The way the whole world is mourning Archbishop Desmond Tutu has brought to the fore the desirability of man to live for others so that when the inevitable end comes, one will be remembered for something enviable. Unfortunately, many people in the world live for the moment and worry about what to wear, what to eat and how much money they have in the banks; in other words, it is materialistic nature of man they pander to whereas man is not matter alone but a soul whose spirit is imperishable.
One may think it is only people of the cloth who can live above the materialistic tendencies of man but there are instances of public servants whose exemplary contributions to the lives of many in their nations and outside through exemplary and sacrificial commitment and contributions to the welfare of their people and country puts them well above the pedestal of other ordinary men in their generation. It really doesn’t matter how one began life; what really matters is how one ends and in the process one would have had chances where one’s contributions provide restitutions for one’s imperfections and infelicities of behavior of the past which may have been morally inadequate and if one gets opportunity to make amends, one seizes it by both hands. In other words, it is never too late for us especially those who had opportunity in the past to make a contribution but through compromise with evil one became complicit in hurting others and a whole people or generation.
We have had such people in our national life in this country and there have been such other people who had leadership thrust upon them and rather than taking care of their people sold them down the drain or even sold their country’s interests to foreign plunderers just because they and their families derived pecuniary rewards from their engaging in state capture.
Many of our leaders in Africa inherited state infrastructure and accumulated foreign reserves from the departing colonial masters but squandered them on frivolities until their countries went bankrupt without adding anything tangible to the welfare of their people while storing national patrimony in foreign countries for their families and themselves to live abroad lives of luxuries while their people wallow in poverty and foreigners dismiss their people as savages because of the colour of their skin. This has been the lot of many African countries.
The fight against the immoral evil and unchristian political humiliation and denial of the humanity of black peoples on their own continent in South Africa began after the Second World War with the eventual defeat of the Jan Smuts government in 1948 by the Afrikaner nationalist party of Daniel Francois Malan. It was not that General Jan Smuts believed in extending franchise to the majority black and other non-white peoples in South Africa, but he did not elevate racial discrimination to an article of religious faith like Malan’s successor, Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd who was actually born in Amsterdam in Holland in 1901 did. It was Voerwoerd who developed the racial ideology which underpinned the philosophy of apartheid in which human, political and economic rights radiated downwards from whites to Indians and coloureds and finally to blacks. This immoral system was based on nothing else but racial differences and pigmentation of the skin and on some crude understanding or misunderstanding of religion particularly the Christian religion.
The material manifestation of the apartheid regime was denial of opportunities based on the differences which were identified by the high priests of apartheid. Confrontation with that government was waged on two fronts, namely the political front and the moral front. The political front was led by the African National Congress (ANC) and the moral front initially by the so-called native churches or the “black Zionists” which had very limited success and international support and understanding until the World Council of Churches eventually got involved through the effort of Archbishop Ernest Urban Trevor Huddleston, the second Anglican Archbishop of the Province of the Indian Ocean and the relatively young Bishop Tutu who provided a rallying point for those opposed to a system the good bishop called “evil , immoral and unchristian”. The Anglican Church provided a linchpin and rampart for the archbishop’s activities.
Tutu actually became heavily involved in what we can now call the liberation movement when young people particularly started the black consciousness movement of people like Steve Biko in the 1970s when black people were being shot by South African soldiers and policemen. Not only were the racists bent on carrying their aggression into Southern African states and murdering the Mozambiquan leader Samora Machel in 1986 and also made constant incursions into Zambia and after its independence in 1980, Zimbabwe, was a target of South African subversion. The regime also went after SWAPO in South West African Peoples Organization, fighting to gain independence for Namibia. They carried their nefarious military promenade into Angola to support the most retrograde of the liberation fronts of UNITA against the internationally recognized MPLA government. Even Nigeria was not spared by South Africa which sent agents into Malabo in Equatorial Guinea overlooking Nigeria, ostensibly for ranching. The serious internal situation in Southern Africa by 1978 drew Nigeria into becoming a front-line state in the confrontation with the apartheid regime in South Africa. The battle lines between the entrenched racist regime and the rest of black Africa were drawn. The possibility of a racial war in Southern Africa against a regime which had managed through covert Israeli and possibly western support to split the atom thus leading to possibility of racial war in Africa became evident. The impending conflict in which nuclear war was a possibility however remote it may seem was frightening. The alternative of neutral leadership not bent on war if persuasion proved impossible as was then presented by the ANC, was provided by the diminutive Archbishop Desmond Tutu. This was not without suspicion by the radical cadres of the liberation movements. This was so when the Archbishop was given the Nobel prize for peace in 1984. When Nelson Mandela was released in 1990 after serving 27 years imprisonment following growing domestic and international pressure and fears of racial war, by President W. de Klerk, Desmond Tutu was one of his closest advisers. Mandela himself had decided that retribution against his oppressors was not the best way to go and when he set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Desmond Tutu was made to head it. Archbishop Tutu brought Christian ideas of charity to all, into the work of the commission. His idea was that all players in the tragedy of apartheid must be made to confess their roles after which they were reconciled with their victims and then pardoned so that the “rainbow nation “can begin anew. Tutu’s ideas got listening ears of Mandela and his government and their decision was loudly acclaimed by the rest of the world.There were of course others in South Africa who felt that the ANC had bent over backward too much to accommodate the whites which had hardly made any sacrifice particularly on the issue of redistribution of land ad ownership of the commanding heights of the economy and the mineral resources of the country which were still in the hands of the entrenched white people. This inequality was later pointed out by the Archbishop who critcised the ANC government for corruption and not doing much to alleviate the suffering of the South African people.
By the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa in 1994 , Archbishop Tutu had become an international icon whose opinions were sought on many knotty and burning international issues sometimes beyond his ken He was opposed to the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He supported the right of Israel for peaceful existence while also supporting the right of the Palestinians to their own state in a two states solution. He supported the right of the Tibetan people for the independence of their country from China. He criticized the United States for its police’s brutality against black people. He embraced the struggle for a clean global environment and global joint efforts to mitigate the problems of global warming and consequent climate change. The Archbishop was not afraid to speak his mind and he would constantly say he was not a politician but a man of God guided by the Bible.
His mourning by the Queen of The United Kingdom Elizabeth 11, President Biden of the USA and former presidents, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama the Dalai Lama of Tibet, former and serving presidents, prime ministers and ordinary people is a testimony to the global importance of the diminutive Archbishop.
