Desmond Tutu

A Spiritual Biography of South Africa's Confessor

Michael Battle

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781646980086
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Biografía bíblica

The first biography of its kind about Desmond Tutu, this book introduces readers to Tutu's spiritual life and examines how it shaped his commitment to restorative justice and reconciliation.

Desmond Tutu was a pivotal leader of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and remains a beloved and important emblem of peace and justice around the world. Even those who do not know the major events of Tutu's life—receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, serving as the first black archbishop of Cape Town and primate of Southern Africa from 1986–1996, and chairing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission from 1995–1998—recognize him as a charismatic political and religious leader who helped facilitate the liberation of oppressed peoples from the ravages of colonialism. But the inner landscape of Tutu's spirituality, the mystical grounding that spurred his outward accomplishments, often goes unseen.

Rather than recount his entire life story, this book explores Tutu's spiritual life and contemplative practices—particularly Tutu's understanding of Ubuntu theology, which emphasizes finding one's identity in community—and traces the powerful role they played in subverting the theological and spiritual underpinnings of apartheid. Michael Battle's personal relationship with Tutu grants readers an inside view of how Tutu's spiritual agency cast a vision that both upheld the demands of justice and created space to synthesize the stark differences of a diverse society. Battle also suggests that North Americans have much to learn from Tutu's leadership model as they confront religious and political polarization in their own context.

PART 1

PURGATION

“I hope the normal pressure of the accord will lead them to undergo a Damascus experience of conversion and come to see that their best chance of success and survival lies in aligning themselves with their fellow South Africans.”¹

—Desmond Tutu, Star Sun

Tutu anoints Michael Battle’s hands with oil at Battle’s ordination to the Anglican/Episcopal priesthood at St. George’s Cathedral, Cape Town, on Battle’s birthday, December 12, 1993. Author photo.

Chapter 1

Diving in Troubled Water

Here in part 1, before getting into the theology of purgation, I will present a brief overview of Tutu’s formative experiences growing up. Such formation I name as purgative in the sense of how Tutu was shaped to be an unusual institutional church leader. Many of the traditional markers of a self-contained institutional church leader were eventually burned away or purged from Tutu’s style of leadership, as he was forced into a primary role of resisting the evils of apartheid. Before we see Tutu’s tour de force in this regard, a basic biographical overview of Tutu’s life may give the reader better traction in navigating the difficult terrain in which Tutu traveled.

The first difficult terrain that purged Tutu’s leadership was in the synthesizing of African and Anglican identities in light of colonialism. As we will see, Tutu chose the Anglican Church as his spiritual home. The Anglican Church is one of the largest Christian denominations on the global stage, behind Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox. Interestingly enough, the Anglican churches formed into the Anglican communion around 1867 in London, England, when John Colenso, an English bishop sent to South Africa, got into trouble for his progressive theology among the British colonies. The English bishops made Colenso go back to the principal’s office in London like a naughty child to face charges of excommunication. The first Lambeth Conference to bring Anglican bishops together was convened in order to deal with Colenso. The current Anglican communion has more than eighty million members around the world. Based in London, the archbishop of Canterbury acts as one of the instruments of Anglican unity, but unlike the pope in the Roman Catholic Church, cannot exercise authority in Anglican provinces outside of the Church of England.

In light of the above, it is important to see how Tutu’s church formation cannot be divorced from his African and ordained Anglican identity. Colonized African identity is particularly charged from the outset as to whether or not to accept negatively imposed identities, especially identities caught in the ambiguity of legitimate or illegitimate humanity. To work against this ambiguity, I believe that there can be no concept of African and Anglican identities without full disclosure of their contingent, politically oppressed histories. In other words, to understand Tutu, one will also need to resist seeing African Christian spirituality as illegitimate discourse. Tutu helps me see this when he states, “Who you are affects and determines to a very large extent what you see and how you see it.”¹ By looking at Tutu’s Christian mystical sensibilities, I think Tutu’s life displays how spiritual convictions need not lead to civil wars but can actually help sustain healthy political witness.

Tutu’s spirituality is highly significant precisely because one cannot distinguish its theory from its praxis, because both toil synchronically toward the desired effect of reconciliation and transformation. Those close to Tutu often said they didn’t know anyone more comfortable in his own skin than Tutu. When you meet Tutu, you cannot help but meet his spirituality. You can speak only about what you observe. In the years I lived with him, observing his strict regimen of prayer and silence, and in all the years since, I have indeed observed Tutu’s integrity of theory and praxis.

There is an unfavorable history of the church’s complacency in the face of racism and apartheid. Although apartheid was formally constructed as a legal system in 1948, when white Afrikaners vied for power through their emerging National Party, South Africa’s history is one of deep racism and white colonial oppression.² Tutu believed that the white right-wing party in apartheid South Africa would have to undergo a Damascus-road conversion experience. This is a biblical allusion to Paul, who once persecuted Christians, before God put Paul, then known as Saul, through the purgation of change. On the road to Damascus, he was hit by light and thereby forever changed. The experience was so dramatic, so expansive, that he changed his name. Once Paul completed his purgation process, he was illumined with the vision to be an apostle and witness for Christ. Purgation, however, had to happen first.³ Here, in part 1 of Tutu’s spiritual biography, we look at the change process that occurred in South Africa as well as in Tutu’s own life leading into his leadership in the church.

FORGING TUTU’S IDENTITY

Desmond Mpilo Tutu was born in South Africa on October 7, 1931. Tutu’s grandfather had been a minister of an African Ethiopian church. His father, Zachariah Tutu, was of Xhosa ethnicity and his mother, Aletta, was Tswana, short with a prominent nose. Tutu states, “I resemble her physically and perhaps inherited her trait of standing up for the underdog.”⁴ Tutu’s mother fiercely loved him. The disability of polio from an early age may have played into the need for such a fierce love, although they never really knew what was physically wrong with Tutu as a child. To this day he has a weak grip with his right hand, but he still loved to play rugby as a fourteen-year-old. He also had tuberculosis as a child, at one stage believing he was dying because he was coughing up blood.

That Tutu’s mother loved him deeply cannot be taken lightly. because his father used to drink too much and sometimes beat his mother. Tutu survived these experiences, which were so profound and so formative that, as we will see later in this chapter, at one point he thought he should become a doctor.⁵

Tutu recounts that his earliest memories are of Christmastime in a black township in South Africa. It was a time that he recognized even then as something quite special. There was always a flurry of activity even in the poor homes, some of them like matchboxes, some of them more like hovels, in the squalor of the black townships. But to Tutu they were homes nonetheless. A special purgative activity that Tutu referred to was the spring cleaning, when “people put a fresh lick of paint on peeling walls and there was a peculiarly African way of plastering walls with soil and with kraal manure, with some women being very adept at producing intricate patterns in different colors on the walls and floors of the houses.” Tutu can still remember even after these many years the clean and fresh smell in the homes that had all been done up.

Tutu recalls that he looked forward to this special time because even in the poorest home parents bought their children something new to wear, though this might be nothing more exciting than a pair of cheap tennis shoes or a pair of khaki shorts or a pink dress for the girls. It might be the only time in the year when he would be lucky enough to get something new that was his own and not have to wear yet another hand-me-down. So it had to be a special time, for in nearly all the homes, where most parents had their work cut out just to make ends meet, they would have baked tasty little cakes and brewed a delicious ginger beer, because “the township urchins went round to every house to ask for a ‘Christmas box.’” Many in Tutu’s community growing up wanted to have something to give away, and many could afford at least to give as gifts a few of their cakes and ginger beer.⁶

Zachariah Tutu pushed education in the mission schools and was headmaster of a Methodist Church primary school, which caused young Desmond to be baptized in a Methodist church. Tutu recalls, “The Methodist church has certainly mothered me in the faith because it was in this church that I was baptized.”⁷ (Nelson Mandela also was baptized in a small Methodist church in the Eastern Cape village of Qunu.) Tutu had two sisters, Sylvia and Gloria (two brothers died in infancy). Zachariah allowed him to read comics: Superman, Batman and Robin. Tutu states, “I had a huge collection.”⁸

Tutu recalls that he first discovered that there were black people in the United States when he was young, when he picked up a battered copy of Ebony magazine. Tutu said that he grew inches taller with pride as he read the magazine, especially as he read about Jackie Robinson breaking into Major League Baseball. “That did wonders for me as a person.” He also remembered seeing the film Stormy Weather, featuring an all-black cast. Tutu could not recall whether it was a very good film, but he did remember that it made a theological statement depicting how we are all made in imago Dei (the image of God).

Tutu laments that he did not have positive role models as a young person searching for an identity. He says that one way to destroy a person’s self-esteem is to tell them that they don’t have a history, and that they have no roots. The narrative in Tutu’s youth was how white people came in the seventeenth century. “Whenever the Dutch or English colonists went over into black territory and got the blacks’ cattle, the word used was the colonists ‘captured’ the cattle. But . . . the Xhosas always ‘stole’ the cattle. And we were very young, but I mean we began to scratch our heads.”⁹

Tutu spent five years of his childhood in Ventersdorp, a town in the North West Province of South Africa. One day Tutu saw some black children scavenging in the dustbins of the white primary school. The white children received school lunches but had thrown away the prepared lunches. These white children came from homes that were uniformly better off than those of their black counterparts. The logic behind the free school-feeding for white children baffled Tutu. Those who needed feeding most and whose parents could least afford it were denied it, while those whose parents could afford it and who did not really want it had it forced on them.

At the time, the apartheid South African government was spending about ten times more per annum educating a white child than it was spending educating a black child. This gross disparity in economic resources also displayed itself in the education facilities that were available to the different race groups. The white school was attractive, with well-laid-out and well-maintained grounds, airy and well-lit classrooms, adequate sports grounds, well-stocked libraries, and well-equipped laboratories. White schools had qualified teachers with moderately sized classes. “We in contrast were using a church building as our school with several large classes sharing the same room; this situation was unbearable.” Black teachers were not all fully qualified. White counterparts lived in well-appointed residential areas, with bright street lighting, paved streets, waterborne sewage, hot and cold running water, public swimming pools and libraries, as well as other facilities that the well-to-do have come to take for granted.

Tutu fetched water from a communal tap in the street and used the bucket system of toilets. His township had dusty unpaved streets, no street lighting, and hardly any sports or recreational facilities. “What I am describing was not exceptional,” Tutu remembers. It was uniformly the case throughout the Union of South Africa. “South African people had to make do with 13 percent of the surface of the land of their birth, whilst the white minority, no more than 20 percent of the total population, rattled about like a tablet in a box over the vast 87 percent of the land available to them. That was a few decades before World War II.”¹⁰ Tutu would often reminisce about these statistics and often state in his mature years of resisting apartheid that this inequity remains. Although the black middle class has increased slightly with the end of apartheid, the economic scale continues to tip heavily in favor of the white population in South Africa.

For Tutu, the point of this reminiscent stroll down memory lane is to say that even though generations of black South Africans were subject to gross violations of their human rights, had their human dignity trampled on, and were turned into victims of a vicious system of injustice and oppression, these very same black South Africans grew up with faith intact that the world could change. Many white South Africans in Tutu’s childhood thought they could ignore black folks, because they lacked that vital commodity, the political power represented by the vote. For example, Tutu lists the black and colored townships under this assumption when he states, “How many Sophiatowns, District Sixes, Pageviews, Vrededorps, etc. . . . should we point to as evidence that the basic human right to a secure and inviolate home has been grossly violated?” Tutu witnessed these inequities time and again as he grew up in Minsieville, Krugersdorp, Roodepoort, in Western Native Township and in Sophiatown—all destroyed by apartheid’s juggernaut of racism and political power.¹¹

TREVOR HUDDLESTON

As Tutu grew up in the context of apartheid, two major influences emerged from his early youth. They are Trevor Huddleston and, perhaps most vital, Tutu’s mother.¹²

Trevor Huddleston was an enlightened white Anglican monk who became a legend in the black community of Sophiatown, where he lived and preached for twelve years in the towering Church of Christ the King. Huddleston, a member of the Anglican Community of the Resurrection (CR), touched the lives of many in South Africa. Tutu recalls that the

Grammy-nominated jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela got his first trumpet from Father Huddleston, who had got it as a gift from Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, as only he could. . . . And if blacks still talk to white people, an extraordinary miracle in present-day South Africa, then it will be in large measure due to people like Trevor who made us realize that we too count, we too matter in the sight of God, we too, even when we are black, are people to whom hats ought to be doffed.¹³

Tutu recalls that when Huddleston, a tall white monk dressed in his black clerical dress, would walk past the Tutu home, he would always raise his hat to Tutu’s mother, a washerwoman. At the time, Tutu had never seen a white man do anything like that before for a black woman who was not educated.¹⁴ “When did I first meet Father Trevor Huddleston?” Tutu asks. “Oh, he was father to so many in Sophiatown. I thought it was when I started school in 1944 in what was called Western Native Township; it is now Western Colored Township in our country obsessed with color and race. It was a high school started by Father Raymond Raynes when he was priest in charge of Christ the King in Sophiatown, a position in which Father Trevor succeeded him. This would have been in 1945, at the end of World War II.”¹⁵

Tutu made his first good confession to Trevor Huddleston, the beginning of a relationship that would shape Tutu for the rest of his life. Tutu lived in a hostel that the CR fathers opened for young men who were working or at high school and had problems with accommodation. Tutu states, “I made my first real sacramental confession to [Huddleston]. . . . He was so un-English in many ways, being very fond of hugging people, embracing them, and in the way in which he laughed.” Tutu humorously recalls how Huddleston did not laugh like many white people, only with their teeth, he laughed with his whole body, his whole being, and that endeared him very much to black people. If he wore a white cassock, it did not remain clean for long, as he trudged the dusty streets of Sophiatown with the litt...