Desmond Tutu

It was 1947, at the hospital in Rietfontein, South Africa.

A teenager lay there, sick with tuberculosis. He would stay for eighteen months.

Again and again, an Anglican priest came to visit him. His name was Trevor Huddleston. The boy's name was Desmond Tutu.

Desmond was born on October 7, 1931, in Klerksdorp, in the Transvaal. His family was poor. His father was a schoolteacher. His parents were Tswana and Xhosa.

As a teenager, he had lived in an Anglican hostel in Sophiatown, near the Church of Christ the King. He served at the altar there. Huddleston was its priest.

That man would shape his life.

Desmond recovered. He became a teacher. He taught English and history to high school students in Krugersdorp.

In 1955, he married Leah Nomalizo. But the government had imposed the Bantu Education Act. Desmond and Leah left teaching in protest.

He then turned to the Church. He was ordained a deacon in 1960, a priest in 1961. In 1962, he left to study at King's College London.

After his return, one post followed another. In 1975, he became Dean of Johannesburg, the first Black man in that role. Then Bishop of Lesotho.

In 1978, he took charge of the South African Council of Churches. He fought apartheid, without violence.

In 1984, he was in New York when he heard the news: the Nobel Peace Prize. In December, he received it in Oslo.

Two years later, on September 7, 1986, he became Archbishop of Cape Town. Once again, he was the first Black man to hold the post.

In 1994, Desmond Tutu voted for the first time in his life. He was sixty-two. Nelson Mandela was elected president.

After the election, Mandela chose him to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

On April 15, 1996, the first hearing was broadcast live on television.

Victims came to testify. More than 19,000 people were recognized as victims of gross human rights violations.

Perpetrators came too. They could apply for amnesty, on condition that they told everything. Of 7,111 applications, 849 were granted.

The Commission sought a balance between justice, accountability, stability, peace and reconciliation.

The testimony of F. W. de Klerk brought him almost to tears.

In 1999, he told of his experience at the head of the Commission in a book: No Future Without Forgiveness. In it, he also compared South Africa to Northern Ireland, Rwanda and the Balkans.

Tutu also wrote about ubuntu.

He also wrote: "I am because I belong." For him, the solitary human being was a contradiction in terms.

More than anyone, he made ubuntu known to the world.

Desmond Tutu died in Cape Town on December 26, 2021, at the age of ninety.

People remember the archbishop, the Nobel laureate, the Commission.

But first there was a hospital room, a sick boy and a priest who kept coming back to see him.