The campaigning Archbishop of Cape Town died on December 26th, aged 90
For most of his long life, it did not seem obvious at all. He was a black man in a place where skin colour had a cruel and absurd significance. At the height of apartheid, black South Africans were denied citizenship in their own country. They could not vote; their schools were awful; they could not enter white areas except as servants. Inter-racial love was illegal. Anyone who protested against the hundreds of daily injustices might be whipped—or worse.
Huddleston deeply influenced him, to the extent that after teaching for a while he turned to theology, and was ordained himself in 1960. He was sure now that a man of God could also be a man of action, and that the sinister, euphemistic bureaucratese of apartheid could be rebutted with simple truths, plainly expressed.
He could have retired then, a Nobel peace laureate and giant of the struggle. But he said he found it too hard to shut up. Besides, the crimes of the old era needed to be documented, exposed, repented for and—most important—forgiven. In 1995 he was appointed to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a groundbreaking exercise in restorative, not retributive justice.
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