June 12, 2004, Chicago, Illinois

When you were a boy in Klerksdorp, what was your childhood like, and what experiences had a large influence on you?

Desmond Tutu: My childhood in Klerksdorp? Well, like any other black child, we lived in a ghetto, and yet, it wasn't as if you went around feeling sorry for yourself.

My father was a schoolmaster, and I remember waking up one evening late, and seeing the room in which I was sleeping filled to the brim, as it were, with musical instruments -- drums and kettle drums and trumpets -- because they had a troop of Pathfinders -- something like Boy Scouts -- and it was just wonderful waking up and having all of this in front of you! And then, I often accompanied my father. I really liked riding with him on his bicycle on Saturdays. He was very fond of fishing. I don't think I liked fishing. I mean, you had to sit quietly and still, but I enjoyed the ride. And it was fun, it was fun. I mean, as I say, you didn't go around lugging a deep sense of resentment. We knew, yes, we were deprived. It wasn't the same thing for white kids, but it was as full a life as you could make it. I mean, we made toys for ourselves with wires, making cars, and you really were exploding with joy!

Was there any book that you read growing up that had the most effect on you?

Desmond Tutu: Actually, you know, I loved reading Aesop's Fables, and then Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare. My father used to try and help me, and I got to loving to read, because he allowed me to read comics, which most people said you shouldn't let your child read because they will spoil him. But that gave me an extraordinary hunger for reading. And I was very fortunate; I had very good teachers.

Was there one teacher in particular you remember?

Desmond Tutu: Ultimately, it's a man who was teaching us English Literature in what we call matricula, the last 2 years of high school. He really was quite extraordinary. When he spoke of a Shakespearean play, you almost thought that he grew up with Shakespeare! He was very good, yes. A black guy who was fantastic and gave us a deep love for literature.

Do you remember his name?

Desmond Tutu: Yes. Geoff Mamabulu. He died. Geoff Mamabulu. He was fantastic, fantastic. But I had other teachers. If you gave me five opportunities, I would give you five good teachers who were incredible.

What first drew you to the priesthood?

Desmond Tutu: I wanted to become a doctor, a physician, and I was admitted to medical school, but my family did not have the money for fees. So I ended up becoming a teacher. I stopped being a teacher when the South African Government introduced a deliberately inferior education for blacks called Bantu education, and I felt I wasn't ready to collaborate with this apology for an educational system. Our children, the 1976 kids who revolted against apartheid in Soweto, called it "gutter education," and it was gutter education. I left teaching. Of course, I didn't have too many option, and mercifully, the Bishop of Johannesburg at that time accepted me for training for the priesthood. So I came to the priesthood, as it were, by default.

What do you think the Bishop saw in you that set you apart from other young men?

Desmond Tutu: What did the Bishop see in me? I wonder. I actually do wonder. There is one thing which made me slightly different. Up to that point, not too many people with university degrees were offering themselves -- certainly in the black community -- were offering themselves for training for the priesthood. So he might have considered me a rare catch. And I have to say it's been an incredibly fulfilling and rewarding vocation. God has been wonderfully, wonderfully good.

What have you found so rewarding about the priesthood that someone who has never experienced it wouldn't know?

Desmond Tutu: What is rewarding about the priesthood is, one, that you have an incredible privilege of being privy to some of the most extraordinary things about people. I mean, as their parish priest, you visit people who are sick, say, on their death bed, and they tell you things that they probably have not shared with any other person. You are privileged to bring the Holy Sacrament to people at a time when they are probably at their lowest. But you also have the privilege of meeting up with people at their moment of great joy, when they are getting married, or when they have a child baptized. And you know, you are given the privilege of connecting people, as it were. Connecting people with the transcendent, connecting people with their God. And in many ways, each one of us, of course, is expected to be an icon, an image of that which is invisible, an image of God. Each one of us, because we each have been created in the image of God. So people actually, if they want to know, "What is God like?" they would have to look at you and me and see us as being compassionate, because God is compassionate, as being loving, because God is loving. God is invisible. People wouldn't know about God except through those who are God's representatives, you and I and all of us.

When you first began to speak out publicly against the apartheid system as Bishop of Lesotho, there must have been people who said, "This is hopeless. It's not going to make a difference. There's nothing you can do that will ever change anything." How did you cope with that?

Desmond Tutu: Many of us had moments when we doubted that apartheid would be defeated, certainly in our lifetime. But I never had that sense. I knew in a way that was unshakable, because you see, when you look at something like Good Friday, and saw God dead on the cross, nothing could have been more hopeless than Good Friday. And then Easter happens, and whammo! Death is done to death, and Jesus breaks the shackles of death and devastation, of darkness, of evil. And from that moment on, you see, all of us are constrained to be prisoners of hope. If God could do this with that utterly devastating thing, the desolation of a Good Friday, of the cross, well what could stop God then from bringing good out of this great evil of apartheid? So I never doubted that ultimately we were going to be free, because ultimately, I knew there was no way in which a lie could prevail over the truth, darkness over light, death over life. What I have to say really bowled me over was how quickly the change happened when it happened. One moment, Nelson Mandela is in jail, and the next moment, he is walking, a free man. One moment, we are shackled as the oppressed of apartheid; the next, we are voting for the very first time. I was 63 when I voted for the first time in my life in the country of my birth. Nelson Mandela was 76 years of age. But it happened, it happened. It happened partly because the international community supported us. People prayed for us. People demonstrated on our behalf, especially young people. Students at universities and college campuses used to sit out in the baking sunshine to force their institutions to divest, and the miracle happened. We became free because we were helped, and we want to say a bit, "Thank you," to the world. And you can become free nonviolently.

There were times when you were subjected at the least to fierce criticism, and I there were times when you must have feared for your life. How do you deal with that?

Desmond Tutu: We received death threats, yes, but you see, when you are in a struggle, there are going to have to be casualties, and why should you be exempt? But I often said, "Look, here, God, if I'm doing your work, then you jolly well are going to have to look after me!" And God did God's stuff. But it was -- I mean people prayed. People prayed. You know, there's a wonderful image in the Book of the prophet Zechariah, where he speaks about Jerusalem not having conventional walls, and God says to this overpopulated Jerusalem, "I will be like a wall of fire 'round you." Frequently in the struggle, we experienced a like wall of fire -- people all over the world surrounding us with love. And you know that image of the Prophet Elisha -- he is surrounded by enemies, and his servant is scared, and Elisha says to God, "Open his eyes so that he should see," and God opens the eyes of the servant, and the servant looks, and he sees hosts and hosts and hosts of angels. And the prophet says to him, "You see? Those who are for us are many times more than those against us."

When you first began, you knew what you were trying to do, and you perhaps had some idea of what you thought it would take to achieve this goal. Now that the goal of ending apartheid and creating democracy in South Africa is achieved, what do you know now that you didn't know before?

Desmond Tutu: I have come to realize the extraordinary capacity for evil that all of us have, because we have now heard the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and there have been revelations of horrendous atrocities that people have committed. Any and every one of us could have perpetrated those atrocities. The people who were perpetrators of the most gruesome things didn't have horns, didn't have tails. They were ordinary human beings like you and me. That's the one thing. Devastating! But the other, more exhilarating than anything that I have ever experienced -- and something I hadn't expected -- to discover that we have an extraordinary capacity for good. People who suffered untold misery, people who should have been riddled with bitterness, resentment and anger come to the Commission and exhibit an extraordinary magnanimity and nobility of spirit in their willingness to forgive, and to say, "Hah! Human beings actually are fundamentally good." Human beings are fundamentally good. The aberration, in fact, is the evil one, for God created us ultimately for God, for goodness, for laughter, for joy, for compassion, for caring.

How do you see the situation in South Africa now? Do you see a conflict between the drive to attract investment, and at the same time repair the economic inequalities that have survived apartheid? Some have said the reparation process is being slowed down by economic considerations. What are you views on that?

Desmond Tutu: You can't put a money value to freedom. You know, people will frequently ask, "Have things changed in South Africa?" And in a sense, they haven't changed. I mean -- when you referred to the material things, which are quite important -- I mean, the people who lived in shacks in 1994, many of them still live in shacks. Those who were the affluent in the apartheid years have tended still to be the affluent. But you know, what money value do you put to being free? It's an incredibly difficult thing to describe to someone who has never been un-free, what it means now not to have shackles. It's almost like trying to describe a red rose to a blind man, or to try to tell someone about the beauty of a Beethoven symphony and they're deaf.

So a great deal has changed, but we in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission said, "Watch it. You can kiss reconciliation and forgiveness goodbye, unless the gap between the rich and the poor -- the haves and the have-nots -- is narrowed, and narrowed quickly and dramatically."

So yes, we face very, very considerable problems. I used to be "Mister Disinvestment." Now I would like to be Mister Investment and say, "Come! Come and be part of an exciting, exhilarating process. Come in! Come in on the ground floor and see a people do something that's probably never happened before, people seeking to become something radically different from what their antecedents would have made us believe they were likely to become."

You provided extraordinary leadership at a crucial time in your country's history. What do you think are the essential elements of leadership?

Desmond Tutu: Our Lord Jesus Christ provided a revolutionary paradigm shift for what a leader should be, turning sort of topsy-turvy the prevalent conventional views according to which the leader is one who lords it over his underlings. Basically they have to know their place.

Someone said, "There are two rules in this operation. Rule number one: the leader is always right. Rule number two: in case the leader is wrong, refer to rule number one." It is that we think of the one who leads as a person who uses verbs in the imperative mood. "Do this!" "Jump!" You ask, "How high?" Now Jesus said, in fact, the real, the authentic leader shows the attribute of leadership in a kind of paradoxical way, almost an oxymoron.

The leader is the servant. So leadership is not having your own way. It's not for self-aggrandizement. But oddly, it is for service. It is for the sake of the led. It is a proper altruism. Now that paradigm sounds hugely unrealistic, idealistic, something for dreamers, namby-pamby -- when you think of our current world as a world of cutthroat competitiveness, dog-eat-dog, where stomach ulcers become status symbols, survival of the fittest, everyone for himself, herself, and the devil take the hindmost. And yet, you see, if you live by this latter code in your corporation, in your school, in whatever organization, you may indeed succeed, but it is at very, very great cost. You end up being feared rather than loved, as happened with a former state president of South Africa's, P.W. Botha, when the knives were out for him. No one, not even his closest associates, mourned his departure. And so they frequently say, "On your way up, be nice to those you meet. You might encounter them on your way down."

And you realize that this isn't just something that is idealistic, romantic, sentimental. Just look at a Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa and Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela, and you'll see that one of the outstanding characteristics of each one of these is how they have poured themselves out prodigally on behalf of others, of their being so utterly selfless.

And when you thought that in a hard-nosed, cynical age such as our own, you would be wanting to admire, hold in high regard the macho, the aggressive. It isn't the "hose" that we revere! Mother Teresa? You could say a lot about her, but "macho" is not one of the words you would use of her. And yet the world has had an incredibly deep reverence for her. She's not been even successful. And yet people almost universally would say this is true leadership, this is authentic leadership, because she has a credibility that seems to come far more easily through suffering.

Suffering seems to authenticate the leader. And so you see a Nelson Mandela, who was President not of a usually successful country, militarily or economically, and yet one has to admit that perhaps we have to say he stands head and shoulders above virtually every other statesperson in the world. And you say, "Why?" And it will be that people will say, "Well, his magnanimity, his readiness to have forgiven those who treated him so shabbily." Ultimately, it is that we recognize goodness. Goodness! Mother Teresa, she is good. Not successful, not macho. The Dalai Lama, mischievous, and yet with an incredible well of serenity at the center of his life. Someone who's been in exile for several, several decades. And so you think, I mean, that to some extent, suffering has to be a component of that which goes to make a good leader. And then you lead by leading, being willing to take risks. Mikhail Gorbachev did that with glasnost and perestroika. Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk, they were not doing things that were hugely popular within their constituencies. And then I think you have to be someone who affirms others, someone who is ready to see the good that is in others, and perhaps help to coax it from them.

There was a cartoon that showed God looking at a poster that said, "God Is Dead." And God, looking somewhat quizzical, said, "Oh, that makes me feel so insecure." We, each of us, need so much to be affirmed. For each of us has -- gnawing away at the center of our being -- a sense of insecurity, some more than others. And frequently, the more insecure, the more aggressive we become. The more we like to throw our weight about and say people should recognize us. If they don't recognize us for goodness, then they will recognize us for being stroppy (obstreperous).

Almost all seem to want to see in the leader the attributes that they wish they themselves have: integrity, compassion, gentleness, magnanimity -- the things that make you and I proud to be human, to say, "Ah yes. There are awful things about us, but I realize I am actually made for the transcendent. I am made for goodness. I am made for laughter. I am made for caring. I am made for sharing." And those leaders who somehow embody these things show that it is achievable. Yes, the sky is the limit, and we are meant to reach for the stars and dream God's dream.

Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us, Archbishop.

God bless you.

A lot of young people will draw inspiration from your words today.

Thank you.

References

• www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/tut0int-1