Desmond Tutu

• 1. Introduction

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  Desmond Tutu, the South African Anglican archbishop who spent decades confronting apartheid, asked to be laid to rest in a plain pine coffin. It was the cheapest one available, chosen to avoid any ostentatious display. He died of cancer on the 26th of December 2021 at the Oasis Frail Care Centre in Cape Town, aged 90. His Funeral Mass took place at St George's Cathedral on the 1st of January 2022. Only 100 people could attend because of COVID-19 restrictions.

  For several days beforehand, the cathedral rang its bells for 10 minutes at noon, and national landmarks including Table Mountain glowed purple in his honour. Such a send-off for a man who wanted the humblest coffin raises questions that this documentary will follow. How did a sickly child from a modest family become a figure mourned across a nation? Why did a churchman, rather than a politician, end up as one of the loudest voices against white minority rule? And what did he ask of South Africans when the old order finally fell?

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• 2. Roots and Mentors

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  Tutu was born on the 7th of October 1931 in Klerksdorp, Transvaal, to parents from two different peoples. His mother, Aletta Dorothea Mavoertsek Mathlare, came from a Motswana family in Boksburg. His father, Zachariah Zelilo Tutu, was amaFengu, a branch of the Xhosa, and grew up in Gcuwa in the Eastern Cape. Xhosa was the language of the household. Zachariah was principal of a Methodist primary school, and the family lived in a mud-brick schoolmaster's house in the yard of the mission.

  Tutu later summed up the family's finances with the line "although we weren't affluent, we were not destitute either". Loss was part of the picture. Sipho, the first son, died in infancy, and a third brother, Tamsanqa, born later in Tshing, also died in infancy. His older sister Sylvia Funeka called him "Mpilo", meaning life, a fitting name for a child who was sickly from birth. Polio atrophied his right hand, and serious burns once landed him in hospital.

  Zachariah Tutu was close to his son, yet Tutu was angered by his heavy drinking and his violence toward Tutu's mother. The family also changed churches. Tutu was baptised a Methodist in June 1932, and the family later moved first to the African Methodist Episcopal Church and then to the Anglican Church. In 1936 they settled in Tshing, where he began primary school, learned Afrikaans and served at St Francis Anglican Church. He fell in love with reading, especially comic books and European fairy tales.

  Around 1941 his mother took a job as a cook at the Ezenzeleni Blind Institute in Johannesburg, and Tutu followed her to the city. In 1945 he entered the Johannesburg Bantu High School, also called Madibane High School, and excelled. A school rugby team gave him a lifelong love of the sport. Outside class he earned money selling oranges and caddying for white golfers.

  In Sophiatown he lived in an Anglican hostel near the Church of Christ the King and became a server under the priest Trevor Huddleston. The biographer Shirley du Boulay judged Huddleston "the greatest single influence" in Tutu's life. In 1947 Tutu contracted tuberculosis and spent 18 months in hospital in Rietfontein, where Huddleston visited him regularly. There he was circumcised, marking his passage to manhood. He sat his national exams in late 1950 and earned a second-class pass.

  A place to study medicine at the University of the Witwatersrand was within reach, but his parents could not afford the fees. A government scholarship instead took him in 1951 to Pretoria Bantu Normal College, a teacher training institution. He served as treasurer of the Student Representative Council, helped organise the Literacy and Dramatic Society and chaired the Cultural and Debating Society. At one debating event he met the lawyer Nelson Mandela, whom he would not see again until 1990. The activist Robert Sobukwe advised him on exams. He also completed five correspondence courses with the University of South Africa, graduating in the same class as the future Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe.

  In 1954 Tutu began teaching English at Madibane High School, and the next year he moved to Krugersdorp High School to teach English and history. In June 1955 he married Nomalizo Leah Shenxane, a friend of his sister Gloria who was training as a primary school teacher. They were wed at Krugersdorp Native Commissioner's Court and then at a Roman Catholic ceremony at the Church of Mary Queen of Apostles. Tutu, an Anglican, agreed because of Leah's faith. Their son Trevor was born in April 1956.

  The Bantu Education Act of 1953 ended his teaching career. The National Party government had introduced it to deepen racial segregation, and Tutu and Leah chose to leave the profession rather than serve it. With Huddleston's backing, he decided to become an Anglican priest. In January 1956 the Ordinands Guild turned him down because of his debts, which the wealthy industrialist Harry Oppenheimer then paid off. Tutu entered St Peter's Theological College in Rosettenville, run by the Anglican Community of the Resurrection.

  The college principal, Godfrey Pawson, wrote that Tutu showed no arrogance and "has obvious gifts of leadership". The trainees, Tutu later admitted, were "in some ways a very apolitical bunch", even though the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 fell during those years. Edward Paget ordained him as a priest at St Mary's Cathedral in December 1960. His first post, as assistant curate at St Alban's Parish in Benoni, paid him two-thirds of what his white counterparts earned.

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• 3. Theology Takes Shape

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  In September 1962 Tutu and his family left South Africa for London, where he would study theology at King's College London. Aelfred Stubbs had proposed the plan. Many in the white-dominated Anglican establishment felt that more Black Africans needed positions of authority, and Tutu was to train as a theology teacher. The Theological Education Fund paid for the move, and the government agreed to let the family go.

  In London the Tutus found a life without South Africa's pass laws. Tutu later remarked that "there is racism in England, but we were not exposed to it". He admired the freedom of speech he saw, especially at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park. The family lived in a curate's flat behind the Church of St Alban the Martyr in Golders Green, where he helped with Sunday services. It was the first time he had ministered to a white congregation. A daughter, Mpho Andrea, was born in that flat in 1963.

  His tutors at King's included Dennis Nineham, Christopher Evans, Sydney Evans, Geoffrey Parrinder and Eric Mascall. They suggested he convert to an honours degree, which meant studying Hebrew as well. Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother presented his degree at the Royal Albert Hall. Another grant then funded a master's degree from October 1965 until September 1966, with a dissertation on Islam in West Africa. During that year he was assistant curate of St Mary's Church in Bletchingley, Surrey, where he encouraged cooperation among Anglican, Roman Catholic and Methodist communities. England, he came to feel, drained away his bitterness toward whites and his sense of racial inferiority, and he lost the habit of automatically deferring to white people.

  In 1966 the family stopped in East Jerusalem, where Tutu spent two months at St George's College studying Arabic and Greek. They then settled in Alice in 1967, where the Federal Theological Seminary, known as Fedsem, had recently been formed from training institutions of several denominations. Tutu taught doctrine, the Old Testament and Greek, and was the college's first Black staff member. Leah became its library assistant. The campus allowed a level of racial mixing that was rare in South Africa, and the Tutus sent their children to a private boarding school in Swaziland to keep them away from the Bantu Education syllabus.

  The neighbouring University of Fort Hare made him its Anglican chaplain. In an unusual move for the time, he invited female students as well as male students to serve at the Eucharist. In August 1968 he preached a sermon comparing South Africa's situation with the Eastern Bloc, likening anti-apartheid protests to the recent Prague Spring. In September Fort Hare students staged a sit-in over the administration's policies, and police surrounded them with dogs. Tutu waded into the crowd to pray with the protesters. It was the first time he had seen state power used to crush dissent.

  In January 1970 he moved to a teaching post at the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland in Roma, Lesotho. The job paid twice his Fedsem salary and brought him closer to his children. He also became the college's Anglican chaplain and warden of two student residences. His father died in February 1971. In 1972 the Theological Education Fund offered him the job of director for Africa, based in England. South Africa's government, suspicious of him since the Fort Hare protests, relented after he argued that taking the role would be good publicity for the country.

  Tutu returned to Britain in March 1972, settling in Grove Park, near the fund's headquarters in Bromley. His work meant assessing grants for theological institutions and students, which sent him touring Africa. In Zaire he lamented corruption and poverty, writing that Mobutu Sese Seko's "military regime... is extremely galling to a black from South Africa." In Nigeria he noted Igbo resentment after the crushing of Biafra. In East Africa in 1972 he admired Jomo Kenyatta's government and witnessed Idi Amin expel Ugandan Asians.

  Those journeys, together with his discovery of liberation theology, changed his thinking. In 1973 he attended a conference on Black theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. His paper declared that "black theology is an engaged not an academic, detached theology." He added that "No permission is being requested for it to come into being." He wanted to fuse the African-American Black theology with African theology. That set him apart from African theologians such as John Mbiti, who regarded Black theology as a foreign import irrelevant to Africa. In 1975 he would return to southern Africa, where a cathedral deanship awaited him.

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• 4. Firsts in the Church

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  In 1975 Tutu lost the contest for Bishop of Johannesburg to Timothy Bavin. Bavin then suggested that Tutu take his vacated post as dean of St Mary's Cathedral. Tutu was elected in March, the first Black man in the role, which was the fourth highest in South Africa's Anglican hierarchy. The news made headlines. The cathedral was packed when he was installed in August.

  Houston-style comfort was never the plan. Tutu skipped the official dean's residence in Houghton, a white suburb, and took a house on a middle-class street in Orlando West, in Soweto. The congregation was mostly white but racially mixed, which gave him hope that a desegregated South Africa was possible. He met resistance when he tried to modernise the liturgy, including by replacing masculine pronouns with gender-neutral ones.

  In March 1976 he was elected Bishop of Lesotho, a job he did not want and reluctantly accepted. Some of his Johannesburg congregation felt he had used their parish as a stepping stone. Bill Burnett consecrated him in July at St Mary's Cathedral, and in August thousands attended his enthronement at the Cathedral of St Mary and St James in Maseru, including King Moshoeshoe II and Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan. Travelling the largely rural diocese, Tutu learned Sesotho. He named Philip Mokuku the diocese's first dean and stressed further education for Basotho clergy. He befriended the royal family, though relations with Jonathan's government were strained.

  Tutu took charge of the South African Council of Churches in March 1978. John Rees had stepped down as general secretary, and his successor John Thorne left after three months. Tutu agreed to step in at the urging of the synod of bishops, which angered Anglicans in Lesotho who felt abandoned. The council was based at Khotso House in Johannesburg, and Tutu was its first Black leader. He introduced daily staff prayers, regular Bible study, a monthly Eucharist and silent retreats. He appointed senior staff able to take initiative and delegated much of the detailed work to them. Many staff called him "Baba", meaning father.

  Biographer Shirley du Boulay called Tutu "a man of many layers" with "contradictory tensions". His warmth and uninhibited manner startled many of the reserved English people he met, yet it endeared him to almost everyone. She described a child with a quicksilver mind and a disarming honesty. He was rarely angry in personal dealings, unless he felt his integrity was being challenged.

  Fundraising dominated his years at the council. During his tenure it emerged that one divisional director had been stealing funds, and in 1981 the judge C. F. Eloff headed a government commission into the matter. Tutu told it that apartheid was "evil" and "unchristian". When the report appeared, he criticised the absence of theologians on the commission, likening it to "a group of blind men" judging the Chelsea Flower Show. In 1981 he also became rector of St Augustine's Church in Orlando West. His sermons and speeches filled Crying in the Wilderness in 1982 and Hope and Suffering in 1984.

  An elective assembly met at St Barnabas' College in October 1984 to choose a new Bishop of Johannesburg. Tutu was one of the two most popular candidates, but the white laity voting bloc kept voting against him. To break the deadlock, a bishops' synod appointed him. Black Anglicans celebrated, while some white Anglicans withdrew their diocesan quota in protest. He was enthroned in February 1985 as the sixth bishop, over the country's largest diocese, with 102 parishes and 300,000 parishioners, about 80% of them Black.

  In February 1986 the Black Solidarity Group began a plan to make Tutu the next Archbishop of Cape Town after Philip Russell announced his retirement. Tutu was in Atlanta, Georgia, receiving the Martin Luther King, Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize when they met. He won a two-thirds majority from both clergy and laity, then a unanimous vote from the synod of bishops. He was again the first Black man in the post, and some white Anglicans left the church in protest. More than 1,300 people attended his enthronement at the Cathedral of St George the Martyr on the 7th of September 1986. Afterwards he held an open-air Eucharist for 10,000 people at the Cape Showgrounds in Goodwood, inviting Albertina Sisulu and Allan Boesak to give political speeches.

  He moved into the archbishop's residence, Bishopscourt, which was illegal because he had no permission to live in what the state called a "white area". He paid for renovations with church money, installed a children's playground, and opened the grounds and swimming pool to members of his diocese. He also invited the English priest Francis Cull to found the Institute of Christian Spirituality in the grounds. His ministry took a growing share of the church's budget, and some Anglicans criticised the spending. Njongonkulu Ndungane, his executive officer, and Michael Nuttall, elected dean of the province in 1989, helped manage his workload.

  In church meetings Tutu drew on African custom, seeking compromise so that votes ended unanimous rather than divided. He won approval for ordaining women as priests, having compared their exclusion to apartheid. He also appointed gay priests to senior positions and privately criticised the church's insistence that gay priests stay celibate.

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• 5. Confronting the State

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  In May 1976 Tutu wrote to Prime Minister B. J. Vorster, warning that the country would erupt in racial violence if the government maintained apartheid. Six weeks later the Soweto uprising began as Black youth clashed with police. Over ten months at least 660 people died, most of them under 24. Tutu was troubled by the lack of outrage among white South Africans. In a Sunday sermon he called their silence "deafening" and asked whether they would have been so unmoved had white youths been killed.

  His chosen weapons were prayer, protest and economic pressure. As dean he publicly endorsed an international economic boycott of South Africa. He shared a platform with Winnie Mandela against the Terrorism Act, 1967, and held a 24-hour vigil at the cathedral, praying for activists detained under it. In September 1977 he travelled to the Eastern Cape for the funeral of Steve Biko, the Black Consciousness activist killed by police. There he called Black Consciousness "a movement by which God, through Steve, sought to awaken in the black person a sense of his intrinsic value and worth as a child of God".

  In October 1979 government ministers reprimanded Tutu for telling journalists he supported an economic boycott. In March 1980 the government confiscated his passport, which only raised his international profile. That year the Council of Churches committed itself to supporting civil disobedience. After John Thorne's arrest in May, Tutu and Joe Wing led a protest march. They were arrested, held overnight and fined.

  In August 1980-20 church leaders including Tutu met Prime Minister P. W. Botha and seven ministers. The clergy failed to persuade the government to end apartheid. Some colleagues thought the dialogue pointless, but Tutu replied: "Moses went to Pharaoh repeatedly to secure the release of the Israelites." His passport came back in January 1981. In March he made a five-week tour of Europe and North America, meeting UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, addressing the UN Special Committee Against Apartheid, preaching in Westminster Abbey and meeting Pope John Paul II in Rome. Botha ordered the passport confiscated again, so Tutu could not collect several more honorary degrees. It was returned 17 months later.

  In the United States Tutu won a popular following and was often compared to Martin Luther King Jr. White conservatives such as Pat Buchanan and Jerry Falwell attacked him as an alleged communist sympathiser. In August 1983 he became a patron of the new United Democratic Front. During a three-month sabbatical in New York in 1984, he addressed the UN Security Council, met the Congressional Black Caucus and visited the White House. He failed to persuade President Ronald Reagan to change course on South Africa. He called Reagan's government "an unmitigated disaster for us blacks" and later called Reagan "a racist pure and simple".

  While in New York in 1984, Tutu learned he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. He had been nominated in 1981-1982 and 1983. The committee wanted to honour a South African and judged Tutu a less controversial choice than Mandela or Mangosuthu Buthelezi. A bomb scare hampered the ceremony in Oslo in December. He shared the US$192,000 prize money with his family, council staff and a scholarship fund for South Africans in exile. Only Albert Luthuli, in 1960, had won it before him among South Africans. The South African government and mainstream media played the award down or criticised it, while the Organisation of African Unity hailed it as evidence that apartheid's end was near.

  In his inaugural sermon as Bishop of Johannesburg in 1985, Tutu urged the world to impose economic sanctions unless apartheid was being dismantled within 18 to 24 months. In October he told the political committee of the UN General Assembly that the deadline should be six months. He then met Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and set up the Bishop Tutu Scholarship Fund for South African students in exile. In August 1986 he visited Japan, China and Jamaica to promote sanctions. With most senior anti-apartheid leaders imprisoned, Mandela called Tutu "public enemy number one for the powers that be".

  At home, the pro-government newspaper The Citizen and the South African Broadcasting Corporation attacked him, often contrasting his middle-class lifestyle with the poverty of the people he claimed to represent. The white far-right group Wit Wolwe sent him hate mail and death threats. His angry rhetoric also alienated white liberals such as Alan Paton and Bill Burnett, who believed apartheid could be reformed gradually. Helen Suzman remained close to him.

  In March 1988 Tutu took up the cause of the Sharpeville Six, who had been sentenced to death. He telephoned representatives of the American, British and German governments, urging them to pressure Botha, and met Botha at his Tuynhuys home. The two argued. Botha accused Tutu of backing the ANC's armed campaign, and Tutu answered that he opposed their violence but supported their aim of a non-racial, democratic South Africa. The death sentences were commuted.

  In May 1988 the Stratkom wing of the State Security Council launched a covert campaign against Tutu. Security police printed leaflets and stickers with anti-Tutu slogans, and unemployed Black people were paid to protest when he arrived at the airport. Traffic police briefly jailed Leah for being late renewing her motor vehicle licence. Security police organised assassination attempts on other Christian leaders, but later claimed they never did so for Tutu, judging him too high-profile.

  In September 1989 Tutu organised a protest march through Cape Town that the new president, F. W. de Klerk, agreed to permit. An estimated 30,000 people of many races took part, and the permission inspired similar demonstrations across the country. In October de Klerk met Tutu, Allan Boesak and Frank Chikane. Tutu was struck that, as he put it, "we were listened to".

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• 6. Violence and Negotiation

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  Tutu once testified on behalf of a captured cell of Umkhonto we Sizwe, an armed anti-apartheid group linked to the banned African National Congress. He said he was committed to non-violence and censured all who used violence, yet he could understand why Black Africans turned to it after peaceful tactics had failed. In an earlier address he judged that an armed struggle had little chance of beating the government. He also accused Western nations of hypocrisy for condemning southern African liberation groups after praising similar organisations in Europe during the Second World War. He signed a petition for Mandela's release, which began a correspondence between the two men.

  In the mid-1980s clashes between Black youths and the security services made funerals a regular duty. Tutu was invited to speak at many for those killed. At a funeral in Duduza he stepped in to stop a crowd from killing a Black man accused of being a government informant. His stand against the torture and killing of suspected collaborators angered some Black South Africans, for whom his calls for non-violence were an obstacle to revolution.

  In January 1985 Tutu accompanied the American politician Ted Kennedy on a visit to South Africa. He was angered when protesters from the Azanian People's Organisation, who saw Kennedy as an agent of capitalism and American imperialism, disrupted proceedings. The ANC called on its supporters to make South Africa "ungovernable", foreign companies increasingly pulled out, and the rand sank to a record low. In July 1985 Botha declared a state of emergency in 36 magisterial districts, suspending civil liberties. He rebuffed Tutu's offer to act as a go-between. That year Tutu also floated a national strike against apartheid without consulting the trade unions, who were angered.

  In February 1990 de Klerk lifted the ban on parties such as the ANC, and Tutu phoned to praise the move. De Klerk then announced Mandela's release. At the ANC's request, Mandela and Winnie Mandela spent his first night of freedom at Bishopscourt. Tutu and Mandela met at Cape Town City Hall, where Mandela spoke to the crowds. Mandela also attended that month's synod of bishops and called Tutu the "people's archbishop". The bishops urged an end to foreign sanctions once the transition to universal suffrage was "irreversible", asked anti-apartheid groups to end armed struggle, and banned Anglican clergy from belonging to political parties. Many priests were angry that this came without consultation, but Tutu argued that party membership would divide congregations.

  In March 1990 violence broke out in kwaZulu between supporters of the ANC and of Inkatha. Tutu joined a Council of Churches delegation for talks in Ulundi with Mandela, de Klerk and the Inkatha leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Church leaders urged Mandela and Buthelezi to hold a joint rally. Tutu's relationship with Buthelezi had always been strained, partly because Buthelezi worked within the government's Bantustan system. Still, Tutu repeatedly visited him to encourage his involvement in democracy.

  As the violence spread into the Transvaal, Tutu toured affected townships in the Witwatersrand and met victims of the Sebokeng and Boipatong massacres. Like many activists, he believed a "third force" was stoking tensions. It later emerged that intelligence agencies were supplying Inkatha with weapons to weaken the ANC's negotiating position. Unlike some ANC figures, Tutu never accused de Klerk of personal complicity. In November 1990 he held a summit at Bishopscourt of church and Black political leaders, urging the latter to tell their supporters to avoid violence and allow free campaigning. He later spoke at the funeral of the Communist Party leader Chris Hani outside Soweto. Exhausted and unwell, he took a four-month sabbatical at Emory University's Candler School of Theology in Atlanta.

  Tutu was thrilled that South Africa might reach universal suffrage through negotiation rather than civil war. He let his face appear on posters urging people to vote. When the multi-racial election came in April 1994, he told reporters, "we are on cloud nine", and cast his own vote in Cape Town's Gugulethu township. He then planned the religious part of Mandela's inauguration, insisting that Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Hindu leaders all take part.

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• 7. Truth and Forgiveness

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  Parliament passed the law creating the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in July 1995. The new government faced a hard question: how to answer the abuses committed by both the state and anti-apartheid activists. The National Party wanted a comprehensive amnesty, while the ANC wanted trials of former state figures. Alex Boraine helped Mandela's government draft the legislation. Michael Nuttall suggested Tutu as one of the commission's seventeen commissioners, and a synod of bishops formally nominated him in September. Mandela named him chair, with Boraine as deputy.

  Tutu proposed a threefold approach. Those responsible would confess and disclose their activities in full, receive forgiveness in the form of legal amnesty, and then make restitution to their victims. He championed "restorative justice", which he considered typical of traditional African jurisprudence "in the spirit of ubuntu". The commission employed over 300 staff in three committees and sometimes held as many as four hearings at once.

  Running it meant managing its own members, many of whom distrusted each other. Some had been anti-apartheid activists and others had supported the apartheid system. Tutu admitted that "we really were like a bunch of prima donnas, frequently hypersensitive, often taking umbrage easily at real or imagined slights." He opened meetings with prayers and often cited Christian teaching, which frustrated those who felt a secular body had too many religious elements.

  The first hearing took place in April 1996, and the hearings were televised. Tutu had little control over the committee that granted amnesty. He chaired the one that heard accounts of abuses by both anti-apartheid and apartheid figures. Listening to victims, he was sometimes overwhelmed and cried during the hearings. He singled out those victims who expressed forgiveness toward the people who had harmed them and made them his leitmotif.

  The revelations tarnished the ANC's image, since some of its activists had engaged in torture, attacks on civilians and other abuses. The party tried to suppress part of the final report, which infuriated Tutu. He warned of the ANC's "abuse of power", saying that "yesterday's oppressed can quite easily become today's oppressors." In October 1998 he handed the five-volume report to Mandela at a public ceremony in Pretoria. He was pleased with what the commission achieved and believed it would aid long-term reconciliation, though he acknowledged its shortcomings.

  Tutu popularised the phrase "Rainbow Nation" for post-apartheid South Africa. He had first used the image in 1989, when he called a multi-racial protest crowd the "rainbow people of God". He practised what liberation theologians call "critical solidarity", backing democratic forces while reserving the right to criticise his allies. He disapproved of Mandela's bright Madiba shirts, and Mandela joked that this was ironic coming from a man who wore dresses. More seriously, Tutu criticised Mandela's keeping of the apartheid-era armaments industry and the generous pay of new members of parliament. Mandela hit back, calling him a "populist" who should have raised these matters privately. Mandela's successor, Thabo Mbeki, would prove an even harder relationship.

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• 8. A Voice Beyond Apartheid

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  In October 1994 Tutu announced he would retire as archbishop in 1996. The other bishops gave him a new title, "archbishop emeritus". At a farewell in June 1996 at St George's Cathedral, Mandela awarded him the Order for Meritorious Service, South Africa's highest honour. Njongonkulu Ndungane succeeded him. In January 1997 Tutu was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and he announced it publicly to encourage other men to be examined. The disease returned in 1999 and 2006.

  He then took visiting posts abroad, partly so that his presence would not overshadow Ndungane. At Emory University from 1998 to 2000 he wrote No Future Without Forgiveness, about the commission. He taught at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in early 2002 and at the University of North Carolina in 2003. In January 2004 he became visiting professor of postconflict societies at King's College London. A speakers' agency booked his lectures, which gave him a financial independence that his clerical pension could not. In June 2000 the Desmond Tutu Peace Centre opened in Cape Town.

  After the 1998 Lambeth Conference reaffirmed the church's opposition to same-sex sexual acts, Tutu said he was "ashamed to be an Anglican." He equated discrimination against gay people with discrimination against Black people and women. In 2007 he declared: "If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God." In 2011 he asked the Anglican Church of Southern Africa to conduct same-sex marriages, and in 2015 he blessed his daughter Mpho's marriage to a woman in the Netherlands. In 2014 he backed legalised assisted dying and said he wanted that option for himself.

  In June 2003 he said of HIV and AIDS: "Apartheid tried to destroy our people and apartheid failed. If we don't act against HIV-AIDS, it may succeed." In 2006 he launched a campaign with the aid organisation Plan to register all children at birth, aimed at combating child trafficking. Before the 2005 G8 summit at Gleneagles, he urged world leaders to promote free trade with poorer countries and to end expensive taxes on anti-AIDS drugs.

  South Africa's own leaders did not escape him. At the 2004 Nelson Mandela Lecture in Johannesburg, he accused the ANC under Thabo Mbeki of demanding "sycophantic, obsequious conformity". Mbeki had accused him of criminalising the ANC's armed struggle through the commission and of being a populist, while Tutu disliked Mbeki's neglect of the AIDS pandemic. In 2006 Tutu criticised the "moral failings" of Jacob Zuma, who faced accusations of rape and corruption. He attacked the government's quiet diplomacy toward Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and in 2008 he called for a UN peacekeeping force. In 2013 he said he would no longer vote for the ANC, citing its failures on inequality, violence and corruption.

  Across Africa he was equally outspoken. In 1987 he gave the keynote speech at the All Africa Conference of Churches in Lomé, Togo, and was elected its president. He worked closely with the general secretary, José Belo. In 1989 they visited Zaire to urge churches to distance themselves from Mobutu's government. In 1994 they visited war-torn Liberia and met Charles Taylor, whose promise of a ceasefire Tutu did not trust. In 1995 Mandela sent him to Nigeria to ask the military leader Sani Abacha to free the imprisoned politicians Moshood Abiola and Olusegun Obasanjo. In July 1995 he preached to 10,000 people in Kigali, a year after the Rwandan genocide, urging mercy tempering justice toward the Hutus who had orchestrated it.

  In July 2007 Tutu became chair of The Elders, a group of world leaders gathered to bring wisdom and integrity to hard problems. He served until May 2013, when he said, "As Elders we should always oppose presidents for Life." The group's first mission, in October 2007, took him to Sudan to keep Darfur in the spotlight. Elders delegations also carried him to Ivory Coast, Cyprus, Ethiopia, India, South Sudan and the Middle East.

  His other causes ranged widely. At the 1988 Lambeth Conference he backed a resolution condemning violence by all sides in Northern Ireland, and he visited Belfast in 1998 and 2001. In February 2003 he broke his rule against joining protests outside South Africa and marched in New York City against the planned Iraq War. He called detentions at Guantánamo "utterly unacceptable" and in 2012 called for George W. Bush and Tony Blair to face the International Criminal Court. In 2008 he marched in San Francisco for Tibet. When he invited the Dalai Lama to his 80th birthday in October 2011, South Africa did not grant entry. He also joined the 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen and called for fossil fuel divestment, comparing it to the boycott of apartheid South Africa.

  On Israel and the Palestinians he held a consistent line. He compared Israel's treatment of Palestinians with apartheid, recognised Israel's right to exist, and called for a Palestinian state and a two-state solution. In 1989 he laid a wreath at Yad Vashem and preached on forgiving the perpetrators of the Holocaust, which drew criticism from Jewish groups worldwide. Alan Dershowitz and David Bernstein later called him antisemitic over his remarks about "the Jewish lobby". Tutu stressed that his criticisms were aimed at the Israeli government rather than at Jews. In 2002 he called for sanctions against Israel, and in 2006 he cancelled a UN fact-finding trip to Beit Hanoun after Israel refused him travel clearance.

  In June 2007 thieves stole his Nobel Prize medal from his Johannesburg home, and it was recovered a week later. In October 2010 he announced his retirement from public life to spend time "at home with my family - reading and writing and praying and thinking". He nonetheless kept speaking. He wrote in support of the imprisoned whistleblower Chelsea Manning in November 2012, condemned oil sands extraction in Fort McMurray in 2014, and in 2017 joined other Nobel laureates in urging Saudi Arabia to halt 14 executions. In September 2017 he asked Aung San Suu Kyi to stop the army's persecution of the Rohingya.

  His last prominent statement on world affairs was an op-ed in the Guardian on the 30th of December 2020. In it he urged incoming President Joe Biden to declare that Israel had nuclear weapons and to end all financial aid, which he believed would lead to the fall of what he called Israel's apartheid system.

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