Remember the True Desmond Tutu — FOREIGN AFFAIRS REVIEW

Feb 17

Feb 17 Remember the True Desmond Tutu

When the former Archbishop of Cape Town Desmond Tutu passed away on Boxing Day last year, there were reasonable and legitimate concerns that his radical legacy would be whitewashed and sanitised in a way that would erase the core of who he was as an activist and person. It was not wrong to fear so - mere hours after his death, tributes to the Archbishop flowed in from society’s upper-class: figures like Dominic Raab, Boris Johnson, Tony Blair, the Royal Family, and so on. Such tributes make Tutu seem like the paragon of morality and a figure for all to admire, and in many ways, he was. But the tributes also make it seem like he was the friend of the upper echelons of society, but nothing could be further from the truth. Desmond Tutu’s life was dedicated to fighting oppressive systems and the people, such as those aforementioned, who shaped and benefited from such systems.

Everybody remembers and celebrates Desmond Tutu, the man who fought Apartheid in his country. Everybody remembers and celebrates the man who organised a multi-racial march through Cape Town to protest the continuation of Apartheid under De Klerk. Everybody remembers and celebrates the man who fought Botha tooth and nail until the death sentences of six anti-Apartheid protesters were commuted. This aspect of his legacy is rightly cherished. But his role in the struggle against South Africa’s Apartheid is cherished only because of how safe it is: nobody reasonable today supports the Apartheid regime. That is why in public tributes to him, at least among the ones that mention his legacy in any detail, the only legacy of note for the most powerful is Apartheid. And though the struggle against Apartheid is worth remembering, it is not Tutu’s only legacy worth doing so.

One part of Tutu’s radical legacy that has conveniently been forgotten by those at the top were his unabashedly anti-capitalist beliefs. Responding to a question from a journalist following a speech where he stated his preference for socialism to other systems, he said, “I have said it before and I say it again that I hate capitalism.” He criticised capitalism as being “underlined by survival of the fittest” and that it “encourages some of the worst features in people.” Very few, if any, mainstream sources covered this aspect of his radical legacy. In four of the United States’s largest newspapers, not one of them mentioned his rhetoric on capitalism.

While in the grand scheme of things, his stances on capitalism are relatively minor, it is important to remember that Tutu despised the economic institutions that many of the powerful people who sent him glowing tributes in the wake of his passing are propping up. It is doubtful that Desmond Tutu, who described himself as hating capitalism, would support Boris Johnson, whose party is currently pushing through a bill that would privatise the NHS. It is doubtful that Tutu, a self-described socialist, would support Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill that incentivises the outsourcing of infrastructure to private companies (for example, in section 71101, subsection B, paragraph 4, subsection c). Would he have supported the Biden plan to privatise Medicare? Tutu ought to be remembered for his legacy as a whole, even if it makes people uncomfortable. To scrub out his beliefs on capitalism from public memory serves nobody but the powerful who will use his words to sell the public on policies that Tutu himself would have opposed.

One of the most jarring juxtapositions to occur in the wake of Tutu’s passing were the statements mourning Tutu’s passing and less than a week later, celebrating former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s knighthood. Even before Blair’s knighthood was announced, his statement regarding Tutu’s passing was in itself noteworthy. A comparison between Blair and his former partner in the United States, George W. Bush, highlights the absurdity of Blair’s statement, and the statements of people celebrating both Tutu’s life and Blair’s knighthood.

Notably, Bush made no statement regarding the archbishop’s passing. Despite the fact that two of his three successors and both of his living predecessors sent Tutu’s family their regards, in a reasonable world, nobody should have expected Bush to acknowledge Tutu’s passing; in fact, it would have been stranger if he had. Tutu was a fierce critic of the Iraq War — he had previously called on Barack Obama to officially apologise for the US invasion. He was involved in a protest in New York City specifically to protest military action in Iraq, a decision which broke his own rules about not joining protests outside of South Africa. He spoke to Condoleeza Rice just days before the invasion, begging her to delay the invasion, in hopes that more time would allow for a peaceful resolution. For his actions in Iraq, Tutu has described Bush as a war criminal and argued that he ought to be tried at the Hague.

Thus it is incredibly strange to see Blair’s comments about Tutu and his passing, for every criticism regarding the Iraq War that Tutu levied at Bush almost always applied to Blair as well. Not only did Tutu argue that Blair be tried for war crimes at the Hague for his role in the Iraq War, Tutu also snubbed an event he was invited to when he realised that Tony Blair was also scheduled to speak at the event. When defending his choice to snub Blair, Tutu called him a liar, writing, “I couldn’t sit with someone who justified the invasion of Iraq with a lie.” The celebration of both Tutu and Blair is a contradiction — somebody who genuinely respects Tutu in his entirety cannot celebrate Blair’s knighthood. The debate regarding the value of orders of chivalry in today’s age is one for another day, but regardless of where one falls on that debate, the fact that it is intended to be an honour is relatively undeniable. And if initiation into the order is supposed to confer a sense of honour to the initiated, Tutu would deem Blair unworthy.

A global moral icon characterising Britain’s former head of government as a war criminal ought to be noteworthy, yet significant British obituaries to Tutu neglected to mention Tutu’s criticisms. For example, none of the BBC, the Guardian, or the Telegraph make mention of Tutu’s disdain for Blair’s role in the Iraq War. For some background, no weapons of mass destruction, nor concrete links between Saddam Hussein’s government and Al-Qaeda were found in Iraq to justify the invasion. Roughly 200,000 civilians were killed violently in the invasion, a number that notably excludes civilian deaths due to structural issues that the war caused. Saddam Hussein’s own notable crimes and transgressions aren’t of issue here; it is that Tony Blair’s own actions have caused immense suffering amongst Iraqi civilians. Tutu’s call for Blair’s trial at the Hague is a call for the powerful to face justice for their crimes against the powerless. That Tutu’s call is being scrubbed from the public record not only defangs Tutu as the radical fighter against injustice that he was but also weakens accountability and entrenches power.

The public adulation of both Tutu and Tony Blair among elite circles is not the only instance of Tutu’s legacy being cherry-picked for the sake of entrenching power. If Tutu was known for one thing, it was his struggle against apartheid. Tutu was opposed to apartheid wherever he knew it existed, yet the focus of his struggle in the wake of his passing seems to be only on the fight in South Africa. But South Africa was hardly the only apartheid state to face Tutu’s ire. He expressed deep solidarity with the Palestinian cause, a solidarity that was ignored in nearly all of his obituaries from mainstream sources.

Tutu was clear in his condemnations of Israeli actions, describing Israeli responses to Palestinian military action as “disproportionately brutal.” He viewed Israel’s oppression of Palestinians as “humiliating” and believed that the treatment that Palestinian civilians faced at the hands of the IDF was reminiscent of the treatment black South Africans faced at the hands of South Africa’s security forces. This was not the only time he compared Israel to South Africa’s apartheid government. In 2002, Tutu gave a speech in Boston where he recalled being “deeply distressed” during a visit to Israel, as the “humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks” reminded him of when young white police officers prevented us [black South Africans] from moving about.” In 2008, Tutu described Israel’s blockade of Gaza, which cuts off fuel and electricity and risks the lives of hospital patients, as a “gross violation of human rights.” He remarked to another activist that “Israel’s apartheid is even worse than South Africa’s. We never had F-16s bomb our Bantustans killing hundreds of children. Remember that.”

Tutu’s comparisons between Israel and South Africa extended to his preferred method of fighting such injustice. He was an ardent supporter of the BDS movement, endorsing the movement very early in its existence. He argued that it would not have been possible for South Africa to democratise without people engaging such economic pressures against it and that the same injustices and inequalities motivated the BDS movement against Israel’s occupation. In 2014, Tutu wrote an op-ed in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz defending the use of boycotts and divestments to pressure Israel into reversing its occupation of Palestine. It was Tutu who said that choosing neutrality in the face of oppression was choosing the side of the oppressor, a sentiment he directly applied and echoed in the op-ed, writing that “Those who continue to do business with Israel … are contributing to the perpetration of a profoundly unjust status quo.”

Tutu was castigated for his support for using economic pressure against Israel’s occupation. The ADL called Tutu’s support anti-semitic, and Alan Dershowitz described Tutu as “evil” and “a rampant anti-semite and bigot.” Such attempts to discredit today’s BDS movement against Israel’s occupation of Palestine, and the late Tutu’s support for it, should be likened to attempts by those who sought to discredit economic pressure against apartheid South Africa. Tutu’s critics attempted to discredit support for a movement that could end a system where the state grants the freedom of movement to one population under its jurisdiction but not to another, where one population is constantly evicted from their lands and see their homes razed in order to make room for the other population’s settlements and where one population is forced into increasingly smaller pieces of land. These circumstances existed in apartheid South Africa and modern-day Israel. Tutu was not alone in his description of Israel as an apartheid state: former Israeli Prime Ministers have described Israel as an apartheid state.

Desmond Tutu led a life fighting injustices around the world. His role in ending the injustices of South Africa’s apartheid regime are rightfully and ought to continue to be cherished. But it is important that the extent of his fights against injustice isn’t forgotten — Tutu was a radical. Tutu stood against the fists of the powerful for the justice of the downtrodden, whether it was for black South Africans, the poor against a cruel economic system, AIDS victims, LGBTQ persons, Iraq War victims, the human victims of the activities of fossil fuel companies as well the planet, Palestinians, or anybody else whose sufferings caught his attention.

It is a shame to see Tutu’s legacy disintegrate to where only his struggle in South Africa is remembered widely while the other struggles fade in the public’s consciousness. Tutu’s role was never to make those at the top comfortable — his moral clarity was derived from his willingness to criticise and act against oppression at the cost of comfort. That the powerful can share Tutu’s words and celebrate his life without any self-reflection of their comfort in systems of oppression Tutu despised ought to be infuriating. It is thus up to those who truly believe in Tutu’s advocacy for the oppressed to remember Tutu for the radical champion of human justice he was in hopes that the legacy of future champions cannot be washed away.