A leading opponent of South African apartheid, Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1931–) gained fame in the 1970s and 1980s for organizing a wave of nonviolent resistance to his nation’s racist government. In part as a result of his work, South Africa finally abolished apartheid in 1991 and held its first democratic, multiracial elections in 1994.
Tutu, an ordained Anglican minister, emerged from the apartheid struggle one of the world’s most respected human rights advocates. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, chaired South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and remains an influential figure in African and global politics.
Born in Transvaal, South Africa, Tutu worked as a high school teacher before entering the ministry in 1958. At the time, the country’s racial codes made it difficult for blacks to pursue most professions. Following his ordination, he studied and worked in England, returning to South Africa in 1967.
As a black minister with a mostly white congregation, Tutu had a unique place in the struggle against apartheid. Unlike other antiapartheid leaders, such as Nelson Mandela (1918–), Tutu never spent time in prison and never endorsed violence. Instead, he called upon the world to halt investment in South Africa, a strategy that put enormous economic pressure on the apartheid government.
Tutu was elevated to bishop of Lesotho in 1976 and became the archbishop of Cape Town in 1986—the first black to lead South Africa’s Anglican Church.
After the end of apartheid in 1991, Tutu was named to head the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated human rights abuses during the apartheid era. He retired as archbishop in 1996. He left South Africa after being diagnosed with cancer and was successfully treated in the United States. In 2000, he founded the Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation, which is committed to giving a voice to marginalized people who seek to speak their truth in the name of social justice.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- A critic of American foreign policy, Tutu appeared in an off-Broadway play in New York in 2004, Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, in which he played the part of a judge who questioned the legal justification for holding terrorism suspects at the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay.
- Tutu invented the term rainbow nation for multiracial South Africa. South Africans, in turn, invented the nickname “the Arch” for Tutu, who officially holds the title archbishop emeritus.
- Tutu has held several academic posts, including that of visiting professor at Emory University in Atlanta and chancellor of the University of the Western Cape in Bellville, South Africa.
