Rev'd Up

He sees ubuntu at work in the unlikeliest of places.

"You remember the family of the Palestinian child that was killed by Israeli soldiers? They donated the organs of that child to the Israelis. Can you imagine? What was it in them, instead of crying out for revenge, that they should exhibit this incredible magnanimity? And even in Israel, look at the family whose son was one of the soldiers abducted by Hezbollah, where that family was saying stop the killing."

"So when you look around the world, I am amazed that when people are given the opportunity, they exhibit an extraordinary level of magnanimity."

In leading South Africa's post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the late 1990s, Tutu saw ubuntu at work when many South Africans embraced reconciliation rather than revenge. The truth commission investigated human-rights abuses, offered amnesty to perpetrators in exchange for verifiable confessions, dispensed financial and symbolic reparations to victims, and attempted to salve a nation's pain. Tutu presided over numerous acts of forgiveness, of magnanimity. And he saw the extent to which even the worst murderers and torturers know that what they did was wrong.

It is out of ubuntu, his love for his community, he says, that he has of late been speaking out harshly about conditions in South Africa 12 years after apartheid's end. The high crime. The yawning schisms of race and class. The consumerism and rush for power.

He's been speaking his mind on such subjects since the days of Mandela's presidency, when he warned of new parliamentarians hopping on the "gravy train" of power. And he has chastised South Africa's current president, Thabo Mbeki, for his government's slow response to the HIV-AIDS epidemic and for its tepid foreign policy approach to the dictatorial ways of Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe.

He is criticized by some South Africans for the sting his criticism carries so soon after the historic victory over apartheid. But Tutu says he speaks what he believes is God's word. The "change of personnel," as he refers to the transition from apartheid to democracy, doesn't mean that he should stop speaking out.

"I mean, I don't sit calculating, 'Now what is the most outrageous thing I can say?' I hope that I am saying what I have been moved to say by God, and I have no guarantee that I may not have misheard God," he says impishly, a wry giggle escaping his lips.

A Living Symbol

With his flowing magenta vestments, he became a fixture on the anti-apartheid scene in the 1980s, when the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize catapulted him to global stature. Nelson Mandela was in prison back then. His wife, Winnie Mandela, was free but variously banished or banned or beset by security agents. Tutu and a few other famed South African clerics (Allan Boesak, Frank Chikane, Smangaliso Mkhatshwa among them) were, for a time, at the front lines of the anti-apartheid campaign.

At the hands of apartheid's police, Tutu was tear-gassed and detained; his wife of 50 years, Leah Tutu, was once arrested, too, and threatened with violence. Tutu put his own life on the line over and over again, even stepping between a suspected informer and an angry crowd ready to hang a burning tire around the man's neck. That dreaded necklace.

The fight was always both moral and quite personal. The forced removals or racially targeted community demolitions that were part of apartheid's draconian social engineering hit Tutu's birthplace, his family home, the church in which he was married, the college his wife attended, and ultimately that legendary township called Sophiatown, where Tutu once lived. Demolished.

Against the backdrop of all this abuse being meted out to the nation, Tutu was outraged that President Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher continued to view many of the anti-apartheid activists (including Mandela) as terrorists and refused to condemn the abuses of President P.W. Botha's government.