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Rev'd Up
Desmond Tutu, the archbishop emeritus of South Africa, on a recent visit to New York. Reading the new biography of his eventful life is, he says, like "strutting in front of a mirror."
(Helayne Seidman for The Washington Post)
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While Botha's government imposed a state of emergency, bombed neighboring countries for supporting exiled anti-apartheid activists, detained thousands of people without trial and shot down protesters, Tutu campaigned furiously for economic sanctions. He wanted Washington and the world to put the squeeze on Pretoria.
But Reagan resisted. It was the era of "constructive engagement," a foreign policy in which the United States maintained friendly relations with Botha's regime in the hope of spurring positive change not only in South Africa but also in the broader region.
After pushing and prodding and making no headway, Tutu took a no-holds-barred approach. He called Reagan and his policies "racist" and said that the West "can go to hell."
Tutu's righteous indignation, coupled with the high-profile activists of the Free South Africa Movement who got themselves arrested day after day at the South African Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue, had an effect. Congress finally approved sanctions in 1986, with the House overriding Reagan's veto of a Senate sanctions bill.
Chester A. Crocker, then the assistant secretary of state for Africa, says today that Tutu did not understand the breadth of the African regional issues at play.
While saying he had "terrific respect for his ability to communicate," Crocker added in an interview, "He was also someone who, when he decided what he wanted to argue, was a great simplifier. He was a very effective advocate, and he made my work more difficult."
Formidable Obstacles
Back home, in South Africa, the far-right press sometimes ran headlines such as: "Tu-Tu Much" and "Shut Up." But Tutu would not shut up.
"He called it the way he saw it and in quite tough, vivid English language, which really got under the skin of whites," says John Allen, a white South African journalist who became Tutu's longtime assistant and is the author of the new biography.
In his prologue to "Rabble-Rouser for Peace," Allen describes an episode in which the diminutive Tutu went toe to toe in a shouting match with Botha, the tall, beefy president known in the Afrikaans language as "die Groot Krokodil" ("the great crocodile"). It happened in 1988, in the presidential offices in Cape Town. Tutu had gone to plead for clemency for a group of activists facing the gallows, but the two men ended up arguing over a recent protest march in which police water cannons mowed down clergymen. (Tutu had been arrested at the start of the march.)
There in Botha's office, the two men shouted and wagged their fingers at each other's faces. Botha dressed Tutu down for participating in the march. Tutu accused Botha of lying and suggested Botha had been a Nazi sympathizer. Botha called Tutu wicked and issued a warning consistent with the repressive apartheid policies of the previous 40 years:
"If you want confrontation, you're going to get confrontation," Botha shouted. "You must tell the people: They're going to get confrontation."
Tutu felt bad about it, felt he had gone too far.
