Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who died Sunday at the age of 90, was a consistent voice for nonviolent social change, campaigning against apartheid, advocating for gay rights, and speaking out against the Iraq War.
There are times in my life—in many lives—when multiple identities come into play. I was born in Due West, South Carolina, during, and was what was known in some quarters as a P.K., a preacher’s kid. Both my grandfather and my father were ministers in the A.M.E. church. My father was an Army chaplain, and so we moved around a lot. At an Army school in Alaska, I was the one Black kid in class, and when we moved to Atlanta things weren’t a whole lot better.
Tutu, who was an Anglican bishop and won the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1984, was born to a poor family in the city of Klerksdorp. Like the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Desmond Tutu could not abide violence, which made him an outlier for some in the anti-apartheid campaign. Though there were more radical voices, certainly, in the movement, his bravery as a cleric was consistent: he became a powerful advocate of gay rights, and spoke out against the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
In 1997, I moved to Johannesburg to be the South Africa correspondent for National Public Radio. Apartheid, of course, had been defeated, Nelson Mandela had ascended to the Presidency, and Tutu was now the chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As I said in one of my reports at the time: “Archbishop Tutu has shown himself to be a man of many faces. . . .
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