There is a suburb of Cape Town called Bishopscourt.
It is high up on the hill, near the botanical garden, and filled with Anglophone old money, trees and mansions. (1)
It gets it's name of course from the "official residence of the Archbishop of Cape Town" (Anglican / Church of England).
It was of course a "whites only" area under Apartheid until 1991 (2). Black people there could be assumed to be house or garden servants.
When Mr Tutu was installed there as the first black Archbishop of Cape Town in 1986, he moved in without seeking exemption from this law (3). He would put on his jogging outfit and take his exercise on the streets there, smiling and waving to neighbours as if it was the most normal thing in the world. And in time, it was.
That is praxis.
he was one of the best of us, always seeking a way to reach out.
An inspiration. The best way to challenge insanity is to simply ignore it and move forward without consideration.
You can't debate apartheid because it's farcical to begin with. The terminology even - exemption - makes our brains feel fuzzy, confused. What is this "exemption"? I'll just do my thing, thanks.
> The best way to challenge insanity is to simply ignore it and move forward without consideration.
That's a tactic to be used in specific circumstances, such as by the Archbishop in a specific, peaceful neighborhood. It's for people who are safe.
For a vulnerable person, it can be very dangerous: violating norms can end in being arrested or lynched - that's what lynchings and oppression are. That is the problem. Civil rights tactics such as lunch-counter sit-ins worked because they were carefully strategized and organized, and many people still got hurt and killed. For example,
"Without seeking exemption from the law" is the key phrase. He refused to respect a discriminatory law, and, by living there, was effectively daring the Apartheid government to arrest a sitting archbishop.
It’s civil disobedience. I’m not sure of how SA works , but in the U.S civil disobedience was regularly used to challenge laws during the 20th century. Going into white only areas and living there, forcing de segregation was one such technique.
Both Nelson Mandela and Tutu were greatly influenced by Gandhi. What is less known is that Gandhi's non-violent political philosophy germinated in Africa, greatly influenced by African culture and politics.
> We must at present do our best to form ... a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. - Thomas Babington Macaulay
I would hesitate to call Gandhi a racist, but he definitely was prejudiced against black Africans (in the beginning) as a result of what would today be called brainwashing / indoctrination (of Macaulayism) by the colonial British. Due to this policy of Macaulayism (to tolerate certain indians educated in the British system as equals), Gandhi was largely insulated from British racism in India and UK. So he had not only inculcated the idea that western culture was superior but was also a strong and vocal advocate for the British way.
What changed his worldview was the racism he experienced in Africa. In general, indians were treated differently in Africa. But he also personally experienced racism when he was once asked to get out of a first class compartment, despite having the train ticket for it, because a white man had demanded that he be removed.
The other major thing that changed his opinion of the British completely was when he saw the brutality of colonialism and war. A naive Gandhi believed it was his duty to assist the British empire and so he volunteered as a non-combatant with other indians, to assist the British effort in the Anglo-Boer War.
What he saw horrified and scarred him for life. He then swung to opposite spectrum and believed the British to be the devil's incarnation.
He was in Africa for 21 years and his life experiences, and African culture and politics, greatly influenced his political philosophy. As his political philosophy evolved, he found the right balance between blind admiration to blind hatred of the British empire, their culture and indian culture too.
I get there was a bit of cheek about it, just on the scale of civil disobedience in the country I didn't think "living in a big mansion in the richest neighborhood" would register much of a blip but maybe I'm wrong.
Clearly he was in a more privileged position than a random person from a black township, who would have been swiftly packed into the back of a Land Rover and dealt with extremely harshly. Even people with public prominence weren't exempt, as the case of Steve Biko shows. But Tutu was using the little power he had - as an official representative of the church - to challenge the apartheid laws in an obvious way. There were much easier routes he could have taken - challenging the laws with words, but living somewhere that wouldn't provoke the police. I don't know you, but I get the feeling you don't know quite how vicious the apartheid regime was, and the kind of physical risk that this entailed. Because no-one had done it before, he didn't really know what kind of response he was going to get. "Cheek" doesn't really cover it.
But you don't know about many specific random people with no connection to you taking a jog or sitting down on a bus because it made enough of an impact on other people that they told you about it
Consider a person of colour living in the eponymous mansion of the city's wealthiest neighborhood.
For a racist government, it's a symbol of defiance.
For other people of colour, who have been told by the government their whole lives that they are worthless, good only for manual labour -- one of their own is living in the oldest mansion in the fanciest neighborhood in town. It's an affirmation of their worth.
As a symbol, his place of residence had great power.
1) why would a US president want to live in the White house in DC? It doesn't matter what they want, the official residence comes with the job. I do not think that Mr Tutu spent every single day of his tenure in Bishopscourt - you are right, it wasn't his scene. But he was a common sight there.
2) It was literally illegal for Mr Tutu to live there, then. Doing so anyway, with the backing of a major church, who chose to send him there, was a political act. Which he performed with good humour.
I don't know exactly what was "required", but I do know that the tradition of "going to where the organisation sends you" is far stronger in the clergy than it is in elected politicians.
That's a bit of a spun story. There was apartheid proper, and technically apartheid. By that time, '86, my colonial school had black students. Tutu didn't need exemption, and wasn't being particularly rebellious.
IDK, memory and a check in Wikipedia confirms that things were still pretty bad in '86 and '87.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_in_South_Africa it's a litany of explosions and killings, and the turnaround may have been in the works, but it doesn't surface until December '88 when "Nelson Mandela is moved to Victor Verster Prison" (from Robben Island)
I don't recall school in integration in '86 near me and yes, I would have noticed. If you had that you were lucky.
I wasn't assuming that Mr Tutu was taking any great personal risk, but he was driving progress with cheerful good humour.
Archbishop Tutu told me, a few years ago, that he had received a strange email from someone claiming to be a lawyer from a small English parish in which Tutu had been a curate in the 1970s.
The person was asking for Tutu's assistance in transferring the fabulous wealth of a deceased Nigerian prince to his widow.
“Ah, a 419 scam,” I said.
“A what now?”
I explained what a 419 scam was, and, fearing the worst, asked what he had done about it. It turned out that he still had a number of friends in that area, and had forwarded it on to a friend to investigate.
“Never heard of this lawyer chap,” the response came, “DO NOT respond!”
So, of course the Archbishop responded.
For a moment, I put myself in the shoes of this “Nigerian Prince”, getting an email from “Archbishop Desmond Tutu”, shaming the alleged prince for attempting to scam innocents on the internet. I started giggling.
“So what happened next?” I asked.
“Oh, he emailed me back, and tried to sell me something else.”
I met him as a schoolboy when he came to give a talk at our school. This would've been late 80s. He told the story of the "Blaloon" seller and that the red, yellow, blue, "blaloons" all had the same stuff inside.
His mispronunciation of "balloons" was endearing and stayed with me ever since. Our family would often remark on it with affection.
At the demise of apartheid he led the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which was such a critical instrument in the peaceful dismantling of apartheid.
It's a shame that we don't see more of this approach around the world.
He was a warm and humorous individual with an infectious chuckle.
I had the privilege to attend a week-long convention where he delivered the keynote address each day back in '87. Everyone talks about Mandela, but I have always had far more respect for Tutu and his role in bringing about the end of aparteid.
Remember that aphorisms like that don't only apply to your side.
Every time you say something like that, imagine that someone whose sense of injustice is opposite to yours is using it. Maybe they think that abortion is literal murder. Maybe it's the 1950s and they think some poor black guy has raped a white girl (because how would she ever consent?) Maybe they're a Russian living in Ukraine and they think the Ukrainian government is oppressing the Russians and the only way to stop this is by helping Russian troops take over.
I want people to say "No, I do not have to bomb that abortion clinic. No, I do not have to join that lynch mob. No, I do not have to overthrow the government." If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you haven't chosen the side of the oppressor. Rather, if you're neutral in situations of injustice, it means that you have figured out that humility can be a virtue.
> Every time you say something like that, imagine that someone whose sense of injustice is opposite to yours is using it.
This line of reasoning only makes sense if you think that moral positions have no qualities other than how strongly people hold them. If, on the other hand, you believe that two people can hold two opposing moral positions with equal strength, and one of them can be correct while the other is incorrect, this line of reasoning doesn’t make sense.
Of course, this was obviously Tutu’s position. Tutu probably didn’t think “before you go and help the mouse, realize that doing so might be just as upsetting to the elephant as your neutrality would have been to the mouse.”
>This line of reasoning only makes sense if you think that moral positions have no qualities other than how strongly people hold them.
Of course there are differences in moral positions other than how strongly people hold them. But if you're going to make a rule about them, your rule can't take those differences into account, because everyone thinks their own moral position is correct.
It's like having a rule "the police may coerce confessions from suspects, but only if they're guilty". This rule is impossible in practice because every officer coercing a confession thinks the suspect is guilty.
> But if you're going to make a rule about them, your rule can't take those differences into account, because everyone thinks their own moral position is correct.
No, that’s precisely what I’m disagreeing with. The point is that it is possible to think your position is correct, and your opponent thinks their position is correct, but you are correct and they are incorrect. Why can’t a “rule” take that into account? Any notion of justice clearly has to take this into account already!
Or that is the wrong question. You have posited a false dichotomy.
Is bodily autonomy a right that extends to all people including females from about 12 to 50 years old?
Bodily autonomy is so deeply held that we cannot even harvest life-saving organs for donation from the dead if they dictate it shall not be done.
Abortion is the only exception we make as a society. We even pass laws preventing birth control from being paid for with group health insurance policies.
Anti-abortion positions have never been about fetuses; they are about limiting the rights of women.
When you restrict access to choose, you are granting greater agency to corpses than living women. Ask the right questions.
From context, I can tell we have similar views on how society should decide the question “what options should a pregnant person have?”
Even with that agreement, I don’t see how our views are rooted in some fundamental truth that precludes someone from arguing the opposing point of view (or arguing that the cutoff from one conclusion to the other is at a different number of weeks; I do not believe abortion should be generally legal at 39 weeks, nor at 38 weeks, ...)
Lots of people follow their conviction; travel far away to hurt others and deminish their and others humanity, that might be to help someone but in the end it's not ethical. Recently there was an discussion about the quote from Aristotle¹ that can be shorten to "virtues are actions, not words", but that leads to misinterpretations. Same with this quote from Tutu, you can not take it out of context and make it out as neutral to the ethics.
> every officer coercing a confession thinks the suspect is guilty.
That's absolutely not true; coerced confessions absolutely are used against people known to be innocent by those coercing the confession (heck, even when the coercers are, in fact, the guilty parties.)
OTOH, it is true that the cops will always say the target is guilty, because that’s the whole point.
>..Rather, if you're neutral in situations of injustice, it means that you have figured out that humility can be a virtue.
I'm not sure I understand how humility comes into the picture? I don't think anyone didn't join a lynch mob, yet allowed them to continue on their way to the victim and thought of themselves as humble.
Vaccinations decrease the chance you’ll take valuable hospital space from someone who isn’t there for covid. That’s the real issue. Anyways, maybe you’ll eventually get the picture and get vaccinated, maybe not, but eventually you will be a pariah in the community and I certainly won’t be there to defend your idea of freedom.
Sober drivers kill people too, not just drunk drivers - yet we have no problem prohibiting driving drunk.
But even that analogy breaks down because it’s been 1 year of vaccine’s existing, and in most places much less than 6 months of vaccine-only rules. This is a health crisis. Nobody wants or intends this to be forever. It’s like crying injustice because of a temporary ban on drunk driving.
We know vaccine doesn't stop you from getting infected, we know vaccine doesn't stop you from spreading the virus.
This is absolutist nonsense. It takes the truth and makes it imply something false.
Vaccines make you less likely to become infected, and decrease viral load if you do get infected. So, even if you do become infected, the infection is milder and you are less likely to pass it on. In all these ways, (less likely to catch, milder infection, less likely to transmit) they provide protection to you and those around you.
complete nonsense based on some small studies while real world data contradict this, vaccinated makes same or higher proportion of infected than it's actual vaccination rate in many countries
same with viral load especially now with Omicron
vaccines were sold as effective against infection and transmission, them narrative moved to effective against mild symptoms, them narrative moved to effective against serious symptoms
but I understand you I would have also buyer's remorse if I fell for this, trying to make everyone make same mistake add you did doesn't change a thing though
Yeah cockney rhyming slang (UK), if you get a 2:2 degree you’ve got a “Desmond”. I’m not surprised people don’t know why, when I first heard it I had to look it up. I don’t think kids grow up learning about Desmond Tutu.
There's a certain irony that many people who celebrate the life of Desmond Tutu and his fight against apartheid continue to ignore that he said Israel does the same thing and should be subject to boycott.
It's still ignored by a lot of people who do not hesitate to argue apartheid is bad, yet can't stomach the comparison. Tutu's willingness to call Israeli government policy apartheid, alongside other prominent apartheid fighters, like e.g. Arthur Goldreich, matters greatly in legitimising resistence against those policies. Even so every new person or organisation deciding to come out and saying this is still met with fierce resistance.
Desmond Tutu views were incredibly consistant and technical, rather than emotional. Policy of Israel is driven by the need to maintain a Jewish majority franchise, should not need to explain why, however the simple demographics of the Arabs would quickly create Arab majority in Israel if Israel were to acknowlege soverentiy over the occupied territories or even permit the return of refugees.
An outcome like the above is of course clearly completely unacceptble, locally and in the west.
However Israel cannot allow even those territories to become independant because that would require giving up security control, control over valuable land and other natural resources like water. No nation gives away its territory easily!
So current status quo with the territories must be maintained!
Desmond Tutu was critical of Israeli government policy in the treatment of Palestinian people and even earlier when Israel maintained friendly relations with the apartheid regime in South Africa. This is also the same man who criticised Arab nations for refusing to recognise Israel as a sovereign state, sympathised with the historical atrocities committed against Jewish people and condemned violence from both parties in the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts.
There is no irony in celebrating the life of a man who universally condemned oppression and called for a peaceful resolution to one of the most complex conflicts of modern times.
Always loved this episode of Late Late Show where Craig interviewed Archbishop Desmond Tutu. "You know craig, I think you're crazy. We need your kind of crazy. giggles" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12OlAe2Sfes#t=14m
My favorite tid bit from his book, the book of joy about his and the Dalai Lama, I paraphrase.
A man met with Mr. Tutu and asked him to pray for the man's son, who was gravely ill and in need of medical treatment. The boy got the treatment he needed and became healthy again. Years later, the same boy fell ill again and the boys father once again asked the archbishop to pray for him. Mr. Tutu replied to the boys father "I never stopped (praying for your son). He had such deep, meaningful compassion for all his fellow humans. Just reading his writings made a significant meaningful positive impact on my life and well being. Thank you Mr. Tutu.
Perhaps it's overly cynical, but "X name has Y hits on Wikileaks" reads to me as an oblique claim of wrongdoing by X. Famously, that particular tactic was used during the last American presidential election, with the "Y hits" including silly things like birthday emails and recipes.
If you just meant "here are some potentially interesting documents that have Desmond Tutu's name in them," then it's not clear what linking to Wikileaks offers that linking to WaPo's, WSJ's, NYT's, or even just Google's search results does not. But normally linking to the results of a search with no other context would be considered a frivolous thing to post, which is again why I assumed that you had some other implied statement in mind.
It would make for a better discussion if you stated plainly why you think your link is interesting. Wikileaks is a hot button issue in some circles and just giving a link like this without context will raise some eyebrows.
To compare apartheid to being asked to follow scientifically validated an internationally agreed protocols to not spread a disease to those around you, geesh.
I disagree with this comment. I don’t want to start a debate, just to give my experience and perspective.
I am a South African, I am white, just for transparency.
In my experience:
White people are still in a position of economic and social power such that the (unjust) assumptions made by an average person during apartheid are still mostly the same.
White people are stereotypically more educated, have more money, connections and are more trustworthy etc.
To say that white people are the subject of reverse racism while making any comparison to apartheid, where people where abducted, tortured, disappeared, forcefully relocated and removed from their land, is simply ignorant.
I make this post not to try and change your mind, but simply to give some representation to an alternate view point.
Can you expand more - on the ‘reversed racism’ aspect? I’ve spent a good amount of time in CT with long-time white locals, and this isn’t something I experienced or sensed.
It gets it's name of course from the "official residence of the Archbishop of Cape Town" (Anglican / Church of England).
It was of course a "whites only" area under Apartheid until 1991 (2). Black people there could be assumed to be house or garden servants.
When Mr Tutu was installed there as the first black Archbishop of Cape Town in 1986, he moved in without seeking exemption from this law (3). He would put on his jogging outfit and take his exercise on the streets there, smiling and waving to neighbours as if it was the most normal thing in the world. And in time, it was.
That is praxis.
he was one of the best of us, always seeking a way to reach out.
1) "ranked sixth richest suburb in South Africa" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishopscourt,_Cape_Town
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_Areas_Act
3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond_Tutu#Archbishop_of_Cap...