page_title: Desmond Tutu
section_title: Activism and the Nobel Peace Prize
hierarchical_section_title: Desmond Tutu / Career during apartheid / General-Secretary of the South African Council of Churches: 1978–1985 / Activism and the Nobel Peace Prize
caption_attribution_description: English: 12/7/1984 President meeting with Bishop Desmond Tutu of Anglican Church of South Africa in oval office
context_page_description: Desmond Mpilo Tutu OMSG CH GCStJ is a South African Anglican cleric and theologian known for his work as an anti-apartheid and human rights activist. He was the Bishop of Johannesburg from 1985 to 1986 and then the Archbishop of Cape Town from 1986 to 1996, in both cases being the first black African to hold the position. Theologically, he sought to fuse ideas from black theology with African theology.
  Tutu was born of mixed Xhosa and Motswana heritage to a poor family in Klerksdorp, Union of South Africa. Entering adulthood, he trained as a teacher and married Nomalizo Leah Tutu, with whom he had several children. In 1960, he was ordained as an Anglican priest and in 1962 moved to the United Kingdom to study theology at King's College London. In 1966 he returned to southern Africa, teaching at the Federal Theological Seminary and then the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland. In 1972, he became the Theological Education Fund's director for Africa, a position based in London but necessitating regular tours of the African continent.
context_section_description: During this period, he testified on behalf of a captured cell of the Umkhonto we Sizwe, an armed anti-apartheid group linked to the banned African National Congress (ANC). He stated that although he was committed to non-violence and censured those on all sides who used violence, he could understand why other black Africans would turn towards it when all their non-violent tactics had proved fruitless in overturning apartheid. In an earlier address, he had expressed the view that an armed struggle against the South African government had little chance of succeeding but also called out Western nations for hypocrisy, noting that they were condemning armed liberation groups in southern Africa while they had praised armed liberation groups operating in Europe during the Second World War.
  After Tutu told Danish journalists that he supported an international economic boycott of South Africa, he was called before two government ministers to be reprimanded in October 1979. In March 1980, the government confiscated his passport, an act which raised his international profile and brought condemnations from the US State Department and senior Anglicans like Robert Runcie. Tutu also signed a petition calling for the release of Mandela, an imprisoned anti-apartheid activist; Mandela's freedom was not yet an international cause célèbre. This led to a correspondence between the two men. In 1980, the SACC committed itself to supporting civil disobedience against South Africa's racial laws. After Thorne was arrested in May, Tutu and Joe Wing led a march of protest, during which they were arrested by riot police, imprisoned overnight, and fined. The authorities confiscated Tutu's passport. In the aftermath of the incident, a meeting was organised between 20 church leaders, including Tutu, Prime Minister of South Africa P. W. Botha, and seven government ministers. At this August meeting the clerical leaders unsuccessfully urged the government to dismantle the apartheid laws. Some of the clergy saw this dialogue with the government as pointless, but Tutu disagreed, noting that "Moses went to Pharaoh repeatedly to secure the release of the Israelites".
  In January 1981, the government returned Tutu's passport to him. In March, he embarked on a five-week visit to ten countries in Europe and North America, meeting politicians including the UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, and addressing the UN Special Committee Against Apartheid. In the UK, he met Runcie gave a sermon in Westminster Abbey, while in Rome he spent a few minutes with Pope John Paul II. On his return to South Africa, Botha again ordered his passport confiscated, preventing Tutu from personally collecting several further honorary degrees. It was returned to him 17 months later. In September 1982 he addressed the Triennial Convention of the Episcopal Church in New Orleans before traveling to Kentucky to see his daughter Naomi, who lived there with her American husband. He was troubled that President Ronald Reagan adopted a warmer relationship with the South African government than his predecessor Jimmy Carter, relating that Reagan's government was "an unmitigated disaster for us blacks". Tutu gained a popular following in the US, where he was often compared to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., although white conservatives like Patrick Buchanan and Jerry Falwell lambasted him as an alleged communist sympathiser.
  By the 1980s, Tutu had become an icon for many black South Africans, his stature among them rivalled only by Mandela. In August 1983, South Africans opposed to apartheid formed the United Democratic Front (UDF), with Tutu selected as one of the organisation's patrons. Conversely, he angered the government as well as much of the press and white public. Most of his critics were conservative whites who did not want apartheid to end. He was criticised in pro-government press outlets like The Citizen and the South African Broadcasting Corporation, with this criticism often centering on how his middle-class lifestyle contrasted with the poverty of the blacks he claimed to r
caption: U.S. President Ronald Reagan meeting with Desmond Tutu in 1984. Tutu described Reagan's administration as "an unmitigated disaster for us blacks",[168] and Reagan himself as "a racist pure and simple."[169]
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