Desmond Tutu

Desmond Tutu was an Anglican churchman who became one of the most recognisable opponents of apartheid in South Africa. The first black African to serve as Bishop of Johannesburg and then Archbishop of Cape Town, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, and after white minority rule ended he chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He remained an outspoken and often controversial voice on world affairs until his death in 2021.

Tutu was born in Klerksdorp, in the Transvaal, on 7 October 1931, to a Xhosa father who was a school headmaster and a Motswana mother. The family was poor, and as a boy he survived polio and 18 months in hospital with tuberculosis. In Sophiatown he came under the influence of the Anglican priest Trevor Huddleston. Unable to afford medical school, he trained as a teacher, married Leah Shenxane in 1955 and taught for a few years, but left teaching in protest at the government's Bantu Education Act.

Ordained in 1960, Tutu went to King's College London in 1962 and took bachelor's and master's degrees in theology. Life in England, free of pass laws, helped him shed any habit of deference to white authority. Back in southern Africa he taught at a seminary in Alice and at the university in Lesotho, then from 1972 spent three years in Britain directing grants to theological colleges across Africa. In this period he embraced black theology, which he sought to combine with African theology.

In 1975 he became the first black dean of St Mary's Cathedral in Johannesburg and chose to live in Soweto. In May 1976 he wrote to the prime minister, B. J. Vorster, warning that apartheid would lead to violence; weeks later the Soweto uprising began. After a spell as Bishop of Lesotho, during which he spoke at the funeral of Steve Biko, he led the South African Council of Churches from 1978 to 1985 and turned it into a prominent advocate for human rights.

Tutu condemned violence by all sides while arguing that oppression explained it, and he called for international economic pressure on Pretoria. The government twice took away his passport. Many black South Africans regarded him as an icon second only to the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, while many white South Africans thought him a dangerous radical and some militants found him too moderate. The Nobel Prize in 1984 made him an international figure.

Appointed Bishop of Johannesburg in 1985 and Archbishop of Cape Town in 1986, he moved into the archbishop's residence in defiance of residential segregation laws. He mediated between protesters and police, led marches, and won approval for the ordination of women. After Mandela's release in 1990 he helped calm the violence between ANC and Inkatha supporters during the negotiations that led to the end of apartheid and the 1994 election. He popularised the phrase "Rainbow Nation" for the new country.

Mandela named Tutu chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose televised hearings began in April 1996. Tutu promoted a restorative justice rooted in confession, amnesty and reparation. The commission examined abuses by the apartheid state and by liberation movements alike, and he clashed with the ANC when it tried to suppress part of the final report, which he presented in October 1998.

In retirement Tutu campaigned on HIV/AIDS, gay rights and climate change, opposed the Iraq War and criticised the governments of Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. He chaired The Elders from 2007 to 2013. He likened Israel's treatment of Palestinians to apartheid while affirming Israel's right to exist; some Jewish groups and commentators accused him of antisemitism, while he insisted that his criticism was aimed at the Israeli government rather than at Jews. He died of cancer in Cape Town on 26 December 2021, aged 90.

Our 1960 and 1985 maps show South Africa under apartheid, and the 1994 map shows the country in the year of its first democratic election.