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By Owei Lakemfa

In its darkest days  when the evil Apartheid system reigned, South Africa produced two outstanding liberation theologians who were burning torches in a country enveloped in darkness.  In 1982 when Apartheid was rebuilding its strength after waves of mass protests beginning with the 1976 Soweto Uprising, Reverend Allan  Aubrey Boesak of the Dutch Reform Church was elected  President    of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches.   He also became the patron of the largest anti-Apartheid coalition, the United  Democratic Front, UDF. His being leader of faith and of  mixed European and African  ancestry,  further put him in an advantageous position as he could speak with the White, Coloured and African populations. Through his work and those  of  visionary South Africans like the Anglican Archbishop,  Desmond Tutu, a ‘Rainbow Nation’ was born.

Where Boesak was formal and hard hitting, Tutu was more informal and subtle. He delivered devastating blows against Apartheid like Muhammed Ali whose blows in the ring appeared light, but brought down the most fearsome heavy weight boxing champions  of his day like Sonny Liston and George Foreman.

Tutu was all of laughter who even when those he spoke to did not seem to see the joke he was making, laughed heartily to himself. He once said: “Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime. Teach a man to cycle and he will realize fishing is stupid and boring.”

On another occasion, he argued: “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”

On hopes and aspirations he joked: “When your dreams turn to dust, vacuum.”

His sense of humour and understanding included otherwise serious  issues of faith and theology.  He once told his audience: “We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.”

Tutu’s  Christianity was  not all about what the Bible says, but their interpretation from the perspective  of shared  humanity,  truth and social justice.  To him: “Religion is like a knife: you can either use it to cut bread, or stick in someone’s back.”  For those who claim Christianity is the only way to salvation and that nobody can get to the Father except through Christ, Tutu argued: “God is not upset that Gandhi was not a Christian, because God is not a Christian! All of God’s children and their different faiths help us to realize the immensity of God.”

His stand point on Apartheid and world politics including the struggles of the weak across the universe was: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

He taught people that they need not be influential , powerful nor rich to bring about needed change: “Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.”

As the winner  of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, Anglican Bishop of Johannesburg in 1985 and  Archbishop of Cape Town  from the following year – the first  Black African to hold these positions – Tutu was highly favoured and could live his life in luxury, but like Jesus whom the Devil showed the riches of the world and was told they could be his only if he bowed before him, Tutu told the Apartheid regime, get thee behind me. He said to the powerful Apartheid overlords: “I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of human rights.”

He once asked the Apostles of Apartheid:  “How could you have a soccer team if all were goalkeepers? How would it be an orchestra if all were French horns?”  Apartheid  was indeed not just an evil system, but a most stupid and unsustainable one. But the racists  could not understand  this even when he tried to teach them basic lessons such that: “A person is a person through other persons; you can’t be human in isolation; you are human only in relationships.”

But the racists who held on tenaciously to Apartheid like a drowning person to any straw he could hold, would not let go, so  he told them: “I wish I could shut up, but I can’t, and I won’t.” In this, Tutu was  like  Martin Luther who  on  October 31,1517 spoke up  against the very powerful leadership of the Church. Rather than be remorseful or   tactical, he told them: “ Thus I cannot and will not recant because acting against one’s conscience  is neither  safe nor sound. Here I stand; I can do no other. God help me.” So for Tutu, just as the die was cast for Luther some 470 years before, so was it for him; he was light and had no business with the darkness of Apartheid, inhumanity and injustice except to bring light to them.

Even when Apartheid came to an inglorious end in 1994, Tutu continued to  crusade   against injustice such as the on-going genocide against the Palestinian people.  When he visited  the Christian Holy Land where spiritual rejuvenation was expected, he witnessed  the same injustice he had lived with in Apartheid South Africa. He said of his experience: “I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of apartheid.”

Tutu was a gift to humanity to speak truth to power,  speak out for the oppressed, give voice to the repressed and stand with the poor and  the physically, politically and spiritually dispossessed.

On Boxing Day, December 26, 2021 an international day   of giving  gifts, we lost the gift that was Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He was 90.   On Friday, as the year ends, his body is to lie in state in St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town. Tutu, aware he was human and that all human beings owe  death a debt that must be paid, had made known how he wished his funeral be conducted; no ostentatious or lavish funeral and  only  his family’s  bouquet of coronations.

On Saturday, January 1, 2022 as the world welcomes the birth of a new year, our beloved Tutu, would be cremated and his ashes placed in the   St George’s Cathedral.   To a servant   of humanity and God who strived to be Christ-like, it is a sobering farewell.