Desmond Tutu wanted to be a doctor, but his parents couldn't pay
Desmond Tutu won a place to study medicine but his family could not afford the fees, so he trained as a teacher instead. Quitting classrooms in protest at apartheid schooling, he became a priest, then Cape Town's first black archbishop, a Nobel peace laureate, and chair of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Tutu was born in Klerksdorp in 1931 to a Xhosa father, a Methodist school principal, and a Motswana mother. The family was poor. Polio withered his right hand, and in 1947 tuberculosis kept him in hospital for 18 months, where the priest Trevor Huddleston visited him often; a biographer called Huddleston the greatest single influence on his life. As a teenager he sold oranges and caddied for white golfers, and he fell for rugby at Johannesburg Bantu High School.
At teacher training college he chaired the debating society and briefly met a young lawyer named Nelson Mandela, whom he would not see again until 1990. He married Leah Shenxane in 1955 and taught English and history. When the Bantu Education Act entrenched segregated schooling, the couple left teaching. His application to train for the priesthood was first blocked over debts, which the industrialist Harry Oppenheimer paid off. Ordained in 1960, he earned two-thirds of a white curate's pay, then went to King's College London in 1962 to study theology.
Returning to southern Africa, he taught theology, served as Bishop of Lesotho and, from 1978, led the South African Council of Churches. He warned the government that apartheid would breed racial violence while himself urging non-violent protest and foreign economic pressure. He became Bishop of Johannesburg in 1985 and Archbishop of Cape Town in 1986, the first black African in each post, and brought in women priests.
After Mandela's release, Tutu mediated between rival black factions during negotiations, and the new president chose him to lead the commission investigating abuses by both sides of the apartheid struggle. He later campaigned for gay rights and criticised presidents Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. Many white South Africans found him too radical and some activists too moderate. He left public life in 2010 and died in December 2021.
Source: Desmond Tutu
