded the establishment of Fedsem and helped pay for his studies at King’s College. As part of his work, Tutu spent much of his time travelling to the newly independent nations of sub-Saharan Africa. He saw the disastrous effects of the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, and was there when boxers Muhammad Ali and George Foreman arrived for the world heavyweight title fight, the “Rumble in the Jungle,” in 1974.

Tutu was impressed by the government of Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, appalled by the expulsion of Ugandan Asians by Idi Amin and concerned by what he saw as growing Igbo resentment in Nigeria following the Biafran War. His African travels influenced his vision for post-apartheid South Africa and also helped significantly shape his theological views.

Rising in the Anglican hierarchy

In 1975 Tutu returned to Johannesburg, where had been appointed the first Black Anglican dean of the city. It was here that he took his first significant public steps to becoming a prominent figure in the anti-apartheid movement. Declining to live in the dean’s official home in Houghton, Tutu instead moved his family to Soweto. There he saw first-hand the desperation and angry dissatisfaction of young people.

In May 1976 he famously penned a letter to Prime Minister BJ Vorster, warning him that “Unless something drastic is done very soon then bloodshed and violence are going to happen in South Africa almost inevitably. A people can only take so much and no more … I am dreadfully frightened, that we may soon reach a point of no return, when events will generate a momentum of their own, when nothing will stop their reaching a bloody denouement.”

Vorster dismissed Tutu’s letter as propaganda engineered by the white opposition in parliament. On 16 June, Tutu’s worst fears became reality and he was profoundly upset by the lack of outrage by white South Africa to the murder of Black children by the state.