Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu’s legacy will live on

Ryland Fisher

There is a certain irony in Archbishop Desmond Tutu choosing his last day on earth to be 26 December 2021 – the Day of Goodwill in South Africa and a day after the world celebrated the birth of Jesus Christ.

I use the word “choosing” because I know that, over the past few months, he had basically prepared his family and everyone around him for his final day. Everyone knew he would be going soon; it was only a matter of when. The cancer which he had been battling for many years was eating away at his body and it must have been sad for his family to see someone who was so strong being so weak in his final days.

Irony has always been a strong part of Desmond Tutu’s life. Even during the days of apartheid, while he was in the forefront of the struggle, there were some young comrades, including myself, who felt that he might have been too soft on the proponents of apartheid. There were many others, including conservatives in the church, who felt that he was too outspoken against apartheid.

Later, after I became one of the first black editors of a major South African daily newspaper, the Cape Times, in 1996, I began to interact with him a lot and developed a greater understanding of this great man whose only fault was to love South Africa and his family unconditionally.

The Arch loved to laugh, especially at himself, and would often tell jokes in which he was the subject of the humour. But he was also prepared to tell jokes which might not seem politically correct. Once, he said that the first time he boarded a plane and heard that the pilot was black, he started praying. And when he asked the (black) air hostess for black pepper, she brought him the Sowetan. He would then laugh out loud. He told these jokes as a way of pointing out certain absurdities and ironies in life.

At 90, the Arch had a good innings and made his mark on the world, whether it was as the Bishop of Johannesburg, the general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, the chairperson of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) or as one of South Africa’s four Nobel Peace Laureates.

Publicly, he dealt with the big issues in society, but privately, he dealt with many seemingly smaller problems, including a host of requests from family and friends.

I remember once, in 2003, when I was at the home of my good friend, the Rev Buck Bellmore, who was Archbishop Tutu’s chaplain while he was convalescing from prostrate cancer at Emory University in Atlanta in the late 1990s, I received a call. It was unusual for me to receive a call at Buck’s house, because no one really knew I was there. The person on the other end of the line greeted me in Afrikaans with a “Hoe gaan dit, boet?” (roughly translated as “How is it going, brother?”) and I spent a few second trying to figure out who it was.

It was the Arch who told me he was in Atlanta for one night, staying at his daughter’s house, and he wanted to know if I would like to come for dinner that evening. Buck and his wife, Connie-Dee, were away at the time and I was helping to look after their children, Thomas and Sarah, but I agreed immediately. That evening, I drove Buck’s car on the wrong side of the road (like they do in America) and went to meet him at the house his daughter, Thandeka Tutu-Gxashe, shared with her husband and son.

For a few hours that night, Thandeka, her husband, the Arch and me, spoke about South Africa and the world and his frustration with Thabo Mbeki, who was still President of South Africa. He spoke about how Nelson Mandela had to intervene to ensure that Mbeki accepted the report he had prepared as the chairperson of the TRC, after Mbeki was initially reluctant. The report had made some adverse findings against the ANC, among many others. But we also spoke about many other things, such as the importance of family and the Arch cracked many jokes, which we all appreciated.

A few years later, Buck had left Atlanta, where he had a parish, to join another Episcopal church in Mobile, Alabama. He did not last long and soon found himself unemployed, mainly because of his outspokenness. I went to visit Buck in Mobile while he was unemployed and, soon after I after I returned, I went for dinner at the Arch’s house in Milnerton. I told him about Buck’s situation and asked him to see whether he could put in a good word to someone in America on behalf of Buck. I also asked him to give Buck a call, especially as it was shortly before Christmas.

The day after Christmas, I received a call from Buck, saying that he had been offered a job in Las Vegas and Archbishop Tutu had called him on Christmas day.

Tutu never hesitated to give of himself to the world and, in his later years, became as outspoken about more “modern” issues, such as climate change, xenophobia, gender-based violence and the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community.

When I wrote my book, Race, which was published in 2007, the Arch willingly agreed to write the foreword, even though he thought I was “a little bit crazy”.

He wrote in the foreword that “This [writing a book about race] was not a job to be approached lightly and, irrespective of how you approached it, it was bound to upset some people.” He was very pleased when I went to take him a copy of the book after it was published, but still insisted that I was crazy.

I interviewed Archbishop Tutu on his 70th and 80th birthdays. He did not do any interviews when he turned 90 in October this year because he was already very weak. The last time I interviewed him, we spoke about many issues, from child marriages to his views on the quality of South Africa’s freedom and some of low points of his life. Some of the low points, he said at the time, was when Barney Pityana and others were expelled from Fort Hare University because they were protesting, the Boipatong massacre and the death in police custody of people like Steve Biko.

I asked him about his legacy. His response was: “You can’t ask someone about his legacy. That is for other people to worry about. You cannot sit and say you want to be remembered in this way or that way.” He remained self-deprecating until the end. But his legacy will live on.

(First published by IOL on Sunday, 26 December 2021)