The young Tutu was immersed, not by choice, in the dreadful lot of the pariah people he was born of, writes Tinyiko Maluleke.
Johannesburg - In 2006 a bunch of primary school kids from Fellview Primary in Wigton, UK, penned a letter to Anglican Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu – personally signed by each one of them.
Intended to thank him for his work in promoting peace in Ireland, the kids also took occasion to tell Tutu that they thought he was a kind, generous, and honest man – pretty accurate, kind and incisive, coming from the proverbial mouths of babes.
South Africans could learn from the children of Fellview Primary to appreciate and know Tutu better. They also surmised that he must have had a happy childhood.
On this particular point, I would beg to differ with the children of Wigton.
What Tutu had was a difficult if also eventful childhood, but I would never call it happy.
Except perhaps in the Pharrell Williams sense of being happy “like a room without a roof” – the kind of happiness which persists even when there “come(s) bad news talking this and that”.
Maybe the kids were supposing that as a child, Tutu had the attitude expressed in the Bobby Macferrin song, “Don’t worry, be happy”.
For in the world of Macferrin’s imagination, one chooses to be happy and not to worry even though one has plenty to worry about and little to be happy about.
And yet the Macferrin injunction and choice must be neither oversimplified nor romanticised.
Certainly not in the case of Tutu.
On October 7, Tutu will turn 84.
He was born in a place called Makoeteng – meaning the broken remnants and remains of what used to be mud houses – outside Klerksdorp, to Zacharia Zelilo “ZZ” Tutu and Aletta Dorothea Mavoertsek neé Matlhare.
Razed when the people of the location were moved by the apartheid regime for being too close to a white area, the Makoeteng of Tutu’s infancy is no more.
In its place was established a suburb called Neserhof.
For more reasons than the destruction of Makoeteng, Tutu was raised from the “resilient remnants” of the black South Africans who, according to Sol Plaatjie, woke up on Friday morning, June 20, 1913 and found themselves “not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth”.
Around the time of Tutu’s birth, Klerksdorp’s black residents showed up in white newspapers as “robbers”, “tax dodgers”, undocumented vagrants, “employment deserters”, “fowl thieves” and “shop burglars”.
These criminalised people who scraped a living on the fringes of a white world gave us Desmond Tutu.
Not far from Klerksdorp, there is an Afrikaner memorial to 149 adults and 968 children who died in a British concentration camp during the Anglo-Boer War.
Research has since revealed that, although unnoticed and long unremarked by historians, 14 000 black people also died in the war.
Is Tutu a remnant also of the victims of this war?
I think so.
He is the offshoot of anti-colonial Xhosa chiefs Ndlambe and Ngqika. In him live the spirits of Kimpa Vita, Nongqawuse, Nxele, Ntsikana and Tiyo Soga, famous anti-colonial prophetesses and prophets.
He is a seedling of Enoch Mgijima, Mpambani Mzimba, and Engenas Lekganyane – church leaders who sought African self-determination and independence, even in matters of the spirit and belief.
The young Tutu was immersed, not by choice, in the dreadful lot of the pariah people he was born of.
Between forced removals and in the search for a livelihood his family moved, with the young Tutu, from Moakoeteng, to Munsieville, to Tshing, to Roodepoort and to the Sophiatown environs.
Nor were the Tutus saved from the ravages of the diseases and implications of the man-made poverty that afflicted the darker peoples during the apartheid years.
According to one of his biographers, the young Tutu “was once accosted by a police officer who suspected he was homeless or a beggar”.
To make extra money, Tutu and a friend, Stan Motjuwadi – who was to become a famed Drum journalist – sold fruit and caddied for white golfers at the Killarney golf course in Joburg.
Two of Tutu’s brothers, Sipho and Thamsanqa, died in childhood and infancy. Desmond had to watch his father officiate at the funeral of Thamsanqa.
Of the five children born to his parents, only three survived.
One winter morning, in Klerksdorp, the brazier fire – the best and only way black families could warm themselves during winter – caught Tutu’s flannel pyjamas, resulting in serious burns.
Polio and tuberculosis had their turn with young Tutu’s frail frame.
Tutu writes with his left hand because of the damage done by polio to his right hand.
For nearly two years the young Tutu was in the Rietfontein Hospital, battling TB, and he was sure the end was nigh.
“Well, God, if I’m going to die, it’s okay. And if not, that’s okay too,” he prayed.
That was the context in which he met his great friend and role model Trevor Huddleston, who cared for Tutu as if he was his own child and race.
Most Tutu students concur in recognising his parents as his most influential teachers and role models.
His mother, Aletta Dorothea Mavoertsek Matlhare, taught the young Desmond all he needed to know and experience about compassion, self-sacrifice and humanitarianism.
A domestic worker, Mavoertsek would often ask for an advance from her white employers so she could pay for Tutu’s train ticket to school.
Tutu’s father, a descendant of the amaMfengu, was a proud Xhosa man and a strict parent who deeply loved his children.
To supplement his measly teacher’s salary, ZZ took to fishing and wedding photography, among other pursuits, at weekends – for which he was often paid with eggs, chickens, or even pigs.
As Tutu has noted several times, ZZ was no perfect husband. There was a pugnacious side, due to his occasional binge drinking. Desmond’s mother bore the brunt of that.
There were other people and other influences in Tutu’s life. The eZenzeleni school for blind black women in Roodepoort, where Mavoertsek worked as a cook, made a profound impression on Tutu.
Once while visiting there Tutu saw a white cleric, who he thought was Huddleston, doff a hat to his mother, something that was unheard of in those days.
This left an indelible impression on Tutu.
Perhaps this occasion was for him the earliest sign of a rainbow nation, a hint at the possibility of a non-racial future?
And yet the relationship between Tutu, the church and the priesthood was not one of love at first sight.
In fact the priesthood was not even Tutu’s second love.
He wanted to be a doctor and gained admission to medical school at Wits University, only to be financially excluded later.
He then trained as a teacher at the Bantu Normal College in Pretoria. Fellow stuidents included Stanley Mogoba, who was to be imprisoned on Robben Island and become a cleric, as well as legendary columnist Casey “Kid” Motsisi.
For a short while Desmond worked as a teacher – as a good English teacher, if the testimony by Joe Seremane, one of his students, is anything to go by.
Tutu was hurled towards the priesthood by the snowballing experiences of apartheid deprivation and a keen awareness that as a teacher, he could be what apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd had determined for him.
“I am not going to be a collaborator in this nefarious scheme,” Tutu said to himself as he swopped the classroom for the seminary.
The young Tutu had deep and varied experiences of the church.
He was born and baptised a Methodist, and his paternal grandfather, Solomon Tutu, was a minister in an African initiated church.
Tutu also had an uncle who, apart from being a township cobbler, was a priest in an African Independent Church.
His uncle often went about preaching in the township, with the young, banner-carrying Tutu leading the charge.
The Tutu family migrated from African initiated churches to Methodism, to the African Methodist Episcopal Church and later to the Anglican church.
Tutu’s personality and character were fashioned by a spirituality forged at the intersection of the beliefs of the African Independent churches, mainline Christianity, the simple faith of Mavoertsek, the work ethic of his father, the African philosophy of ubuntu and the lived experience of apartheid brutality.
His overall style and mannersisms bear the influence of the “happy” music of Sophiatown.
It is astounding that one whose ministry coincided with so dark a period in the history of South Africa and the world would also be renowned for his love and advocacy of laughter.
His sermons are a total performance, not an academic reading of a speech.
American ethicist and theologian Stanley Hauerwas once said: “Desmond Tutu is not a theologian, he is better.”
* Tinyiko Maluleke is a professor at the University of Pretoria. He writes in his personal capacity. Follow him on Twitter @ProfTinyiko
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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