http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/Display_news.asp?section=World_News&subsection=Rest+of+the+World&month=October2006&file=World_News2006100682458.xml
AFP
10/6/2006 8:24:58

CAPE TOWN • Desmond Tutu, South Africa’s voice of conscience during apartheid, is once more at odds with authority over the moral direction of his beloved Rainbow Nation as he approaches his 75th birthday. Ten years on from his retirement as archbishop of Cape Town, the indefatigable cleric has lost none of his ability to make those in power squirm as he points out their shortcomings. The great and the good of the multi-racial South Africa will be on hand to fete the Nobel laureate at a lavish birthday party in Johannesburg tomorrow.

Hollywood megastar Samuel L Jackson and music maestro Carlos Santana are in the city with their families and will join birthday celebration this weekend. Among the stars at the event were Stevie Wonder, Denzel Washington, Santana, Jonathan Butler, Johnny Clegg, Danny Glover, Quincy Jones and former Robben Island political prisoner Ahmed Kathrada.

But Tutu appears in no danger of embracing the establishment in his twilight years, and instead continues to shine the spotlight on the mounting problems facing the country 12 years after the end of white rule.

“What has happened to us?” Tutu asked last month of modern-day South Africa, the country for which he coined the phrase “Rainbow Nation”. “Perhaps we did not realise just how apartheid has damaged us so that we seem to have lost our sense of right and wrong.”

“We have achieved our goal. We are free … We have an obligation to obey the laws made by our own legislators. We should be dignified, law abiding citizens … proud of our freedom won at such great cost,” he said.

Never a member of the African National Congress, Tutu has clashed frequently with the governments of Nelson Mandela and his successor Thabo Mbeki.

He has repeatedly questioned the response to the Aids pandemic and what he dubbed “a culture of sycophancy” towards Mbeki, leading the president to snap back and brand him a populist.

ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma was declared unfit to lead the country by Tutu following his admission during a rape trial that he had unprotected sex with an HIV-positive family friend half his age.

Foreign leaders have also been on the receiving end of Tutu’s sharp tongue, including Robert Mugabe who was called a “caricature of an African dictator”. The veteran Zimbabwean president in turn called him “an evil little bishop”.

International recognition of Tutu’s contribution to the struggle against apartheid-which he had described as “evil and unchristian”-came in 1984 when he was awarded the Nobel peace prize.

Born into a poor family, Tutu dreamed of becoming a doctor specialising in tuberculosis research, according to an authorised biography by his former press secretary John Allen. Tutu suffered from the disease as a child, and also had polio.

His family could not afford to send him to university, and he instead trained as a teacher on a government scholarship. After a short stint as a teacher, his anger over the inferior education offered black children prompted him to become a priest.

“It wasn’t for very highfalutin ideals that I became a priest,” Allen’s book quotes him as saying. “It was almost by default.

http://152.111.1.251/argief/berigte/beeld/2006/10/07/B1/6/tnjrabble.html
Beeld
Neels Jackson
7 October 2006

‘n Passievolle intensiteit in sy verbintenis tot belangrike kwessies, saam met ‘n diep deernis vir mense.

Dít is die eienskappe van emeritus aartsbiskop Desmond Tutu wat deur John Allen, sy biograaf, uitgesonder word as dít wat die grootste indruk op hom gemaak het.

En Allen behoort te weet.

Hy was immers 13 jaar lank die emeritus aartsbiskop, wat vandag 75 jaar oud word, se regterhand.

Volgens Allen was dit nie sommer net ‘n werk nie. Tutu het nie onderskeid gemaak tussen sy werk en private lewe nie. Sy hele lewe het opgegaan in sy roeping.

Vir Allen het dit beteken dat hy heeltemal opgeslurp is deur sy werk vir Tutu.

Hy het daarvan gehou dat Tutu eg was. Selfs voor hy vir hom gewerk het, toe hy hom nog as joernalis gevolg het, het hy die indruk gekry dat jy die regte Tutu ook in sy openbare optrede sien.

Allen verwys na die passievolle intensiteit waarmee Tutu dinge gedoen het.

Hy sou nie stilbly nie, maak nie saak wat die gevolge was nie.

Dit het egter nooit deernis met mense oorwoeker nie.

Allen vertel dat Tutu by die destydse pres. F.W. de Klerk gepleit het dat hy om verskoning moet vra vir die boosheid van apartheid. Toe De Klerk later wel met ‘n verskoning vorendag kom, het baie gedink dit was te min en te laat, maar Tutu het dit aanvaar.

Dis met dié akkommoderende gesindheid dat hy me. Winnie Mandela by die Waarheid-en-versoeningskommissie gehanteer het.

Omdat hy Tutu so goed ken, vertel Allen, was dit nie nodig om eindelose onderhoude met die emeritus aartsbiskop te voer om Rabble-rouser for peace, die biografie, te skryf nie. Nadat hy die eerste konsep neergepen het, kon hulle net ‘n klompie gate invul.

Allen sê die titel van die boek kom eintlik van me. Albertina Sisulu af. Sy het vir Tutu ‘n “rabble-rouser” genoem.

Oor die voorbladfoto van Tutu in sy pienk biskopsgewaad agter ‘n mikrofoon, oopmond, woes aan die beduie en boonop met ‘n “sinistere donkerbril” op, het die aartsbiskop opgemerk dat die ou SAUK (wat hom dikwels in ‘n negatiewe lig uitgebeeld het) sou sukkel om beter te doen. Toe Allen die foto verdedig, was Tutu se reaksie dat hy nie kapsie maak daarteen nie.

Die biografie is vandeesweek in Johannesburg bekend gestel.

http://www.irishexaminer.com/breaking/story.asp?j=84516210&p=845y65yz&n=84516590
The Irish Examiner
06/10/2006

Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu turns 75 tomorrow – his acerbic tongue and irrepressible humour as sharp as during his anti-apartheid crusades.

Some 1,200 guests – including former President Nelson Mandela – are due to attend a gala dinner in Johannesburg, capping weeks of celebrations in honour of the retired archbishop of Cape Town, or Arch as he is fondly called.

In typical fashion, Tutu has been finding time for ordinary people amid all the festivities. He gleefully knocked around a ball at the Homeless World Cup in Cape Town last week and was treated to a rapturous rendition of Happy Birthday by some of the world’s most marginalised people just hours ahead of a formal concert on his behalf in the city cathedral.

Far from slowing down, Tutu seems more determined than ever to speak up on issues ranging from crime to Aids to the war in Iraq.

“What has happened to us? It seems as if we have perverted our freedom, our rights into license, into being irresponsible,” he said at a lecture last week about South Africa’s horrific rates of violent crime and rape.

“Perhaps we did not realize just how apartheid has damaged us so that we seem to have lost our sense of right and wrong,” said the man who voted for the first time at the age of 62 and coined the phrase Rainbow Nation of God in celebration of South Africa’s different peoples.

Tutu was named earlier this year as a member of a UN advisory panel on genocide prevention, drawing on his long experience as a tireless campaigner against apartheid. He was named Anglican archbishop of Cape Town in 1986 and awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1994.

He retired in 1996, hoping for a “slightly less hectic life”, but then agreed to a request by Mandela to head the Truth and Reconciliation set up to help the country come to terms with the horrors committed under white racist rule.

Tutu sometimes broke down and wept with the victims as he listened to two years of harrowing testimony about atrocities committed under apartheid – abductions, torture, death squads and bodies torched beyond recognition as their killers enjoyed a barbecue.

He criticised the last white President FW De Klerk for failing to accept responsibility for apartheid’s evils – and also lambasted the current government’s limit of 30,000 rands (€3,000) for victims as mean.

Just as Tutu was a thorn in the flesh of the white government, he has not shied away from criticising leaders of the ruling African National Congress.
He incurred President Thabo Mbeki’s ire in 2004 after he made a stinging attack against South Africa’s political elite last week, saying the country was “sitting on a powder keg” because of its failure to alleviate poverty a decade after apartheid’s end.

More recently he outraged supporters of ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma by saying the popular politician should withdraw from the race to become the country’s next president. He said in a public lecture that he would not be able to hold his “head high” if Zuma became leader after being accused both of rape and corruption.

The head of the Congress of South African Students condemned Tutu as a “loose cannon” and a “scandalous man” – a reaction which prompted an angry Mbeki to side with Tutu.

Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe once called Tutu an “angry, evil and embittered little bishop” after the Nobel laureate criticised the country’s human rights record and said that the president was “a cartoon figure of an archetypical African dictator”.

Tutu typically shrugs off such criticism with boundless good humour and mischievous smile that greets the many visitors to his no-frills office in a modest Cape Town business park.

An authorised biography Rabble-rouser for Peace released to coincide with his birthday made it clear that Tutu was frustrated with his beloved Anglican Church because of its rejection of gay priests.

“He found it little short of outrageous that church leaders should be obsessed with issues of sexuality in the face of the challenges of AIDS and global poverty,” wrote his former press secretary John Allen.

Tutu became a priest because – he jokingly said – he wasn’t clever enough to realize his dream of becoming a doctor. He was a sickly child and suffered from tuberculosis – an incident which led him in later life to set up a TB centre and campaign for more funding for the disease.

He disclosed last year that he had a recurrence of prostate cancer that he was first diagnosed with in 1997 – although it hasn’t had a noticeable impact on his hectic schedule or bouncy step.

He celebrated 50 years of marriage last year to his wife Leah, with Mandela and his wife Graca Machel as guests.

“He’s just an ordinary husband who likes gardening, who loves gardening, but who won’t do any gardening,” his wife said.

http://www.sabcnews.com/south_africa/general/0,2172,135276,00.html
SABC News
September 22, 2006, 06:00

F W de Klerk, the former president, has admitted that he failed to act on his suspicions that the apartheid security forces were committing human rights abuses.

De Klerk admits, in an authorised biography of Desmond Tutu, the former Anglican archbishop, that he should have asked more questions.

He made the statements to John Allen, Tutu’s former press secretary, who authored the biography, Rabble Rouser for Peace.

Dave Steward, De Klerk’s spokesperson, says the admission is not a new position and that it’s been said a number of times in recent years.

Steward added that he didn’t believe De Klerk’s inaction could be likened to that of Adriaan Vlok, the former law and order minister. He said De Klerk was of the opinion that Allen was very fair in the biography. The book will be available from next Thursday.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/stephen_bates/2006/09/an_opportunity_missed.html
The Guardian: commentisfree
Stephen Bates
September 22, 2006 11:01 AM

The news that Desmond Tutu, the South African church leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner, was sounded out about becoming Archbishop of Canterbury in preference to George Carey in 1990 is likely to cause liberal members of the Church of England to sob quietly into their cocoa. If only, they’ll be muttering.

Since the revelation comes in Tutu’s authorised biography, Rabble-rouser for Peace, written by his longtime press officer John Allen, I think we can assume it’s true. The idea was stymied because as a South African Tutu could not swear allegiance to the Queen, as is required by the Established Church of England. That is clearly a much more important priority for a Christian leader in this country than any question of mere belief.

How different the Anglican Communion might have been with Tutu at the helm. The biography makes clear that Tutu does not share the visceral antipathy towards gays exhibited by his fellow African bishops further north in the Dark Continent. It is this that is currently tearing the worldwide Anglican communion apart.

This very week African church leaders have been gathered in Rwanda, where they will be gearing up to denounce the liberal US Episcopal Church yet again for its election of a gay bishop three years ago and the Americans’ endorsement of a liberal presiding bishop (a woman, no less!) at their convention in Ohio in June.

The African bishops will all be aware that last week their largest and noisiest member, the Nigerian Anglican Church endorsed a statement affirming its commitment “to the total rejection of the evil of homosexuality, which is a perversion of human dignity” and encouraging the country’s national assembly to ratify a bill which would outlaw homosexuals and make it illegal even to speak on their behalf. This is a clear violation of the Anglican Communion’s own policy towards homosexuals (as well as an offence against Christian charity) but, as far as I am aware, no one has been calling for the Nigerian Church to be expelled.

Tutu himself, from a more liberal African Anglican tradition, has long been firmly against such stigmatisation and intolerance, and much more robust than most English bishops in his defence of gay people. After the meeting of the world’s Anglican bishops at the Lambeth Conference in 1998 adopted a hardline motion against homosexuality – largely at the behest of the Africans – Tutu wrote privately to Carey saying it made him ashamed to be an Anglican. He has also told his biographer that if the Africans don’t like the inclusiveness of churches such as those in the US and Canada “they have the freedom to leave”. Such outspokenness, as opposed to the appeasement that is more usually on offer from white Anglican leaders, should be welcomed.

Nigeria’s primate, Archbishop Peter Akinola, recently appointed a British-born conservative evangelical, the Rev Martyn Minns, currently rector of an Episcopal church in Virginia, as a bishop acting for the Nigerian Church in the US. It would be interesting to know whether Bishop Minns endorses the Nigerian position that homosexuality should be illegal.

Currently a number of US dioceses are demanding alternative archiepiscopal oversight because they cannot stomach the idea of a liberal, female presiding bishop being elected. I would make the modest suggestion that Archbishop Akinola should be appointed to that role. I am sure he would be very congenial to them and he would certainly offer them firm leadership, with no tolerance of dissent. They could then walk apart from more liberal Anglicans safe in their own theological certainty and self-righteousness.

The conservative British theologian Gerald Bray, now professor of divinity in Birmingham, Alabama, wrote (pdf) a little while ago: “Faced with a choice between a white American homosexual bishop and a black-skinned African Archbishop, there has been no hesitation … the celebrant may look more like the church janitor than like any of his worshippers in the pews, but it does not matter.” It sounds like a marriage made in heaven and I do hope Archbishop Rowan Williams will consider it. He could solve a number of problems at a stroke that way.

http://www.capetimes.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3448548
Cape Times
September 22, 2006 Edition 1
SAHM VENTER

Johannesburg: Nobel Peace laureate Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, in his first authorised biography, says he was ashamed of his Anglican Church’s conservative position that rejected gay priests.

In the book, Rabble-rouser for Peace by his former press secretary John Allen, Tutu also criticised FW de Klerk for not accepting accountability for apartheid atrocities. He said the failure caused him to regret having nominated De Klerk, along with Nelson Mandela, for their 1993 Nobel Peace Prize.

Excerpts from the book are to be released today and the biography in time for Tutu’s 75th birthday on October 7.

Tutu was critical of the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams for bowing to conservative elements, particularly African bishops on the gay priest issue, in the 77-million member Anglican Church that includes Episcopalians in the United States.

In a 1998 letter to Williams’s predecessor, Archbishop George Carey, Tutu wrote he that was “ashamed to be Anglican”.

This came after the Lambeth Conference of Bishops rejected the ordination of practising homosexuals saying their sexual relations were “incompatible with scripture”.

Tutu also said he was deeply saddened at the furore caused by the appointment of openly gay Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003.

“He found it little short of outrageous that church leaders should be obsessed with issues of sexuality in the face of the challenges of Aids and global poverty,” wrote Allen.

As archbishop, Tutu criticised but could not change a policy in South Africa that said gay priests would be tolerated as long as they remained celibate. He did approve church blessings for gay and lesbian relationships, without calling them “marriage”.

He also pushed for the ordination of women, and when it was approved, quickly appointed Rev Wilma Jakobsen as his chaplain.

Tutu’s criticism of De Klerk stems from when Tutu was chairman of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which offered perpetrators of apartheid crimes amnesty if they told the truth about their activities.

During the hearings, Tutu sometimes wept with the victims of human rights abuses.

Allen wrote that the process left Tutu disappointed with some political leaders, particularly de Klerk, who he believed had not accepted accountability for apartheid atrocities.

De Klerk was not directly implicated in state-sponsored violence, Allen wrote, but had been aware of “mayhem” as a result of activity by the security forces.

In an interview with the author, De Klerk acknowledged he failed to follow up suspicions security forces were committing human rights abuses.

“Where maybe I failed was not asking more questions, not going on a crusade about things … following up on slight uncomfortableness you feel here and there,” said de Klerk.

In response to a request for his reaction to the book, De Klerk said Allen had tried to be fair in reporting on the tensions between him and Tutu, recording the steps taken to address the violence and saying no evidence implicated the president in the violence.

“Significantly, he (Allen) confirms the shocking suspicion that the TRC had an agenda to incriminate me,” the former president said, noting the author wrote about the frustrations of failing to pin responsibility for the human rights abuses on De Klerk.

De Klerk said he regrets the antipathy that Tutu subsequently developed for him and that their relationship has mellowed with time.

But he said the TRC imposed the “struggle” version the truth on the other parties and seriously undermined prospects for reconciliation.

De Klerk’s admission was “not a new position”, his spokesman Dave Steward said yesterday.

Steward said De Klerk was of the opinion Allen had been “very fair” in the biography. “At the end of the day it is a fair book.”

The biography, published by Rider (Random House), will be available from September 28.