Archbishop Desmond Tutu was the best kind of troublemaker

THERE WERE many times, Desmond Tutu recalled, “when the apartheid rulers were strutting arrogantly, as if they were invincible cocks of the walk, and our people were being treated as if they were rubbish.” He wanted to whisper in God’s ear, “God, we know that you are in charge. Why don’t you make it slightly more obvious?”

For most of Archbishop Tutu’s long life, it did not seem obvious at all. He was a black man in a place where skin colour was imbued with 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. Racial-classification bureaucrats subjected borderline cases to humiliating “tests”. (If a pencil, inserted in the subject’s hair, did not fall out, they might be deemed non-white, for example.) Black South Africans who protested against the hundreds of daily injustices they faced might be slashed with a sjambok (a fearsome rhino-hide whip)—or worse.