Tutu: a man of empathy, moral ardor, and some silly jokes

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Written by northsouth

Category: Africa

Published: 28 December 2021

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By CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA

PRETORIA - One Christmas Day in the 1980s, Desmond Tutu led a packed church service in Soweto, the Black Johannesburg township and fulcrum of protest against white racist rule in South Africa. An American family — mine — found standing room at the back.

We were among the few white people in the congregation and, as we shook hands with Tutu on the steps upon leaving, he made a joke. Something like: “So, it really is a white Christmas.”

Evoking the Irving Berlin song ’’White Christmas,” famously crooned by Bing Crosby, in tense, dusty Soweto was quintessential Tutu. He couldn’t resist a pun about race in an inflamed country suffering the agonies of apartheid, the system of white minority domination that was extinguished in 1994.

(Actually, every once in a very long while, it has snowed in Johannesburg, but certainly not at Christmas time, which falls in the Southern Hemisphere’s summer).

When Tutu died Sunday at age 90, he was remembered as a Nobel laureate, a spiritual compass, a champion of the anti-apartheid struggle who turned to other global causes after Nelson Mandela, another moral heavyweight, became South Africa’s first Black president. Barack Obama praised Tutu for fighting injustice wherever he saw it.

But the former U.S. president also recalled the activist’s ″impish sense of humor.″ And it is that Desmond Tutu — the funny, kind, gracious man behind the icon — whom I and so many others recall.

To see Tutu up close was to bask in his rollercoaster laughter, to revel as his eyes would widen theatrically, to luxuriate in his pristinely enunciated remarks, and to come away infused with the man’s joy and warmth. If he had a chance to dance, usually in church, he was on his feet — with the help of a cane in later years, as he grew more frail.

He seemed to embody the best of what it is to be human, at a granular level. The small generosities, the willingness to listen, the empathy, lightening the mood with … let’s face it, some pretty silly jokes.

He kept that up through grim times in South Africa, showing anger and frustration too at dehumanizing state policies, the violence of white-controlled security forces and the killing within Black communities as apartheid, a scourge that he described as ’’evil,” played out bitterly.

Not everyone was a fan. His moral ardor ran up against realpolitik. His notion of the ″rainbow nation,″ an idealized vision of racial tolerance, is at odds with the social and economic imbalances of South Africa today.

But he always reached out, always looked for and found the humanity in people. In advance of a small service at St. George’s Cathedral in 2015, participants were asked to send photos of themselves; I watched as Tutu went around the congregation, asking each person to say a little about themselves.

I was a boy on that Christmas Day when Tutu riffed on Bing Crosby, and my father was reporting for The Associated Press in South Africa. In 1989, my parents moved to Stockholm. A few months before they departed, a postcard arrived with Tutu’s scrawl on the back.

’’Go well. Thanks for your splendid service,” he wrote. “Will miss you. Will certainly try to see you in Sweden. God bless you.”

In time, I became a journalist and also worked for the AP in South Africa, sometimes covering Tutu’s post-apartheid commentary on corruption and other challenges, as well as his hospitalizations for the prostate cancer that afflicted him for nearly a quarter century.

I would recall the one time he visited our Johannesburg home for dinner. He didn’t stay long. He was charming, easygoing.

Afterwards, he sent us another postcard. On the front was an elephant; on the back was something that could be taken both as a bread-and-butter note and as an unintended valedictory from a remarkable man who, even at age 90, left the world too soon.

“Just an inadequate note to thank you very much for your kind hospitality,” he wrote. “I enjoyed myself and was sorry to have to leave early. God bless you.”

It was signed, simply, “Desmond.”

South Africa’s last apartheid president F. W. de Klerk dies

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Written by northsouth

Category: Africa

Published: 11 November 2021

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By ANDREW MELDRUM

JOHANNESBURG — F.W. de Klerk, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela and as South Africa’s last apartheid president oversaw the end of the country’s white minority rule, has died at the age of 85.

De Klerk died after a battle against cancer at his home in the Fresnaye area of Cape Town, a spokesman for the F.W. de Klerk Foundation confirmed on Thursday.

De Klerk was a controversial figure in South Africa where many blamed him for violence against Black South Africans and anti-apartheid activists during his time in power, while some whites saw his efforts to end apartheid as a betrayal.

It was de Klerk who in a speech to South Africa’s parliament on Feb. 2, 1990, announced that Mandela would be released from prison after 27 years. The announcement electrified a country that for decades had been scorned and sanctioned by much of the world for its brutal system of racial discrimination known as apartheid.

With South Africa’s isolation deepening and its once-solid economy deteriorating, de Klerk, who had been elected president just five months earlier, also announced in the same speech the lifting of a ban on the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid political groups.

Amid gasps, several members of parliament members left the chamber as he spoke.

Nine days later, Mandela walked free.

Four years after that, Mandela was elected the country’s first Black president as Black South Africans voted for the first time.

By then, de Klerk and Mandela had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 for their often-tense cooperation in moving South Africa away from institutionalized racism and toward democracy.

Sudan braces for fresh protests against bloody coup

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Written by northsouth

Category: Africa

Published: 30 October 2021

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KHARTOUM - Sudanese anti-coup protesters plan to flood the streets Saturday to demonstrate against a military takeover that has derailed the country's transition to civilian rule and triggered deadly clashes.

The military on Monday detained Sudan's civilian leadership, dissolved the government and declared a state of emergency, leading to a chorus of international condemnation.

Street protests erupted against the coup, triggering a crackdown by the security forces that has left dead at least eight demonstrators and wounded around 170.

Despite the bloodshed, the protesters remain defiant, with organisers hoping to stage a "million-strong" march against the military's power grab on Saturday.

"We will not be ruled by the military. That is the message we will convey" at the protests, said Sudanese rights activist Tahani Abbas.

"The military forces are bloody and unjust and we are anticipating what is about to happen on the streets," Abbas said. "But we are no longer afraid."

Monday's takeover was led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan - Sudan's de facto leader since the 2019 ouster of longtime autocrat Omar al-Bashir after huge youth-led protests.

Several pro-democracy activists have been arrested.

On the eve of Saturday's rallies, a US official put the death toll at between 20 and 30, adding the protests would be a "real test" of the intentions of Sudan's military.

"We call on the security forces to refrain from any and all violence against protesters and to fully respect the citizens' right to demonstrate peacefully," the official in Washington said on condition of anonymity.

Phone lines were largely down by Saturday morning, as security forces deployed in large numbers on the streets and blocked bridges connecting the capital, Khartoum, with neighbouring cities.

Security forces set up random checkpoints on main roads, randomly frisking passers-by and searching cars.

Britain's special envoy for Sudan and South Sudan Robert Fairweather urged Sudan's security forces to "respect freedom and right of expression" for protesters.

"Peaceful protest is a fundamental democratic right. The security services and their leaders will bear responsibility for any violence towards any protesters," he said on Twitter.

'Grave setback'

Sudan has been led since August 2019 by a civilian-military ruling council, alongside Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok's government, as part of the now stalled transition to full civilian rule.

Hamdok himself was briefly detained before he was released and placed under effective house arrest. Other civilian leaders and ministers are still being held.

Days of unrest have rocked Khartoum and other cities.

Protesters have barricaded roads with rocks, debris and burning tyres.

Shops have largely been shuttered, and government employees have refused to work as part of a campaign of civil disobedience.

"The Sudanese people are determined to... win back the gains of the December 2018 revolution" against Bashir, said Abdelgelil al-Basha from the capital's twin city of Omdurman.

Burhan, a senior general under Bashir's three decades of iron-fisted rule, has insisted the military takeover "was not a coup" but only meant to "rectify the course of the Sudanese transition".

The move triggered a wave of international condemnation and several punitive measures, with the World Bank and the United States freezing aid - a heavy blow to a country already mired in a dire economic crisis.

US President Joe Biden has called the coup a "grave setback", while the African Union has suspended Sudan's membership for the "unconstitutional" takeover.

On Friday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on the military to show restraint as he reaffirmed his "strong condemnation" of the coup.

"People must be allowed to demonstrate peacefully," Guterres said.

Monday's power grab was the latest coup to hit impoverished Sudan, which has enjoyed only rare democratic interludes since independence in 1956 and spent decades riven by civil war.