It must have been an odd moment at the Johannesburg airport that day in the December of 1986. Archbishop Desmond tutu was waiting to board to flight to Capetown along with 400 others. It was impossible not to recognize the Arch ( that’s how he was affectionately called in South Africa), he was the Nobel prize winner for peace in 1984, world-renowned preacher, widely respected humanitarian, and one of the foremost and passionate evangelists of the anti-apartheid movement in the country. However, as the boarding started, and passengers queued up to pass the final security check before departure, the Archbishop was singled out for a final security check. Apparently, there was a beep when he passed through the detector ( which no one heard except the security staff). Desmond Tutu submitted himself to the scrutiny without a hint of despair, but on the contrary, had his characteristic huge smile beaming across his face. With a twinkle in his eye, he gently touched the silver cross hanging across his neck and mused ” Did they think this was a weapon?” A simple question that had deep connotations and possibilities contained it. Were there afraid of the cross as a metallic object, or were they afraid of the symbolism and the moral crusade the cross stood for? A Newyork times journalist, who happened to be at the airport at that time, remembers this incident with clarity. It was an innocuous quip by the Arch but had deep significance and resonance in the context of Southern Africa of the 1980s and 90s, which was mired in the depth of apartheid, racial inequalities, and struggling to live by their moral imperatives. This small incident also reveals the Man Archbishop Desmond Tutu was – down to earth and profound and utterly unfazed in the light of what he perceived to be the truth.
The Archbishop died yesterday of prostate cancer at the ripe age of 90 years. What a life? At a time when it is considered fashionable or politically correct to eulogize the death of public figures and entertainers with hardly any social substance to their lives as the “end of an era”, the passing away of Desmond Tutu is truly one. He dedicated his life to the onerous task of removing lock, stock, and barrel one of the primary evils of the modern human condition – the bane of human discrimination based on the color of one’s skin. America had its martyr in Martin Luther King jr in its fight for civil liberties, and South Africa had its strongest advocate in Desmond Tutu along with Nelson Mandela after his release in the 1990s. From the pulpits across the world in the name of religion, from the podiums of anarchy where violence erupted with relentless fury and regularity in the name of apartheid, from the midst of villages and towns where families and children stood orphaned and helpless by racial violence, the Archbishop’s voice rose like Handel’s choruses, urging people – both the blacks and the whites – to stop violence and see the banality of apartheid as a malignant disease that had to be necessarily uprooted through civic and moral understanding, and through the transformation of the individual, and never through bloodshed. He opposed violence of any kind and was often criticized by his own people for his stand on that principle. But the Arch remained steadfast in his belief that it had to be so. He commanded a tremendous power when he spoke. His orations and appeals were not just from the intellect, they arose from the depths of his heart, and when he spoke from the center, his voice would turn into glissandos ( going up and down in pitch) that often brought tears and transformation to the eyes and hearts of his listeners. He tirelessly traveled the globe seeking international support for the anti-apartheid movement in South- Africa. He pleaded, argued, reasoned, and appealed to world leaders for their intervention. Some did support, and some did not; notably, Reagan did not.
The Archbishop was first diagnosed with cancer in 1997, and since then, has been hospitalized so many times in the fear that it has spread. Each time, the Bishop could out of the hospital with a beaming smile and continue his demanding regimen of work. Until a few years ago, his daily routine began at 4.30 AM with a jog. He never slacked or allowed cancer to take over his life. Till the last day, he presented himself well. His trademark grey suit worn over a magenta-colored shirt with a spotlessly white clerical color, and those twinkling eyes squeezed behind the gold-rimmed glasses, have adorned the covers of top magazines for decades. You can see him in all kinds of moods and mannerisms – ferocious, contemplative, laughing, crying, dancing – he was a man full of energy and vitality. The French philosopher Henri Bergson spoke of the “elan vital” – that effervescent spark of life that goads man to excellence. The archbishop embodied the principle of elan vital to its full. Like the Dalai Lama, with whom he shared a special camaraderie, Desmond Tutu wore his priesthood lightly, in the sense, he never allowed his personality to be weighed down by his responsibilities as a priest. Though till the end of his life, he referred to himself only as a priest doing God’s work and never as a social reformer, it was clear to those who interacted with him that he combined the best of all worlds in his engagement with the people. It was hard to separate Desmond Tutu the man, the priest, and the leader of the civil disobedience movement. They fused into one in him.
The apotheosis ( the highest point) of Archbishop Tutu’s work happened after the apartheid movement ended in the early nineties and Mandela came to power. The Archibishop was appointed the chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to reconcile the differences between the black and white communities, and gather testimony of the outrage and viciousness for their human crimes during the apartheid period. It was the equivalent of the Nuremberg commission appointed at the end of the second world war to bring the German war crimes to Justice. But unlike the Nuremberg trials, under the stewardship of the Archbishop, the commission established by Mandela’s government sought to provide amnesty and forgiveness to those who volunteered information and sought forgiveness and mercy. The last thing the Archbishop wanted was to carry the scars of a dark memory over to the next generation. Archbishop called his work at the commission as ‘restorative” justice and not retributive justice. A beautiful idea that at once dissolves deep differences and creates a possibility for change. He, again and again, stressed to his countrymen, and to the world at large, that the idea of apartheid was as dehumanizing to the oppressors as it was to the oppressed. Blaming one at the expense of the other would only exacerbate the festering wounds. It is better to treat the period of apartheid as a moral aberration, heal it once and for all, and begin afresh. It was largely due to the even-minded presence of Archbishop Tutu, that a fractured South Africa, pulling in different directions – politically, militarily, and socially – was able to come together and forge a new tryst with destiny. The Archbishop’s voice continued to speak against discrimination of any kind, even after the apartheid movement had ended. In the Mandela government, he was openly critical of some of the ministerial choices, not because of any personal reasons, but he believed that the choices weren’t based on merit or performance. Even at the height of his popularity, the Archbishop never once aspired to hold any political office. He chose to remain the moral conscience of a nation.
Archbishop Tutu always called himself the “wounded healer” and would tell his listeners that a ” wounded healer is the best possible healer” because he knows the pain first hand. When a man’s soul is forged and bent in the fire of suffering, the words ring true. That was the case with Archibishop Tutu. In the fall of 2015, just before the US election that brought President Trump to Power, the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu met at Dharmasala, India on the occasion of the Dalai Lama’s eightieth birthday. It was a unique occasion, not deliberately orchestrated for any purpose, but it so happened that both of them were in the vicinity and agreed to meet for a week and discuss common themes. Both men were freedom fighters, both were holy men belonging to different spiritual denominations, both had an infectious laughter and charismatic personality, both are Nobel Laureates, and both of them were great teachers and social reformers. Their conversations were divided into three general categories: The Nature of true Joy, obstacles to Joy, and the eight Pillars of Joy. These dialogues were freewheeling and later compiled into a book The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World. It is a book that should be available on every bookshelf. Here are two masters discussing some of the fundamental issues about the human condition. Faithe didn’t matter, theology didn’t matter, what mattered between the two was the principal question of what can make man happy and remain happy. This is the most fundamental question we have, and all our life is nothing but a desperate search for an answer. Within the covers of this book, The Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu condense and exchange their experiences of a lifetime dealing with pain and cultivating happiness. There is one observation that I love and reflect upon frequently:
“Discovering more joy does not, I’m sorry to say, save us from the inevitability of hardships and heartbreaks. In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily, too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreak without being broken.”
The book is full of similar transformative insights.
The death of Archbishop Desmond Tutu cannot be an end; Men like him don’t die. He will live on as long there is a collective sense of what is right and wrong in the way we organize ourselves. When that sense is lost, hope recedes. When faced with moral choices, The Archbishop’s voice, his struggle, and his humanity will loom large in front of us, will act as our moral conscience. It is up to us to heed to it or not. The lasting contribution of the Archbishop is that he raised the quality of the rhetoric about freedom and equality to a higher dimension, a dimension that puts everything else in its right perspective. He lived through the worst period of South African history and dealt with its issues from the front. For such men, death is inconsequential. Their work is done, it is for us to carry the baton now.
God bless…
yours in mortality,
Bala