Desmond Tutu

Desmond Mpilo Tutu was a small man with a large laugh, and from the late 1970s until apartheid fell he was the Black South African voice most widely heard abroad. He rose through the Anglican Church rather than through politics, and used the pulpit, and later a purple archbishop's cassock, as a platform that the apartheid state found very hard to silence. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, became the first Black person to lead his church in Southern Africa, and, when white minority rule ended, presided over the country's attempt to reckon with its past.

He died in Cape Town on 26 December 2021, aged 90. This profile follows the shape of his life in four parts: the making of the churchman, his role in bringing apartheid down, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission he chaired, and the long argument he went on having with power after 1994. Where there are numbers, it uses them; much of what made him effective, a persistent and unembarrassed moral voice, does not reduce to a figure, and the piece says so.

Tutu was born in Klerksdorp, in what is now North West province, in 1931, to a schoolteacher father and a mother who worked as a domestic servant. He wanted to be a doctor but could not afford the training, so he taught instead, then resigned in protest at the Bantu Education Act, the law that deliberately gave Black children a stunted schooling designed to fit them for servitude. He turned to the church and was ordained an Anglican priest in 1960.

He climbed quickly. By 1978 he was the first Black general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, a post that gave him a national and international platform, which he used to condemn apartheid and, pointedly, to call on foreign governments to impose economic sanctions on Pretoria. That stance angered Western leaders and much of white South Africa, and it made him a target at home. In 1984 the Nobel committee awarded him the Peace Prize for his part in a non-violent campaign against apartheid, a decision whose timing turned the world's attention back on the country. In 1985 he became the first Black Anglican Bishop of Johannesburg, and in 1986 the first Black Archbishop of Cape Town, the head of his church across Southern Africa.

When South Africa held its first democratic election in 1994, Tutu reached for an image that stuck: a Rainbow Nation, one country made of many colours. It was hopeful language for a fragile moment, and it became part of how the country described itself. The harder task came the following year. Under the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, the new government created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to confront gross human rights violations committed between 1960 and 1994, and Nelson Mandela asked Tutu to chair it.

The commission's central bargain was unusual and deliberate. Rather than pursue mass prosecutions, it offered perpetrators of politically motivated crimes a route to amnesty from prosecution, on one condition: full and public disclosure of what they had done. Victims, meanwhile, could tell their stories in hearings that were broadcast live and followed by the whole country. Over its work the commission took more than 21,000 statements from victims, and the testimony was often unbearable. Tutu, presiding, sometimes wept at the table.

The commission is still argued over, and Tutu with it. Supporters see it as a model studied around the world, a way for a divided society to establish an agreed record of the past without tipping back into conflict. Critics see a bargain that bought peace at the price of justice. Some victims' families, most famously that of the murdered activist Steve Biko, objected that swapping amnesty for testimony denied them their day in a criminal court. Others complained that the architects of apartheid escaped serious consequence while lower-ranking men confessed and walked free.

What set Tutu apart from many struggle heroes is that liberation did not soften him. He had criticised the apartheid government from the pulpit; after 1994 he turned the same candour on the movement he had helped bring to power. He attacked the ANC over corruption and self-enrichment, clashed with President Thabo Mbeki over the government's denial of the link between HIV and AIDS during an epidemic that killed hundreds of thousands, and warned that a party grown arrogant in office could go the way of the government it replaced.

The breach became explicit in 2011, when South Africa, under pressure from China, declined to grant the Dalai Lama a visa to attend Tutu's own birthday celebration. Tutu, furious, said he would pray for the downfall of a government he had once helped to elect. He championed gay rights when almost no senior cleric would, saying he would refuse a heaven that was homophobic, and at 85 he publicly backed the right to die with dignity, against his own church's teaching. Through The Elders, the group of senior figures he co-founded with Mandela in 2007, he pressed on Darfur and the Middle East, and his willingness to compare the plight of Palestinians to apartheid drew both strong agreement and sharp criticism.

The honours accumulated: the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation's recognition of his lifelong habit of speaking truth to power in 2012, the Templeton Prize in 2013, and a long list of honorary degrees. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1997 and lived with it for nearly a quarter of a century, gradually stepping back from public life from around 2010 while never quite falling silent. When he died on 26 December 2021, tributes came from heads of state, faith leaders and ordinary South Africans; by his own instruction the funeral was austere, with the cheapest available coffin and an eco-friendly alternative to cremation.

The reckoning he led, though, was never fully completed. Reparations to the victims who testified arrived slowly and amounted to far less than the commission had recommended, and almost none of the cases it referred for criminal prosecution were ever pursued. In January 2025, more than two decades on, a group of survivors and victims' families went to the Constitutional Court, arguing that successive governments had deliberately suppressed those investigations. Tutu did not live to see the case, but it belongs to the ledger of the commission he chaired, and to the argument about whether truth without justice was ever going to be enough.