The former teacher and priest, throughout his life, fought many struggles for human dignity, forgiveness and reconciliation. This close friend of Nelson Mandela, who died on December 26, 2021, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.
Desmond Mpilo Tutu, whose death, at the age of 90, was announced Sunday, December 26, let nothing pass. No slippage, no abuse, no violation of human rights escaped his wrath. Throughout his life, under apartheid as under the successive black governments after the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994, this little devil of a man in a mauve robe did not cease, in the name of justice and equity, to annoy the established powers, to take part in the rulers, to torment the powerful.
Energetic, talkative, mischievous, an actor at will, he never failed to criticize policies wherever they come from. In the course of the multiple and epic battles he waged for human dignity, forgiveness and reconciliation, he had become the benevolent benchmark of a nation in reconstruction, the moral conscience of a country sporadically plagued by the demons of the past. .
For US Senator Edward Kennedy, visiting Pretoria in the 1990s, Desmond Tutu was nothing less than "the Martin Luther King of South Africa". The comparison had pleased him very much. He too had "had a dream", the same, more or less, as that of the murdered pastor. He too, like the great old American, was in his time hunted down, oppressed, vilified and regularly threatened with the worst by the partisans of what he called "the most vicious system ever invented since Nazism", namely "development. separate from races ”- apartheid.
For a long time, Desmond Tutu was, for members of the white Afrikaner minority (in power from 1948 to 1994), "the very embodiment of evil". For a long time, until the last few months, he was, for many black ministers, "the patent bother," the keeper of getting rich in circles, the tireless slayer of everything that was wrong in the "nation. Rainbow ".
So many risks and sacrifices
His courage, his skill, his sagacity, his effervescent, enveloping personality, his cascading laughter, his public tears, his devastating humor and his obvious benevolence towards all that pertained to the human will have ended up disarming the most excited about his criticism. "The People's Archbishop," as his friend Nelson Mandela called him, left no one indifferent. But what work has been done, what risks have been taken and what sacrifices have been made to get there!
Desmond Mpilo Tutu was born on October 7, 1931 in Klerksdorp, two hours west of Johannesburg. His father was a teacher in schools for blacks and opened, before the invention of apartheid in 1948, by Christian missions. The Tutu family is poor "without being miserable", he liked to say. At the age of 4, puny little Desmond fell victim to polio. He will retain discomfort in his left arm all his life.