Love is stronger than hate
2010 October 8 tags: apartheid, God by Paul Vallely
[pic]One of the great figures of the twentieth century vowed he was going into retirement yesterday. Do not believe it. Desmond Tutu has retired before and whenever a serious injustice reared its head he has returned.
Desmond Mpilo Tutu was one the central forces in the dismantling of the apartheid state which kept a white elite in power over the black majority in South Africa for nearly five decades, causing untold death and suffering.
In the early years of apartheid various movements of political protest and resistance arose. The white regime responded by arresting tens of thousands of black activists. Many more in the African National Congress (ANC) went into exile, to continue their opposition from abroad.
The torch of resistance back home was passed largely to the South African churches, the one group the white government could not outlaw. Its most prominent leader was Desmond Tutu who in 1975 had become the first black man to be appointed Dean of St. Mary’s Anglican Cathedral in Johannesburg. “It was people of faith who by and large kept the fires of revolution burning,” he later said in an interview for a BBC documentary I presented.
Just a year after his appointment at the cathedral he came to international attention for the vigour of his condemnations of the massacre of schoolchildren in Soweto. Hundred were mown down by white police for protesting against the government’s decision to make black schools use Afrikaans as the language of education.
Tutu bravely spoke out, encouraging the public in the West to launch an economic boycott of his country. Sanctions might throw blacks out of work, Tutu argued, but at least they would be suffering “with a purpose”. He organised peaceful marches which brought tens of thousands of people onto the streets.
But he also travelled abroad,