Desmond Mpilo Tutu was born on 7 October 1931 in Klerksdorp, a city in northwest South Africa. His mother, Allen Dorothea Mavoertsek Mathlare, was born to a Motswana family in Boksburg. His father, Zachariah Zelilo Tutu, was from the amaFengu branch of Xhosa and had grown up in Gcuwa, Eastern Cape. At home, the couple both spoke the Xhosa language. Zachariah trained as a primary school teacher at Lovedale college before taking a post in Boksburg, where he married his wife. In the late 1920s, he took a job in Klerksdorp; in the Afrikaaner-founded city, he and his wife resided in the black residential area. Established in 1907, it was then known as the “native location” although was later renamed Makoetend. The native location housed a diverse community; although most residents were Tswana, it also housed Xhosa, Sotho, and a few Indian traders. Zachariah worked as the principal of a Methodist primary school and the family lived in the schoolmaster’s house, a small mud-brick building in the yard of the Methodist mission.

The Tutus were poor; describing his family, Tutu later related that “although we weren’t affluent, we were not destitute either”. Tutu had an older sister, Sylvia Funeka, who called him “Mpilo” (“life”), a name given to him by his paternal grandmother. The rest of the family called him “Boy”. He was his parent’s second son; their firstborn boy, Sipho, had died in infancy. Another daughter, Gloria Lindiwe, would be born after him. Tutu was sickly from birth; polio resulted in the atrophy of his right hand, and on one occasion he was hospitalised with serious burns. Tutu had a close relationship with his father, although was angered at the latter’s heavy drinking, during which he would sometimes beat his wife. The family were initially Methodists and Tutu was baptised into the Methodist Church in June 1932. They subsequently changed denominations, first to the African Methodist Episcopal Church and then to the Anglican Church.

In 1936, the family moved to Tshing, where Zachariah was employed as the principal of a Methodist school; they lived in a hut in the school yard. There, Tutu started his primary education and played football with the other children, also becoming the server at St Francis Anglican Church. He developed a love of reading, particularly enjoying comic books and European fairy tales. Here, he also learned Afrikaans, the main language of the area. It was in Tshing that his parents had a third son, Tamsanqa, who also died in infancy. Around 1941, Tutu’s mother moved to Witwatersrand to work as a cook at Ezenzeleni Blind Institute in western Johannesburg. Tutu joined her in the city, first living with an aunt in Roodepoort West before they secured their own house in the township. In Johannesburg, he attended a Methodist primary school before transferring to the Swedish Boarding School (SBS) in the St Agnes Mission. Several months later, he moved with his father to Ermelo, eastern Transvaal. After six months, the duo returned to live with the rest of the family in Roodepoort West, where Tutu resuming his studies at SBS. He had pursued his interest in Christianity and at the age of 12 underwent confirmation at St Mary’s Church, Roodepoort.

Tutu failed the arithmetic component of his primary school exam, but despite this, his father secured him entry to the Johannesburg Bantu High School in 1945, where he excelled academically. There, he joined a school rugby team, developing a lifelong love of the sport. Outside of school, he earned money selling oranges and as a caddie for white golfers. To avoid the expense of a daily train commute to school, he briefly lived with family nearer to Johannesburg, before moving back in with his parents when they relocated to Munsieville. He then returned to Johannesburg by moving into a hostel that was part of the Anglican complex surrounding the Church of Christ the King in Sophiatown. He became a server at the church and came under the influence of its priest, Trevor Huddleston; later biographer Shirley du Boulay suggested that Huddleston was “the greatest single influence” in Tutu’s life. In 1947, Tutu contracted tuberculosis and was hospitalised in Rietfontein for 18 months, during which he spent much of his time reading and was regularly visited by Huddleston. In the hospital, he underwent a circumcision to mark his transition to manhood. He returned to school in 1949 and took his national exams in late 1950, gaining a second-class pass.

Wanting to become a doctor, Desmond Tutu secured admission to study medicine at the University of the Witwatersrand; however, his parents could not afford the tuition fees. Instead, he turned toward teaching, gaining a government scholarship to start a course at Pretoria Bantu Normal College, a teacher training institution, in 1951. There, he served as treasurer of the Student Representative Council, helped to organise the Literacy and Dramatic Society, and chaired the Cultural and Debating Society for two years. It was during one local debating event that he first met the lawyer—and future president of South Africa—Nelson Mandela; the latter did not remember the meeting and they would not encounter each other again until 1990. At the college, Tutu attained his Transvaal Bantu Teachers Diploma, having gained advice about taking exams from the activist Robert Sobukwe. He had also taken five correspondence courses provided by the University of South Africa (UNISA), graduating in the same class as future Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe.

In 1953, the white-minority National Party government had introduced the Bantu Education Act as a means of furthering their apartheid system of racial segregation and white domination; both Tutu and his wife disliked these changes and decided to leave the teaching profession. With Huddleston’s support, Tutu left the teaching profession to become an Anglican priest. In January 1956, his request to join the Ordinands Guild was turned down due to the debts he had accrued; these were then paid off by the wealthy industrialist and philanthropist Harry Oppenheimer. Tutu was admitted to St Peter’s Theological College in Rosettenville, Johannesburg, which was run by the Anglican Community of the Resurrection. The college was residential, and Tutu lived there while his wife moved to train as a nurse in Sekhukhuneland and his children lived with his parents in Munsieville. In August 1960, his wife gave birth to another daughter, Naomi.

In 1954, he began teaching English at Madibane High School; the following year, he transferred to the Krugersdorp High School, where he taught English and history. He began courting Nomalizo Leah Shenxane, a friend of his sister Gloria who was studying to become a primary school teacher. They were legally married at Krugersdorp Native Commissioner’s Court in June 1955, before undergoing a Roman Catholic wedding ceremony at the Church of Mary Queen of Apostles; although he was an Anglican, Tutu had agreed to the ceremony due to Leah’s Roman Catholic faith. The newly married couple initially lived in a room at Tutu’s parental home before renting their own home six months later. Their first child, Trevor, was born in April 1956; their first daughter, Thandeka, appeared 16 months later. The couple worshipped at St Paul’s Church, where Tutu volunteered as a Sunday school teacher, assistant choirmaster, church councillor, lay preacher, and sub-deacon, while outside of the church he also volunteered as a football administrator for a local team.

On 2 July 1955, Tutu married Nomalizo Leah Shenxane, a teacher whom he had met while at college. They had four children: Trevor Thamsanqa, Theresa Thandeka, Naomi Nontombi and Mpho Andrea, all of whom attended the Waterford Kamhlaba School in Swaziland. Du Boulay referred to him as “a loving and concerned father”, while Allen described him as a “loving but strict father” to his children.

At the college, Tutu studied the Bible, Anglican doctrine, church history, and Christian ethics, earning a Licentiate of Theology degree. The college’s principal, Godfrey Pawson, wrote that Tutu “has exceptional knowledge and intelligence and is very industrious. At the same time he shows no arrogance, mixes in well and is popular… He has obvious gifts of leadership.” He won the archbishop’s annual essay prize for his discussion of Christianity and Islam. During his years at the college, there had been an intensification in anti-apartheid activism in South Africa, accompanied by a growing government crackdown on this dissent; in March 1960 several hundred casualties resulted from the Sharpeville massacre. Tutu and his other trainees did not mobilise in support of the anti-apartheid movement; he later noted that “we were in some ways a very apolitical bunch”.

In December 1960, Edward Paget ordained Tutu as an Anglican priest at St Mary’s Cathedral. Tutu was then appointed assistant curate in St Alban’s Parish, Benoni, where he was reunited with his wife and children; they lived in a converted garage. He earned 72.50 rand a month, which was two-thirds of what his white counterparts were given. In 1962, Tutu was transferred to St Philip’s Church in Thokoza, where he was placed in charge of the congregation and developed a passion for pastoral ministry. Many in South Africa’s white-dominated Anglican establishment felt the need for a greater number of indigenous Africans in positions of ecclesiastical authority; to assist in this, Aelfred Stubbs proposed that Tutu be trained as a theology teacher at King’s College London. Funding was secured from the International Missionary Council’s Theological Education Fund (TEF), and the government agreed to give the Tutus permission to move to Britain. They duly did so in September 1962. Tutu was awarded Bachelor of Divinity in 1965 and Master of Theology in 1966, both from University of London.

At KCL’s theology department, Tutu studied under theologians like Dennis Nineham, Christopher Evans, Sydney Evans, Geoffrey Parrinder, and Eric Mascall. In London, the Tutus felt liberated experiencing a life free from apartheid and the pass laws of South Africa; he later noted that “there is racism in England, but we were not exposed to it”. He was also impressed by the freedom of speech available in the country, especially that at Speakers’ Corner. The family moved into the curate’s flat behind the Church of St Alban the Martyr in Golders Green; they were allowed to live rent-free on the condition that Tutu assisted Sunday services, the first time that he had ministered to a white congregation. It was in the flat that a daughter, Mpho Andrea, was born in 1963. Tutu was academically successful and his tutors suggested that he convert to an honours degree, which entailed him also studying Hebrew. He received his degree from Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother in a ceremony held at the Royal Albert Hall.

In 1966, the Tutu left the UK and travelled, via Paris and Rome, to East Jerusalem. Spending two months in the city, Tutu studied Arabic and Greek at St George’s College. He was shocked at the level of tension between the city’s Jewish and Arab citizens. From there, the family returned to South Africa, spending Christmas with family in Witwatersrand. They found it difficult readjusting to a society where they were impacted by segregation and pass laws. He explored the possibility on conducting a PhD at UNISA, on the subject of Moses in the Quran, but this project never materialised. In 1967 they proceeded to Alice, Eastern Cape, where the Federal Theological Seminary (Fedsem) had recently been established, an amalgamation of training institutions from different Christian denominations. There, Tutu was employed teaching doctrine, the Old Testament, and Greek. Tutu was the college’s first black staff-member, with most of the others being European or American expatriates. The campus allowed a level of racial-mixing which was absent in most of South African society. Leah also gained employment there, as a library assistant. They sent their children to a private boarding school in Swaziland, thereby ensuring that they were not instructed under the government’s Bantu Education syllabus.

While at St Peter’s, Tutu had also joined a pan-Protestant group, the Church Unity Commission, and served as a delegate at Anglican-Catholic conversations in southern Africa. It was also at this point that he began publishing in academic journals and journals of current affairs. Tutu was also appointed as the Anglican chaplain to the neighbouring University of Fort Hare. In an unusual move for the time, he invited female students to become servers during the Eucharist alongside their male counterparts. He joined Anglican student delegations to meetings of the Anglican Students’ Federation and the University Christian Movement. It was from this environment that the Black Consciousness Movement emerged under the leadership of figures like Steve Biko and Barney Pityana; although not averse to working with other racial groups to fight apartheid, as the exponents of Black Consciousness often were, Tutu was supportive of the movement’s efforts. In August 1968, he gave a sermon comparing the situation in South Africa with that in the Eastern Bloc, likening anti-apartheid protests to the recent Prague Spring. In September, Fort Hare students held a sit-in protest at the university administration’s policies; after they were surrounded by police with dogs, Tutu waded into the crowd to pray with the protesters. This was the first time that he had witnessed state power used to suppress dissent, and he cried during public prayers the next day.

Although plans were afoot for Tutu to become Vice Principal of Fedsem, he decided to leave the seminary to accept a teaching post at the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland (UBLS) in Roma, Lesotho. The new position allowed him to live closer to his children and offered twice the salary he earned at Fedsem. In January 1970, he and his wife moved to the UBLS campus; most of his fellow staff members were white expatriates from the U.S. or Britain although the university’s policy was non-racial and inclusive. As well as his teaching position, he also became the college’s Anglican chaplain and the warden of two student residences. In Lesotho, he joined the executive board of the Lesotho Ecumenical Association and served as an external examiner for both Fedsem and Rhodes University. He returned to South Africa on several occasions, including to visit his father shortly before the latter’s death in February 1971.

During the early 1970s, Tutu’s theology fundamentally changed as a result both of his experiences in Africa and his discovery of liberation theology, a term coined in 1971 by the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez and introduced to Tutu by the TEF’s associate director for Latin America, Aharon Sapsezian. On discovering black theology, he had been immediately attracted to it, in 1973 attending a conference on the subject at New York City’s Union Theological Seminary. There, he presented a paper in which he stated that “black theology is an engaged not an academic, detached theology. It is a gut level theology, relating to the real concerns, the life and death issues of the black man.” He stated that his paper was not an attempt to demonstrate the academic respectability of black theology but rather to make “a straightforward, perhaps shrill, statement about an existent. Black theology is. No permission is being requested for it to come into being… Frankly the time has passed when we will wait for the white man to give us permission to do our thing. Whether or not he accepts the intellectual respectability of our activity is largely irrelevant. We will proceed regardless.” Tutu sought to fuse the African-American derived black theology with African theology, an approach which contrasted with that of other African theologians like John Mbiti who regarded black theology as a foreign import not relevant to the African situation.

The TEF offered Tutu a job as their director for Africa, a position that would require relocating to London. Tutu agreed, although was initially refused permission to leave by the South African authorities; they regarded him with suspicion ever since his involvement in the Fort Hare student protests and were also increasingly antagonistic toward the WCC, which ran the TEF, because it had condemned apartheid as un-Christian. After Tutu insisted that taking the position would be good publicity for South Africa, the authorities relented. In March 1972, he returned to Britain. The TEF’s headquarters were in Bromley, a town in the southeast of the city, with the Tutu family settling in nearby Grove Park, where Tutu became honorary curate of St Augustine’s Church.

Tutu’s job entailed assessing grants to theological training institutions and students. This required him touring much of Africa in the early 1970s, and he wrote accounts of his experiences. In Zaire, he for instance lamented the widespread corruption and poverty, while complaining that Mobutu Sese Seko’s “military regime… is extremely galling to a black from South Africa”. In Nigeria, he first witnessed the interaction between Christians and Muslims in real life, and expressed concern at the Igbo people’s resentment following the crushing of their Republic of Biafra. In 1972 he travelled around East Africa, where he was impressed by Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenyan government and witnessed Idi Amin’s expulsion of Ugandan Asians. Back in England, he experienced one of his only racist encounters in the country when a stranger told him “You bastard, get back to Uganda”, mistaking him for a Ugandan Asian refugee. He also acknowledged that he retained his own subconscious anti-black racist thoughts; when on a Nigerian plane, he felt a “nagging worry” on discovering that both pilot and co-pilot were black, having been conditioned to thinking that only whites could be entrusted with such positions of responsibility.

In 1975, Tutu was nominated to be the new Bishop of Johannesburg, although lost out to Timothy Bavin. Bavin suggested that Tutu take his newly vacated position, that of the dean of St Mary’s Cathedral, Johannesburg. Tutu was elected to this position—the fourth highest in South Africa’s Anglican hierarchy—in March 1975, becoming the first black man to do so, an appointment making headline news in South Africa. Tutu decided to return to South Africa, a decision opposed by Leah, resulting in a strain on their marriage. Tutu was officially installed as dean in an August 1975 ceremony. The cathedral was packed for the event; in attendance was the TEF’s chairman, Archbishop Karekin Sarkissian of the Armenian Orthodox Church. Moving to the city, Tutu lived not in the official dean’s residence in the white suburb of Houghton but rather in a house on a middle-class street in the Orlando West township of Soweto, a largely impoverished area for blacks. The cathedral’s congregation was racially mixed but with a white majority; this mixing gave Tutu hope that a racially equal, de-segregated future was possible for South Africa. He attempted to modernise the liturgies used by the cathedral’s congregation although found that this was not desired by most. He also divided opinion among the congregation for his support of the ordination of women and for replacing masculine pronouns with gender neutral ones in his sermons and liturgy.

Tutu used his position to speak out about what he regarded as social injustice. He met with Black Consciousness Movement figures like Mamphela Ramphele and Soweto community leaders like Nthano Motlana, and publicly endorsed international economic boycott of South Africa over its apartheid policy. He opposed the government’s Terrorism Act, 1967 and shared a platform with anti-apartheid campaigner Winnie Mandela in condemning it. He held a 24-hour vigil for racial harmony at the cathedral where he included special prayers for those activists detained under the act. In May 1976, he wrote a letter to Prime Minister B. J. Vorster, urging him to dismantle apartheid and warning that if the government continued enforcing this policy then the country would erupt in racial violence. Six weeks later, the Soweto uprising broke out as black youth protesting the introduction of Afrikaans as the mandatory language of instruction clashed with police. Over the course of ten months, at least 660 were killed, the majority of them under the age of 24. Tutu was upset by what he regarded as the lack of outrage from South Africa’s white community; he raised the issue in his Sunday sermon, stating that the white silence was “deafening” and asking if they would have shown the same nonchalance had the school children killed by police and pro-government paramilitaries been white.

Tutu had been scheduled to serve a seven-year term as dean, however after seven months he was nominated as a candidate in an election for the position of Bishop of Lesotho. Although Tutu stipulated that he did not want the position, he was elected to the position regardless in March 1976, at which he reluctantly accepted it. This decision upset some of his congregation, who felt that he had used their parish as a stepping stone for his personal career advancement. In July, Bill Burnett consecrated Tutu as a bishop at St Mary’s Cathedral. In August, Tutu was enthroned as the Bishop of Lesotho in a ceremony at Maseru’s Cathedral of St Mary and St James; thousands attended, including King Moshoeshoe II and Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan. In this position, he travelled around the diocese, often visiting parishes in the mountains. He learned the Sesotho language and developed a deep affection for the country. He appointed Philip Mokuku as the first dean of the diocese and placed great emphasis on further education for the Basotho clergy. He befriended the royal family although his relationship with Jonathan’s right-wing government, of which he disapproved, was strained. In September 1977 he returned to South Africa after being invited to speak at the Eastern Cape funeral of Black Consciousness activist Steve Biko, who had been killed by police while in their custody. At the funeral, Tutu stated that Black Consciousness was “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”.

After John Rees stepped down as general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, Tutu was among the nominees for his successor. John Thorne was ultimately elected to the position, although stepped down from the position after three months. Tutu was nominated once more, this time being selected. Tutu was unsure whether to accept, but agreed to do so at the urging of the synod of bishops. His decision angered many Anglicans in Lesotho, who felt that Tutu was abandoning them. Tutu took charge of the SACC in March 1978. Returning to Johannesburg—where the SACC’s headquarters were based at Khotso House—the Tutus returned to their former Orlando West home, now bought for them by an anonymous foreign donor. Leah gained employment as the assistant director of the Institute of Race Relations.

Tutu was the SACC’s first black leader, and at the time, the SACC was one of the only Christian institutions in South Africa where black people had the majority representation. There, he introduced a schedule of daily staff prayers, regular Bible study, monthly Eucharist, and silent retreats. He also developed a new style of leadership, appointing senior staff who were capable of taking the initiative, delegating much of the SACC’s detailed work to them, and keeping in touch with them through meetings and memorandums. Many of his staff referred to him as “Baba” (father). He was determined that the SACC become one of South Africa’s most visible human rights advocacy organisations, a course which would anger the government. His efforts gained him international recognition; in 1978 Kings College London at University of London elected him a fellow while the University of Kent and General Theological Seminary gave him honorary doctorates; the following year Harvard University also gave him an honorary doctorate.

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”.

As head of the SACC, Tutu’s time was dominated by fundraising efforts, particularly attempts to secure funds from overseas to pay for the organisation’s various projects. While Tutu was in charge of the SACC, it was revealed that one of its divisional directors had been stealing funds. In November 1981 an all-white government commission was launched to investigate the issue, headed by the judge C. F. Eloff. Tutu gave evidence to the commission, during which he criticised apartheid as “evil” and “unchristian”. When the Eloff report was published, Tutu criticised it, focusing particularly on the absence of any theologians on its board, likening it to “a group of blind men” judging the Chelsea Flower Show. Tutu also missed pastoral work, and in 1981 also became the rector of St Augustine’s Church in Soweto’s Orlando West. He also began collecting some of his sermons and speeches, publishing them in a collection titled Crying in the Wilderness: The Struggle for Justice in South Africa in 1982. This was followed by another collected volume, Hope and Suffering, in 1984.

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.

It was while in New York that Tutu was informed that he had won the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize; he had previously been nominated in 1981, 1982, and 1983. When the Nobel Prize selection committee met to decide 1984’s award, they agreed that it should go to a South African to recognise the problems in that country, deciding that Tutu would be a less controversial choice than other South African nominees Mandela and Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Tutu travelled to London, where he gave a public statement dedicating his award to “the little people” in South Africa. In December, he attended the award ceremony in Oslo—which was hampered by a bomb scare—before returning home via Sweden, Denmark, Canada, Tanzania, and Zambia. He shared the $192,000 prize money with his family, SACC staff, and a scholarship fund for South Africans in exile. He was the second South African to receive the award, after Albert Luthuli in 1960. The South African government and mainstream media either downplayed or criticised the award, while the Organisation of African Unity hailed it as evidence of apartheid’s impending demise.

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 represent. He received hate mail as well as death threats from white far-right groups like the Wit Wolwe. His rhetoric of angry defiance against the government alienated many white liberals, who believed that apartheid could be gradually reformed away; among the white liberals who publicly criticised Tutu were Alan Paton and Bill Burnett. He nevertheless remained close with other prominent white liberals like Helen Suzman.

In 1984, Tutu embarked on a three-month sabbatical leave at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York. In the city, he was invited to address the United Nations Security Council in October, and in December he met the Congressional Black Caucus and the subcommittees on Africa in the House of Representatives and the Senate, urging them to put pressure on South Africa. He was also invited to the White House to visit President Ronald Reagan; he urged Reagan to change his approach to the South African government although was unsuccessful. Referring to Reagan’s decision to put Cold War alliances before the rights of black South Africans, Tutu later described Reagan as “a racist pure and simple”.

After Bavin retired as Bishop of Johannesburg, Tutu was among five candidates considered as his replacement. An elective assembly met at St Barnabas’ College in October 1984 and although Tutu was one of the two most popular candidates, the white laity voting bloc consistently voted against his candidature. After a deadlock ensued, a bishops’ synod was called to make the final decision; they decided to give the role to Tutu. Black Anglicans celebrated, although many of their white co-religionists were angry at the selection. Tutu was enthroned as the sixth Bishop of Johannesburg at a ceremony in St Mary’s Cathedral in February 1985. He was the first black man to hold the role, and took over the largest diocese in South Africa, comprising 102 parishes and 300,000 Anglican parishioners, approximately 80% of whom were black. In his inaugural sermon, Tutu declared that he would call on the international community to introduce punitive economic sanctions against South Africa unless apartheid had not begun to be dismantled within 18 to 24 months. As bishop, he resigned as patron of the UDF.

The response he received from South Africa’s white minority was more mixed. Most of those who criticised him were conservative whites who did not want a shift away from apartheid and white-minority rule. Many of these whites were angered that he was calling for economic sanctions against South Africa and that he was warning that racial violence was impending. Said whites often accused him of being a tool of the communists. This hostility was exacerbated by the government’s campaign to discredit Tutu and distort his image, which included repeatedly misquoting him to present his statements out of context. According to Du Boulay, the SABC and much of the white press went to “extraordinary attempts to discredit him”, something that “made it hard to know the man himself”. Allen noted that in 1984, Tutu was “the black leader white South Africans most loved to hate” and that this antipathy extended beyond supporters of the far-right government to liberals too. The fact that he was “an object of hate” for many was something that deeply pained him.

Tutu also drew criticism from within the anti-apartheid movement and the black South African community. He was criticised repeatedly for making statements on behalf of black South Africans without consulting other community leaders first. Some black anti-apartheid activists regarded him as too moderate, and in particular too focused on cultivating white goodwill. The African-American civil rights campaigner Bernice Powell for instance complained that he was “too nice to white people”. According to Gish, Tutu “faced the perpetual dilemma of all moderates – he was often viewed suspiciously by the two hostile sides he sought to bring together”. Tutu’s critical view of Marxist-oriented communism and the governments of the Eastern Bloc, and the comparisons he drew between these administrations and far-right ideologies like Nazism and apartheid brought criticism from the South African Communist Party in 1984. After the transition to universal suffrage, Tutu’s criticism of presidents Mbeki and Zuma brought objections from their supporters; in 2006, Zuma’s personal advisor Elias Khumalo claimed that it as a double standard that Tutu could “accept the apology from the apartheid government that committed unspeakable atrocities against millions of South Africans”, yet “cannot find it in his heart to accept the apology” from Zuma.

On 16 October 1984, the then Bishop Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Committee cited his “role as a unifying leader figure in the campaign to resolve the problem of apartheid in South Africa”. This was seen as a gesture of support for him and The South African Council of Churches which he led at that time. In 1987 Tutu was awarded the Pacem in Terris Award. It was named after a 1963 encyclical letter by Pope John XXIII that calls upon all people of good will to secure peace among all nations.

In the mid-1980s, there were an increasing number of clashes between angry black youths and the security services, resulting in a growing death toll; Tutu was invited to speak at many of their funerals, which attracted crowds of thousands. At a funeral in Duduza, he stepped in to prevent members of the crowd from killing a black man suspected to be a government informant. He spoke out against the torture and killing of suspected collaborators, angering some of those in the black community. For these young militants, Tutu and his calls for non-violence were perceived as an obstacle on the path to revolution; one young woman was quoted as saying that Tutu was “too moderate for most of us, too much within the system”. When Tutu accompanied the U.S. politician Ted Kennedy on the latter’s speaking tour of South Africa in January 1985, he was angered and humiliated that protesters from the Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO)—who regarded Kennedy as an agent of capitalism and American imperialism—repeatedly disrupted proceedings.

Amid the violence, the ANC called on black South Africans to make the country “ungovernable”, while foreign companies increasingly disinvested in the country and the rand reached a record low. In July 1985, Botha declared a state of emergency in 36 magisterial districts, further suspending civil liberties and giving the security services additional powers; Tutu criticised this, and offered to serve as a go-between for the government and leading black organisations, but was rebuffed by the former. He also continued with his protests; in April 1985, Tutu led a small march of clergy through Johannesburg to protest the arrest of Reverend Geoff Moselane. In October 1985, he backed the National Initiative for Reconciliation’s proposal for people to refrain from work and engage in a day of prayer, fasting and mourning. He also proposed a national strike against apartheid, angering trade unions whom he had not consulted about such an idea.

Tutu had continued to make foreign visits to promote his cause. In May he embarked on a speaking tour of the U.S., and in October 1985 addressed the political committee of the United Nations General Assembly urging that the international community impose sanctions on South Africa if apartheid was not dismantled within six months. He proceeded to the United Kingdom, where he met with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He also announced the formation of a Bishop Tutu Scholarship Fund to financially assist South African students living in exile. He returned to the U.S. in May 1986, and in August 1986 visited Japan, China, and Jamaica to promote sanctions. Given that most senior anti-apartheid activists were imprisoned, Mandela referred to Tutu as “public enemy number one for the powers that be”.

After Philip Russell announced his retirement as the Archbishop of Cape Town, in February 1986 the Black Solidarity Group formed a plan to get Tutu appointed as his replacement. At the time of the meeting, Tutu was in Atlanta, Georgia receiving the Martin Luther King, Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize. Tutu’s name was put forward for the position alongside that of Michael Nuttall, although both expressed hesitation at the nomination. In the vote, Tutu secured a two-thirds majority from both the clergy and laity and was then ratified in a unanimous vote by the synod of bishops. He was the first black man to hold the post. Some white Anglicans left the church in protest at his election. Over 1300 people attended his enthronement ceremony, which was held on 7 September 1986 at the Cathedral of St George the Martyr. After the ceremony, Tutu held an open-air Eucharist for 10,000 people at the Cape Showgrounds in Goodwood, where he invited Albertina Sisulu and Allan Boesak to give political speeches.

When pressed to describe his ideological position, Tutu has described himself as a socialist. In 1986 he related that “All my experiences with capitalism, I’m afraid, have indicated that it encourages some of the worst features in people. Eat or be eaten. It is underlined by the survival of the fittest. I can’t buy that. I mean, maybe it’s the awful face of capitalism, but I haven’t seen the other face.” Also in the 1980s, he was reported as saying that “apartheid has given free enterprise a bad name”. While identifying with socialism, he opposed forms of socialism like Marxism-Leninism which promoted communism, being critical of Marxism-Leninism’s promotion of atheism. Tutu has often used the aphorism that “African communism” is an oxymoron because—in his view—Africans are intrinsically spiritual and this conflicts with the atheistic nature of Marxism. He was critical of the Marxist-Leninist governments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, comparing the way that they treated their populations with the way that the National Party treated South Africans. In 1985 he stated that he hated Marxism-Leninism “with every fiber of my being” although sought to explain why black South Africans turned to it as an ally: “when you are in a dungeon and a hand is stretched out to free you, you do not ask for the pedigree of the hand owner.”

Mandela had foregrounded the idea of Ubuntu as being of importance to South Africa’s political framework. In 1986, Tutu had defined Ubuntu: “It refers to gentleness, to compassion, to hospitality, to openness to others, to vulnerability, to be available to others and to know that you are bound up with them in the bundle of life.” Reflecting this view of ubuntu, Tutu was fond of the Xhosa saying that “a person is a person through other persons”.

Alongside his domestic work, he also turned his attention to events elsewhere in Africa, and in 1987 gave the keynote speech at the All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC) in Lomé, Togo. There, he called on churches to champion the oppressed throughout the continent, stating that “it pains us to have to admit that there is less freedom and personal liberty in most of Africa now then there was during the much-maligned colonial days.” At the conference, he was elected president of the AACC, while José Belo was elected its general-secretary. Calling for an “African renaissance” across the continent, the pair formed a partnership that would last a decade. In 1989 they visited Zaire to encourage the country’s churches to distance themselves from Seko’s autocratic government. In 1994, he and Belo visited war-torn Liberia in a mission co-organised by the AACC and the Carter Center. There, they met Charles Taylor, but Tutu did not trust his promise of a ceasefire. In 1995, Mandela sent Tutu to Nigeria to meet with Nigerian military leader Sani Abacha to request the release of imprisoned politicians Moshood Abiola and Olusegun Obasanjo. In July 1995, he visited Rwanda a year after the genocide, where he preached to 10,000 people in Kigali. Drawing on his experiences in South Africa, he called for justice to be tempered with mercy towards the Hutu who had orchestrated the genocide. Tutu also travelled to other parts of world, for instance spending March 1989 in Panama and Nicaragua.

Along with Boesak and Stephen Naidoo, Tutu became one of the church leaders involved in mediating conflicts between black protesters and the security forces; they for instance worked to avoid clashes at the 1987 funeral of ANC guerrilla Ashley Kriel. In February 1988, the government banned 17 black or multi-racial organisations, including the UDF, and restricted the activities of trade unions. Church leaders organised a protest march, and after that too was banned they established the Committee for the Defense of Democracy. When the group’s rally was banned, Tutu, Boesak, and Naidoo organised a service at St George’s Cathedral to replace it.

In March 1988, he took up the cause of the Sharpeville Six who had been sentenced to death; opposed on principle to capital punishment, he called for their lives to be spared. He telephoned representatives of the U.S., British, and German governments urging them to pressure Botha on the issue, and personally met with Botha at the latter’s Tuynhuys home to discuss the issue. The two did not get on well, and argued. Botha accused Tutu of supporting the ANC’s armed campaign; Tutu said that while he did not support their use of violence, he supported the ANC’s objective of a non-racial, democratic South Africa. The death sentences were ultimately commuted.

In May 1988, the government launched a covert campaign against Tutu, organised in part by Stratkom wing of the State Security Council. The security police printed leaflets and stickers with anti-Tutu slogans while unemployed blacks were paid to protest at the airport when he arrived there. Traffic police arrested Leah and locked her in a cell when she was late to renew her motor vehicle license. Although the security police organised assassination attempts on various anti-apartheid Christian leaders, they later claimed to have never done so for Tutu, regarding him as too high-profile.

During Tutu’s rise to notability during the 1970s and 1980s, responses to him were “sharply polarized”. Noting that he was “simultaneously loved and hated, honoured and vilified”, Du Boulay attributed his divisive reception to the fact that “strong people evoke strong emotions”. Tutu gained much adulation from black journalists, inspired imprisoned anti-apartheid activists, and led to many black parents naming their children after him. For many black South Africans, he was a respected religious leader and a symbol of black achievement. By 1984 he was—according to Gish—”the personification of the South African freedom struggle”. In 1988, Du Boulay described him as “a spokesman for his people, a voice for the voiceless”.

His work as archbishop, coupled with his political activism and regular foreign trips, led to him accumulating a vast workload, which he managed with the assistance of his executive officer Njongonkulu Ndungane and with Nuttall, who in 1989 was elected dean of the province. In church meetings, Tutu drew upon traditional African custom by adopting a consensus-building model of leadership, seeking to ensure that competing groups in the church reached a compromise and thus all votes would be unanimous rather than divided. He secured approval for the ordination of female priests in the Anglican church, having likened the exclusion of women from the position to the exclusionary system of apartheid. He also appointed gay priests to senior positions and privately—although not at the time publicly—criticised the church’s insistence that gay priests remain celibate, regarding it as impractical.

Tutu remained actively involved in acts of civil disobedience against the government; he was encouraged by the fact that many whites also took part in these protests. In August 1989 he helped to organise an “Ecumenical Defiance Service” at St George’s Cathedral, and shortly after joined protests at segregated beaches outside Cape Town. To mark the sixth anniversary of the UDF’s foundation he held a “service of witness” at the cathedral, and in September organised a church memorial for those protesters who had been killed in clashes with the security forces. He organised a protest march through Cape Town for later that month, which the new President F. W. de Klerk agreed to permit; a multi-racial crowd containing an estimated 30,000 people took part. That the march had been permitted inspired similar demonstrations to take place across the country. In October, de Klerk met with Tutu, Boesak, and Frank Chikane; Tutu was impressed that “we were listened to”. In 1994, a further collection of Tutu’s writings, The Rainbow People of God, was published, and followed the next year with his An African Prayer Book, a collection of prayers from across the continent accompanied by the Archbishop’s commentary.

Tutu also spoke out on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. While in New York in 1989, he had praised God for the creation of the state of Israel and asserted its right to “territorial integrity and fundamental security against attacks from those who deny her right to exist”. He visited Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat in Cairo, urging him to accept Israel’s existence. At the same time he expressed anger that Israel had supplied military hardware to South Africa during the apartheid era, expressing bemusement as to how the Jewish state could co-operate with a government that had contained many Nazi sympathisers. Referring to the Israeli-occupied territories in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, he stated that there were “deeply, deeply distressing” parallels with the situation in apartheid South Africa. He called for the formation of a distinct Palestinian state, and emphasised that his criticisms were of the Israeli government rather than Jews as a broader group. At the invitation of Palestinian bishop Samir Kafity, he undertook a Christmas pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where he gave a sermon at Shepherd’s Field near Bethlehem, in which he called for a two-state solution. On that trip, he also visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, where he laid a wreath and spoke to journalists on the importance of forgiveness. His calls to forgive those who perpetrated the Holocaust, coupled with his support for a Palestinian state, brought criticism from many Jewish groups across the world. This was exacerbated by the fact that he sought to evade suspicions of anti-Semitism through comments such as “my dentist is a Dr. Cohen”.

Tutu popularised the term “Rainbow Nation” as a metaphor for post-apartheid South Africa after 1994 under ANC rule. He had first used the metaphor in 1989 when he described a multi-racial protest crowd as the “rainbow people of God”. Tutu advocated what liberation theologians call “critical solidarity”, offering support for pro-democracy forces while reserving the right to criticise his allies. He criticised Mandela on several points, such as his tendency to wear brightly coloured Madiba shirts, which he regarded as inappropriate; Mandela offered the tongue-in-cheek response that it was ironic coming from a man who wore dresses. More serious was Tutu’s criticism of Mandela’s retention of South Africa’s apartheid-era armaments industry and the significant pay packet that newly elected members of parliament adopted. Mandela hit back, calling Tutu a “populist” and stating that he should have raised these issues privately rather than publicly.

In February 1990, de Klerk un-banned political parties like the ANC; Tutu phoned him to congratulate him on the move. Shortly after, de Klerk announced that Mandela was to be released from prison. The ANC asked Tutu if Mandela and his wife Winnie could stay at Bishopscourt on the first night of his freedom, to which Tutu agreed. They met for the first time in 35 years at Cape Town City Hall, where Mandela gave a speech to assembled crowds from the balcony. Tutu invited Mandela to attend an Anglican synod of bishops in February 1990, at which the latter described Tutu as the “people’s archbishop”. At that synod, Tutu and the bishops decide to call for an end to foreign sanctions once the transition to universal suffrage was “irreversible”, urged anti-apartheid groups to end their use of armed struggle, and ban Anglican clergy from belonging to political parties. Many clergy protested about the latter point, particularly as it has been imposed without consultation. Tutu publicly defended the decision, stating that if priests openly affiliated with political parties then it would prove divisive, particularly amid the growing violence between the supporters of rival parties throughout South Africa.

Like many other activists, Tutu believed that there was a “third force” stoking the tensions between the ANC and Inkatha; it later emerged that sectors of the 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 these operations. In November 1990, Tutu organised a “summit” at Bishopscourt attended by both church leaders and leaders of political groups like the ANC, PAC, and AZAPO, in which he encouraged them to call on their supporters to avoid violence and allow free political campaigning. After the South African Communist Party leader Chris Hani was assassinated by a white man, Tutu served as preacher at Hani’s funeral outside Soweto; despite his objections to Hani’s Marxist beliefs, Tutu had admired him as an activist. Amid these events, Tutu had experienced physical exhaustion and ill-health, and he undertook a four-month sabbatical at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, Georgia.

In October 1994, Tutu announced his intention to retire as archbishop in 1996. Although retired archbishops normally return to the position of bishop, the other bishops bestowed on him a new title: “archbishop emeritus”. A farewell ceremony was held at St George’s Cathedral in June 1996, attended by senior politicians like Mandela and de Klerk. There, Mandela awarded Tutu the Order for Meritorious Service, South Africa’s highest honour. Tutu was succeeded as archbishop by Ndungane.

A key question facing the post-apartheid government was how they would respond to the various human rights abuses that had been committed over the previous decades by both the state and by anti-apartheid activists. The National Party had wanted a comprehensive amnesty package whereas the ANC wanted trials of former state figures. Alex Boraine helped Mandela’s government to draw up legislation for the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which was passed by parliament in July 1995. Nuttall suggested that Tutu become one of the TRC’s seventeen commissioners, while in September a synod of bishops formally nominated him. Tutu proposed that the TRC adopt a threefold approach: the first being confession, with those responsible for human rights abuses fully disclosing their activities, the second being forgiveness in the form of a legal amnesty from prosecution, and the third being restitution, with the perpetrators making amends to their victims.

The first hearing took place in April 1996. The hearings were publicly televised and had a considerable impact on South African society. He had very little control over the committee responsible for granting amnesty, instead chairing the committee which heard accounts of human rights abuses perpetrated by both anti-apartheid and apartheid figures. While listening to the testimony of victims, Tutu was sometimes overwhelmed by emotion and cried during the hearings. He singled out those victims who expressed forgiveness towards those who had harmed them and used these individuals as his leitmotif. The ANC’s image was tarnished by the revelations that some of its activists had engaged in torture, attacks on civilians, and other human rights abuses. It sought to suppress part of the final TRC report, infuriating Tutu. He warned of the ANC’s “abuse of power”, stating that “yesterday’s oppressed can quite easily become today’s oppressors… We’ve seen it happen all over the world and we shouldn’t be surprised if it happens here”. Tutu presented the five-volume TRC report to Mandela in a public ceremony in Pretoria in October 1998. Ultimately, Tutu was pleased with the TRC’s achievement, believing that it would aid long-term reconciliation, although recognised its short-comings.

In January 1997, Tutu was diagnosed with prostate cancer and travelled abroad for treatment. He publicly revealed his diagnosis, hoping to encourage other men to go for prostate exams. He faced recurrences of the disease in 1999 and 2006. Back in South Africa, he divided his time between homes in Soweto’s Orlando West and Cape Town’s Milnerton area. In 2000, he opened an office in Cape Town. In June 2000, the Cape Town-based Desmond Tutu Peace Centre was launched, which in 2003 launched an Emerging Leadership Program.

Tutu also spoke out regarding The Troubles in Northern Ireland. At the Lambeth conference of 1988, he backed a resolution on the issue which condemned the use of violence by all sides; Tutu believed that, given Irish republicans had the right to vote, they had not exhausted peaceful means of bringing about change and thus should not resort to armed struggle. Three years later, he gave a televised service from Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral where he called for negotiations to take place between all factions, including the Irish republican Sinn Féin and the Provisional Irish Republican Army, groups which Thatcher’s UK government had refused to engage with. He visited Belfast in 1998 and again in 2001.

Tutu gained many international awards and honorary degrees, particularly in South Africa, the United Kingdom, and United States. By 2003, he had approximately 100 honorary degrees; he was, for example, the first person to be awarded an honorary doctorate by the Ruhr University of West Germany, and only the third person whom Columbia University in the U.S. agreed to award an honorary doctorate off-campus to. Many schools and scholarships were named after him. For instance, in 2000 the Munsieville Library in Klerksdorp was renamed the Desmond Tutu Library. At Fort Hare University, the Desmond Tutu School of Theology was launched in 2002.

Conscious that his presence in South Africa might overshadow Ndungane, Tutu agreed to a two-year visiting professorship at Emory University. This took place between 1998 and 2000, and during the period he wrote a book about the TRC, No Future Without Forgiveness. In early 2002 he taught at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From January to May 2003 he taught at the University of North Carolina. In January 2004, he was visiting professor of postconflict societies at KCL, his alma mater. While in the United States, he signed up with a speakers’ agency and travelled widely on speaking engagements; this gave him financial independence in a way that his clerical pension would not. In his speeches, he focused on South Africa’s transition from apartheid to universal suffrage, presenting it as a model for other troubled nations to adopt. In the US, he thanked anti-apartheid activists for campaigning for sanctions, also calling for US companies to now invest in South Africa.

Tutu retained his interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and after the signing of the Oslo Accords was invited to Tel Aviv to attend the Peres Centre for Peace. He became increasingly frustrated following the collapse of the 2000 Camp David Summit, and in 2002 gave a widely publicised speech denouncing Israeli policy regarding the Palestinians and calling for sanctions against Israel. Comparing the Israeli-Palestinian situation with that in South Africa, he said that “one reason we succeeded in South Africa that is missing in the Middle East is quality of leadership – leaders willing to make unpopular compromises, to go against their own constituencies, because they have the wisdom to see that would ultimately make peace possible.” Tutu was named to head a United Nations fact-finding mission to Beit Hanoun in the Gaza Strip to investigate the November 2006 incident in which soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces killed 19 civilians. Israeli officials expressed concern that the report would be biased against Israel. Tutu cancelled the trip in mid-December, saying that Israel had refused to grant him the necessary travel clearance after more than a week of discussions.

Tutu also spoke out on the need to combat the HIV/AIDS pandemic, in June 2003 stating that “Apartheid tried to destroy our people and apartheid failed. If we don’t act against HIV-AIDS, it may succeed, for it is already decimating our population”. On the April 2005 election of Pope Benedict XVI—who was known for his conservative views on issues of gender and sexuality—Tutu described it as unfortunate that the Roman Catholic Church was now unlikely to change its opposition to the use of condoms “amidst the fight against HIV/AIDS” nor its opposition to the ordination of women priests. To help combat child trafficking, in 2006 Tutu launched a global campaign, organised by the aid organisation Plan, to ensure that all children are registered at birth.

In 2003, Tutu was the scholar in residence at the University of North Florida. It was there, in February, that he broke his normal rule on not joining protests outside South Africa by taking part in a New York demonstration against plans for the U.S. to launch the Iraq War. He telephoned Condoleezza Rice urging the U.S. government not to go to war without a resolution from the United Nations Security Council. Tutu questioned why Iraq was being singled out for allegedly possessing weapons of mass destruction when Europe, India, and Pakistan also had many such devices. In 2004, he appeared in Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, an Off Broadway play in New York City critical of the U.S. detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. In January 2005, he added his voice to the growing dissent over terrorist suspects held at Guantánamo’s Camp X-Ray, stating that these detentions without trial were “utterly unacceptable” and comparable to the apartheid-era detentions. He also criticised the UK’s introduction of measures to detain terrorist subjects for 28 days without trial. In 2012, he called for U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to be tried by the International Criminal Court for initiating the Iraq War.

In 2003, Tutu received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In 2008, Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois proclaimed 13 May ‘Desmond Tutu Day’.

In 2004, he gave the inaugural lecture at the Church of Christ the King, where he commended the achievements made in South Africa over the previous decade although warned of widening wealth disparity among its population. He questioned the government’s spending on armaments, its policy regarding Mugabe’s government in Zimbabwe, and the manner in which Nguni-speakers dominated senior positions, stating that this latter issue would stoke ethnic tensions. He made the same points three months later when giving the annual Nelson Mandela Lecture in Johannesburg. There, he charged the ANC under Mbeki’s leadership of demanding “sycophantic, obsequious conformity” among its members. Tutu and Mbeki had long had a strained relationship; Mbeki had accused Tutu of criminalising the ANC’s military struggle against apartheid through the TRC, while Tutu disliked Mbeki’s active neglect of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Like Mandela before him, Mbeki accused Tutu of being a populist, further claiming that the cleric had no understanding of the ANC’s inner workings. Tutu later criticised ANC leader and South African President Jacob Zuma; in 2006, he criticised Zuma’s “moral failings” as a result of accusations of rape and corruption that he was facing. In 2007, he again criticised South Africa’s policy of “quiet diplomacy” toward Mugabe’s government, calling for the Southern Africa Development Community to chair talks between Mugabe’s ZANU-PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, to set firm deadlines for action, with consequences if they were not met. In 2008, he called for a UN Peacekeeping force to be sent to Zimbabwe.

Before the 31st G8 summit at Gleneagles, Scotland, in 2005, Tutu called on world leaders to promote free trade with poorer countries and to end expensive taxes on anti-AIDS drugs. In July 2007, Tutu was declared Chair of The Elders, a group of world leaders to contribute their wisdom, kindness, leadership and integrity to tackle some of the world’s toughest problems. Tutu served in this capacity until May 2013. Upon stepping down and becoming an Honorary Elder, he said: “As Elders we should always oppose presidents for Life. After six wonderful years as Chair, I am sad to say that it was time for me to step down.” Tutu led The Elders’ visit to Sudan in October 2007 – their first mission after the group was founded – to foster peace in the Darfur crisis. “Our hope is that we can keep Darfur in the spotlight and spur on governments to help keep peace in the region,” said Tutu. He has also travelled with Elders delegations to Ivory Coast, Cyprus, Ethiopia, India, South Sudan and the Middle East.

Post-apartheid, Tutu’s status as a gay rights activist kept him in the public eye more than any other issue facing the Anglican Church. Tutu regarded discrimination against homosexuals as being the equivalent to discrimination against black people and women, and his views on this known through speeches and sermons. After the 1998 Lambeth Conference of bishops reaffirmed the church’s opposition to same-sex sexual acts, Tutu wrote to George Carey stating “I am ashamed to be an Anglican”. He regarded the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams as too accommodating of conservatives who wanted to eject various US and Canadian Anglican churches from the Anglican Communion after they expressed a pro-LGB rights stance. Tutu expressed the view that if these conservatives disliked the inclusiveness of the Anglican Communion, they always had “the freedom to leave”. In 2007, Tutu accused the church of being obsessed with homosexuality and declared: “If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn’t worship that God.” In 2011, he called on the Anglican Church of Southern Africa to accept and conduct same-sex marriages.

During the 2008 Tibetan unrest, Tutu marched in a pro-Tibet demonstration in San Francisco; there, he called on heads of states to boycott the 2008 Summer Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing “for the sake of the beautiful people of Tibet”. Tutu invited the Tibetan Buddhist leader, the 14th Dalai Lama, to attend his 80th birthday in October 2011, although the South African government did not grant him entry; observers suggested that they had not given permission so as not to offend China, a major trading partner. In 2009, Tutu assisted in the establishing of the Solomon Islands’ Truth and Reconciliation Commission, modelled after the South African body of the same name. He also attended the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, and has publicly called for fossil fuel divestment, comparing it to disinvestment from apartheid-era South Africa.

In October 2010, Tutu announced his retirement from public life so that he could spend more time “at home with my family – reading and writing and praying and thinking”. In May 2013, Tutu declared that he would no longer vote for the ANC, stating that while the party was “very good at leading us in the struggle to be free from oppression”, it had done a poor job in countering inequality, violence, and corruption in South Africa. The following month, he welcomed Raphele’s launch of a new party, Agang South Africa. After Mandela died in December 2013, Tutu initially stated that he had not been invited to the funeral, but the government denied this and Tutu subsequently announced that he would attend. He publicly criticised the memorials held for Mandela, stating that they had given too much prominence to the ANC and that Afrikaners had been marginalised from them, believing that Mandela himself would have been appalled by this.

In 2010 Desmond Tutu delivered the Bynum Tudor Lecture at the University of Oxford and became Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford. In 2013 he received the £1.1m ($1.6m) Templeton Prize for “his life-long work in advancing spiritual principles such as love and forgiveness”. In 2018 the fossil of a Devonian tetrapod was found in Grahamstown by Rob Gess of the Albany Museum; this tetrapod was named Tutusius umlambo in Tutu’s honour.

Tutu also continued to comment on international affairs. In November 2012, he published a letter alongside Mairead Maguire and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel in which they expressed support for U.S. military whistleblower Chelsea Manning and condemned Manning’s imprisonment in the U.S. In August 2017, Tutu was among ten Nobel Peace Prize laureates who urged Saudi Arabia to stop the executions of 14 young people for participating in the 2011–12 Saudi Arabian protests. In September, Tutu asked Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi, a fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate, to halt the army’s persecution of the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority. In December, he was among those to condemn U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to officially recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital despite opposition from the Palestinians; Tutu said that God was weeping at Trump’s decision.

Tutu also maintained an interest in social issues. In July 2014, he came out in support of legalised assisted dying, stating that life shouldn’t be preserved “at any cost” and that the criminalisation of assisted dying deprived the terminally ill of their “human right to dignity”. He later stated that he would want that option open to him personally. He reiterated his support for assisted dying legislation in September 2018 following the arrest of assisted dying campaigner Sean Davison. In December 2015, Tutu’s daughter, Mpho Tutu, married a woman, Marceline van Furth, in the Netherlands. Tutu attended and gave the proceedings a blessing, in spite of ongoing Anglican opposition to same-sex marriage.

In 2015, Queen Elizabeth II was graciously pleased to approve Desmond Tutu the honorary British award of The Order of the Companions of Honour. (CH). Queen Elizabeth II appointed Tutu as a Bailiff Grand Cross of the Venerable Order of St. John in September 2017.