All
except one — Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
It
was December 1986, and Tutu was the leader of his country’s Anglican believers,
Black and white, and one of the most respected figures at the helm of the
struggle against apartheid, its spiritual centre of gravity. He had won the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his courage and commitment.
No
one could not have known who he was and what he stood for.
Yet
of all the passengers in the line, he was the only traveller submitted to the
indignity of a body search. It seemed intended as much as anything to remind
him of his chromatic status in the apartheid nation.
Perhaps,
he mused, his metal pectoral cross had triggered an alarm.
“Did
they think it was a weapon?’’ he asked me.
Sometimes
it is the small, blink-and-you’ve-missed-it moment rather than the blaring
headline that reminds reporters of the essence of the story they have been sent
to cover.
That
moment has remained with me because, considering everything that had happened
and would happen to his tortured land, the point behind his rhetorical question
merited more than passing consideration.
Maybe
the cross itself was not a weapon, but the faith and belief it stood for
provided the battle against white minority rule an overwhelming moral
imperative that offered challenges as much to the archbishop as to his
adversaries.
The
episode at the airport-security desk unfolded several years before the release
of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the beginning of South Africa’s progression
toward democracy. It was a time of choices, dictated variously by the mounting
and increasingly harsh protest of the segregated Black townships, the crucibles
of revolt; by the obduracy of the white minority regime then led by President
P.W. Botha; by growing international pressure for economic sanctions; and by
what seemed an inexorable recourse to violence.
In
all this, the archbishop’s promotion of his Christian striving for peace might
have seemed doomed, a lonesome voice in a bloodstained wilderness.
“I
am surprised that radical Blacks are still willing to say that we are their
leaders,” he said at a news conference in January 1985. “What have we got to
show for all our talk of peaceful change? Nothing.”
Yet,
he was not silenced, either in his opposition to apartheid or his rejection of
the most extreme forms of violence.
In
those years, execution by fire had become an emblem of the struggle, meted out
by Black activists to accused traitors. Iconic images of the accused being
burned alive were deployed in the propaganda wars that cast the Black struggle,
depending on the teller, as either barbarous or suffused with its own fearsome
justice.
Typically,
a person identified or accused of being an informer for white authorities would
be run down and immobilised by an automobile tire around their upper bodies.
Then the tire would be doused in gasoline and ignited. The ritual was called
“necklacing.”
In
one episode in the township of Duduza in July 1985, I watched as then-Bishop
Tutu and a fellow cleric, Simeon Nkoane, struggled and fought to rescue a man
who had been singled out for such punishment, accused, despite his denials, of
being a police undercover operative.
The
passions of the moment were intense. It seemed at some point as if the man was
destined for death. He had been beaten bloody and his car set on fire to
provide what one activist called “his funeral pyre.”
“This
undermines the struggle,” Tutu shouted as he sought to shelter the man.
“No,
it encourages the struggle!” a member of the crowd shouted back at the
bishop, who was clad in purple robes after officiating at a politically charged
funeral, another totemic feature of times when scores died and their burials
became the arenas of yet more and ever-intensifying protest.
Eventually
that day in Duduza, the bishops prevailed, and the alleged informer was driven
away.
It
had been an act of potentially reckless courage by the clerics when their only
shield against the wrath of the would-be executioners were the crosses of their
faith.
But
it was by no means an unusual example of valour that we witnessed.
On
another occasion, Tutu interposed himself between protesters and police,
producing an image of one diminutive priest standing firm against the armed
might of the apartheid security machine.
In
the era after Mandela assumed the presidency in 1994, Archbishop Tutu drew on
other wellsprings of valour to preside over the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission inquiries into rights abuses that defied even the worst expectations
of human behaviour and challenged the possibility of redemption.
Throughout
the years of struggle, clerics were at the forefront, raising their banners —
Methodist, Catholic or Anglican — against white authorities who sought biblical
justification for apartheid in the teachings of the segregated Dutch Reformed
Church.
But
there was always another weapon in the archbishop’s armoury in addition to his
pectoral cross: humour.
At a
fundraiser in the early 2000s attended by Tutu, one participant offered to tell
a joke to lighten the proceedings but warned the audience that he frequently
mangled the punchline and that it was then met with silence.
“I
will laugh,” Tutu shouted.
And
there was laughter.
©2024
The New York Times Company
