Rev'd Up

"I don't know whether that is how Jesus would have handled it," Tutu told Allen for the book. "But at that moment I didn't actually quite mind how Jesus would have handled it. I was going to handle it my way."

And Botha handled it his way. A few months after the confrontation, the Johannesburg headquarters of the South African Council of Churches, which led the clerical march, was bombed on Botha's orders. The church group's leader, Frank Chikane, was poisoned and nearly killed by a covert branch of the South African military.

The state's role in these crimes came to light after apartheid's end, under the truth commission, which also heard testimony about a plot to sabotage Tutu's car and confessions from covert state agents about a bizarre anti-Tutu plot. One agent confessed to hanging a baboon fetus in the yard of Tutu's official church residence. Another agent testified that the larger plot -- never carried out -- was to murder Tutu's son, Trevor, one of Tutu's four children, then point to the baboon fetus as evidence of a murderous plot by some fictional anti-Tutu group that used a deadly "muti," or traditional medicine.

Absorbing Humanity

Late at night in London in the early 1960s, the Tutus, husband and wife, would walk to Trafalgar Square. There, they were fascinated by the London bobbies, so unlike the brutal police back home, where blacks had to carry passes to circulate in white areas.

"We found it almost intoxicating that a police officer . . . didn't come across to ask for your pass," Tutu wrote in a long ago letter reproduced in Allen's book.

"You were free to walk wherever. And we would often go and ask for directions, even when we knew where we were going, just so that we could hear a white police officer saying 'No Sir, yes Ma'am.' "

Britain presented much racial wonderment for Tutu while he studied theology there. Each time a kindness was extended, it surprised him.

A white man, a fellow student, once helped him with his coat, Allen writes, and Tutu responded, " 'Do you know, Mervyn, you're the first white man ever to hold my coat for me!' and then burst into that typical laugh."

He would travel miles, and endure decades, before he could experience in South Africa the ease of life, of humanity, that he experienced abroad. There was racism in Britain for sure, or at least a racial curiosity about people with dark skin, like the time a child asked Trevor, Tutu's son, "How does your mother know you are dirty?"

Race was present in Britain, but the Tutus were not strangled and hemmed in and herded by it, as they would be once they returned to South Africa in 1967.

There, in his homeland, Tutu's faith was stretched and tested, was honed in the fire of a human struggle in which he would emerge one of many heroes, to the world and to his own country.

But he is humble, today, about his global stature. Perhaps it is a humility born of those days of personal conflict in London, when he felt inferior, felt he did not measure up to academic expectations. Or perhaps it was born of his background as a dirt-poor township urchin who suffered both TB and polio.

He is indeed a global cleric, and yet he shuns such descriptions.

Asked to take stock of his stature, he points instead to other iconic figures. Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Aun San Su Ky, Mahatma Gandhi. They are the ones, he says, to whom the world has looked for guidance.

As for himself, he demurs, "Well I haven't sat down and said, 'Now Tutu, what are you, my boy?' " And then he lets out one of his huge cackles. "That's a judgment that's got to be made by others."