Politics for me started with the ‘81 Springbok Tour. As a 10 year-old I convinced my reluctant parents to let me march against the evil that was apartheid in South Africa. While they figured out an escape route should things turned violent, I made a sign. We marched as a family and my 15 year-old sister was hit by an egg.
These are defining memories and amidst them was Desmond Tutu, who died this weekend aged 90. He popped again in high school, when we learnt about apartheid in history class and there he was in the news through the 90s as South Africans, amazingly, removed that dark stain without revolution and replaced it with what Tutu hoped would one day become the “Rainbow Nation”.
As a journalist, cynicism tends to come with the territory, but Tutu has remained a rare hero throughout the years. Not just for his gracious handling of a brutal politics, but for a faith that captures the best of the Christian gospel.
Tutu has been lauded as a man of peace and reconciliation. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 and then chaired South Africa’s flawed yet still ground-breaking Truth and Reconciliation Commission from 1996. So those words were more than just slogans for “the Arch”. Yet few who embrace such ideals live them out with the sort of integrity and consistency as Tutu. Fewer still do it with such humour and mischief!
Tutu in life and death made enemies - he was damned by some whites who saw him as an apologist for violent resistance and revolution and by some black who didn’t see him as violent or revolutionary enough. In that, as a genuine man of justice peace, he walked a similar line to the likes of Martin Luther King Jr and Te White o Rongomai. But those who wished to attack him then and now only show their own blindness.
Tutu repeatedly reminded us all that we live in “a moral universe:”. What does that mean? I suspect there are depths in that statement that I can’t even glimpse, but at the very least it means that we - all of us - need mercy and that it is available for all.
Tutu united people. Not in a ‘why can’t we all just get along’ way. Not in some facile ‘melting pot’ sense or even as an act of loyalty. Tutu preached unity because it is unavoidable and inevitable. He taught that when Jesus Christ taught us to “love thy neighbour’ it was not a matter of do-goodery but of necessity. If we don’t, we are all diminished and damaged. As he said of South Africa, “until blacks are free, no-one in this country is going to be free”. This is a truth that extends to all humanity.
Tutu wasn’t afraid to offend the powerful or speak out “when something wicked this way comes”. His commitment to peace and unity was never cowardly. He called out Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as racist for their policies appeasing apartheid, for example. And he condemned the ANC for corruption and violence. On more than one occasion he walked into the midst of violence - including “necklacings” and saved lives by placing his own life in danger.
Nevertheless, as someone who spent that life standing against injustice, it seems to me he understood the principled truth that injustice is something we all engage in. We are, to greater and lesses degrees, all perpetrators and victims. All in need of, and able to offer, forgiveness and love.
It’s a truth that is often lost in the accusatory, martyrish and self-aggrandising debates of 21st century politics, where everyone is fighting for the right to call themselves the victim, but where no-one is willing to admit to being a perpetrator. Yet that is the human condition Tutu recognised.
In response, he said, he only really ever preached one sermon. It was the message that despite our sins as victim and perpetrator both, we matter and are loved. As he said to American journalist Mill Moyers in 1999:
“I’ve always preached one sermon. And I thought I was preaching it for black people and discovered actually when I went back home that, in an incredible kind of way, the people who perhaps more than others needed to hear that they mattered to God were white people. Because they, in a remarkable way, have come to think that their worth was extrinsic. It depended on the kind of car you had, the size of your house. And you said to them, ‘no, no, no, no. Your worth is intrinsic. It doesn’t depend on status. It doesn’t depend on race. It doesn’t depend on anything. It’s given.
Such is the gospel of grace.
His status as a hero for me came when I read, in my 20s, this wonderful observation - that the simple Christian teaching that we are all children of God, created in the image of God, is the most radical message ever taught. Stop and think about it, he would say. Imagine everyone - every one - is made in the image of God. Then imagine what that demands of you.
No life can be diminished or dismissed because each life is a child of God. A part of God. And if you believe in a god of any kind, as most of the world still does, then we must understand how sacred each person is. And how we as humans - not as ethnicities or nationalities, nor as faiths or cultures - but how we as humans are united. To diminish one, diminishes us all. It was something he said often. But here’s how he said it at the Washington National Cathedral on Christmas Day in 1999:
In his coming, in his turning an epoch to make it belong to the Lord, AD, he proclaimed that all were God’s children, all were members of one family–this new society ruled by kingdom values-love, compassion, gentleness, caring and sharing and ruled by the ethic of family. That was truly revolutionary, truly radical. Wouldn’t it still be in our world today, if we recognised that we were sisters and brothers members of one family?
To me, those are the words of a hero and the legacy that Tutu bequeaths to us all.
In seeing that truth Tutu was able to say to people in midst of the battle against apartheid that although people would continue to suffer and die as they fought this great injustice, that they had already won.
“We used to say, ‘we have already won. They have lost. Those who support injustice have lost'. They may have guns. They may appear to be powerful. But don’t let it kid you.”
That’s what it means to live in a moral universe. It demands that you don’t fight injustice with injustice, but that you hold true to peace and unity regardless of the sins committed against you. You love even your enemy because if you don’t, ultimately, we are all lost.
So Tutu to me was one of the great people of my lifetime. But as I mourn his death, I remember that above all he was a man of hope. Because the belief that love always wins in a moral universe is a belief that unavoidably, intrinsically drips with hope. So the last words go to Tutu:
I would hope that the world would realize that there is no situation that is not transfigurable, that there is no situation of which we can say, 'This is absolutely, totally devoid of hope,' because that is what people thought about South Africa. And that the star turns of this report are those we wrongly call just ordinary people. There are no ordinary people in my theology, but it is the small people, the ones who used to be nonentities, they are the stars and for the world to know that those called—so-called ordinary people are incredible.
Amen.