WHEN Bishop Desmond Tutu, as he then was, stepped forward to deliver the lecture he was entitled to give after being awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1984, it was expected that he would excoriate the apartheid regime in his native land of South Africa.

He did so, reigning in his normal passionate delivery to forensically fillet the proponents of apartheid with facts, figures and explanations of what it was like to be a black person in South Africa. To the surprise of many, Tutu did not finish there.

With his great humanity on show, the Bishop went on to criticise regimes across the world, mentioning Ulster and “behind the Iron Curtain” among others. In a remarkable rallying cry against global poverty and nuclear weapons, Tutu said: “We have the capacity to feed ourselves several times over, but we are daily haunted by the spectacle of the gaunt dregs of humanity shuffling along in endless queues, with bowls to collect what the charity of the world has provided, too little too late. When will we learn, when will the people of the world get up and say, enough is enough.

“When will we learn that an escalated arms race merely escalates global insecurity? We are now much closer to a nuclear holocaust than when our technology and our spending were less.

“Unless we work assiduously so that all of God’s children, our brothers and sisters, members of our one human family, all will enjoy basic human rights, the right to a fulfilled life, the right of movement, of work, the freedom to be fully human, with a humanity measured by nothing less than the humanity of Jesus Christ Himself, then we are on the road inexorably to self-destruction, we are not far from global suicide; and yet it could be so different.”

Tutu was all about making a difference and yet he came relatively late to his greatest challenge – dismantling apartheid. Desmond Mpilo Tutu was born into a Xhosa family in 1931 in the small farming town of Klerksdorp, Transvaal. His father Zacharia was a teacher, the headmaster of a Methodist primary school, while his mother Aletta, of Mosotho lineage, was a domestic servant. Two brothers died in infancy, but his sisters Sylvia and Gloria survived. Tutu was a sickly child who survived both polio and tuberculosis. It was while recuperating from the latter disease that he met his lifelong mentor Father, later Bishop, Trevor Huddleston, one of the first senior Anglicans to condemn apartheid.

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Educated at Johannesburg Bantu High School, Tutu’s first encounter with Nelson Mandela occurred when Mandela was an adjudicator at an inter-school debate. They would not meet in person again until Mandela’s release from Robben Island in 1990. After leaving school Tutu trained first as a teacher at Pretoria Bantu Normal College and in 1954 he graduated from the University of South Africa. The following year he married Leah Nomalizo Shinxani and they would have four children together.

After three years as a high school teacher, Tutu began to study theology, and was ordained as a priest in 1960. The years 1962-66 were devoted to further theological study at King’s College in London leading up to a Master of Theology – Tutu would often say that his time in England laid down his later principles. From 1967 to 1972 he taught theology in South Africa before returning to England for three years as the assistant director of the Theological Education Fund of the World Council of Churches. In 1975 he was appointed Dean of St Mary’s Cathedral in Johannesburg, the first black person to hold that position.

In 1976, he was made Bishop of Lesotho, and in 1978 became the first black General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches. Now in his mid-forties, as bishop and church leader, Tutu started to speak out against apartheid, a dangerous thing to do in South Africa – he survived several assassination attempts over the years.

Tutu once described his aim as “a democratic and just society without racial divisions” and famously made four demands to end apartheid. They were equal civil rights for all, the abolition of South Africa’s passport laws, a common system of education and the cessation of forced deportation to the so-called homelands.

Simple and straightforward, Tutu’s four demands were adopted by many campaigners against apartheid as the minimum asked of the South African government. He spoke out very strongly against sanction-busting nations, but he also became known for his impish sense of humour and infectious laughter. He was already famous before winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, but that award and his speeches catapulted him to global significance and the apartheid regime found it impossible to imprison him as they wanted to do – though they did deprive Tutu of his passport.

Made an archbishop, Tutu insisted on people calling him by the nickname “The Arch”, a sign of his great humour.

Tutu met with both presidents PW Botha and FW De Klerk and bluntly told them the end of apartheid was nigh. It happened within a few years. On gaining the presidency Nelson Mandela asked Tutu to chair the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It was a painful task, but as ever, Tutu did it his way.