Tag Archives: Rabble-Rouser for Peace

Church missed out on chance to be led by tub-thumper Tutu

Reporting
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-2372148,00.html
Comment – Atticus
The Sunday Times
September 24, 2006
Roland White

It could have been a kiss of life to the beleaguered Church of England: Desmond Tutu has revealed he was once approached to become Archbishop of Canterbury.

A forthcoming biography tells how Tutu was contacted by a church official in 1990 to see if he’d be eligible to succeed Robert Runcie. At the time Tutu was Archbishop of Cape Town. He had won the Nobel peace prize, was renowned for his opposition to apartheid and had even featured in a Michael Jackson video.

In the event, the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher picked solid, uncharismastic George Carey, one of two names presented to her, and the following decade saw a record decline in church fortunes. At the time, Tutu’s name was never mentioned as a possible candidate.

The authorised biography, Rabble-Rouser For Peace, also reveals Tutu is critical of Rowan Williams, the current archbishop, for being too soft on opponents of gay clergy. When a church conference rejected the ordination of openly gay priests, Tutu said he was “ashamed”. He told author John Allen that if conservatives were unhappy with gay clergy “they have the freedom to leave”.

Biography says Tutu regrets de Klerk’s Nobel Prize

Reporting

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/story/2006/09/22/tutu-biography.html
CBC
Friday, September 22, 2006 | 12:25 PM ET

The first authorized biography of Archbishop Desmond Tutu reveals the well-respected South African religious leader regrets nominating F.W. de Klerk along with Nelson Mandela for the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize.

Tutu is deeply critical of de Klerk, the last apartheid president of South Africa, for not accepting accountability for atrocities under his rule.

The book, Rabble-Rouser for Peace, written by John Allen, Tutu’s former press secretary, is scheduled for release Oct. 7.

Excerpts have been published in advance in South African newspapers.

The biography features an interview with de Klerk in which he admits failing to act to prevent human rights abuses.

Security forces were often brutal in their efforts to suppress people working against apartheid.

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

Tutu developed an antipathy of de Klerk after serving as chairman of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which began sitting in 1995 and released a final report in 1998.

Many victims of torture and brutality told their stories to the commission and Tutu often wept along with them during their testimony.

The commission offered amnesty to perpetrators of apartheid crimes if they told the truth about their activities.

The exhaustive investigation exposed the depth of complicity by political leaders and left Tutu disappointed with de Klerk, Allen wrote. Tutu regretted nominating him, together with Mandela, for the Nobel laureate.

The biography also reveals that Tutu was once considered to become Archbishop of Canterbury, leader of the worldwide Anglican church.

Although Tutu might have welcomed the appointment, he wasn’t eligible because he was not in a position to swear allegiance to the Queen, as is required by the Church of England.

If he had taken the role, the church might have approached the issue of homosexuality differently.

In Rabble-Rouser for Peace, Tutu says he is ashamed of the Anglican church for its stand against gay priests.

This is a marked difference from other African bishops who pressured Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams not to allow the ordination of homosexuals, leading to a conflict with more liberal church members in the West.

Tutu wrote a 1998 letter to Williams’s predecessor, Archbishop George Carey, saying he was “ashamed to be Anglican” after the church took a stand against practising homosexuals in the priesthood.

Tutu also said he was deeply saddened at the furor caused by the appointment of an openly gay bishop in 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.

A rabble-rouser for peace

Reporting

http://www.guardian.co.uk/southafrica/story/0,,1881205,00.html

If Desmond Tutu is guilty of craving fame, he has made good use of it, writes

David Beresford
Johannesburg dispatch
Tuesday September 26, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

About 10 years ago, when the truth commission and the activities of South African death squads were still fresh in people’s minds, a basket of fruit was delivered to my door. A card said it had come from Archbishop Desmond Tutu. I shouted at my family to take cover.

After a few prods with a broomstick persuaded me that it was not a bomb, and I had calmed down, I remembered that I had asked the archbishop to launch a book I had written. He had been unable to do so because of pressure of work. The fruit basket was by way of apology.

So I was prepared, when I took delivery last week of a parcel containing the archbishop’s biography, Rabble-Rouser for Peace, and did not have recourse to a broomstick. In fact I was reluctant to open it at all, so gorgeous was the wrapping: shocking pink paper tied with gold ribbon in the shape of a cross, with an ornamental crucifix and a parchment dove of peace.

The wrapping was no doubt the inspiration of the publishers (Simon & Shuster) or the biographer (John Allen), but it was somehow in the style of Tutu: a bit “over the top”.

The question is whether that is evidence of his guilt of the charge that George Orwell, talking about Gandhi, said should be levelled at all saints until they are proven innocent. As with Gandhi, the charge against Tutu is that of vanity. And although Allen, who is Tutu’s former press secretary, may be taken aback by the claim, the biography does go some way towards sustaining it.

This is a man who wants fame, and makes no bones about it. The night before the Nobel prize was about to be announced, he slept badly, he recalls. “It was almost like waiting for exam results,” he said. “It had happened twice before that people said I was a strong candidate and the let-down then was very hard.”

Perhaps more episcopalian was the “holy indifference to the result” for which Natal’s Michael Nuttall prayed while awaiting the outcome of the election to determine the archbishop of Cape Town, in which Tutu was his rival.

Tutu was a man who made much use of public gesture. During a hearing of the truth commission in Bloemfontein, he went on a pilgrimage to the memorial of an Anglo-Boer war concentration camp. “The next day Afrikaans newspapers featured a photograph of him in his cassock, bending his head in prayer in front of a statue of two women and a dying child,” records Allen.

And on occasions, when a shepherd might be expected to be consoling his flock, it was the shepherd who required consoling. So, at the outset of the truth commission hearings, while listening to an account by a torture victim of his treatment by the police, Tutu put his face down on the table “and wept uncontrollably, disrupting the proceedings”.

The charge of vanity is nothing new. Nelson Mandela used the word “arrogant” to describe Tutu in an interview with Allen. Recalling that the cleric had made an offer to call off the boycott campaign against South Africa if the then US president, Ronald Reagan, would meet his (Tutu’s) demands, Mandela is quoted as saying it was as if the archbishop had introduced the boycott.

“He made a statement which was regarded as arrogant by many of us,” said Mandela ­ referring to fellow ANC prisoners then with him in Pollsmoor jail.

Tutu’s presumption as he trod the international diplomatic stage appeared overweening, as on the occasion when he “cut off contact with British officials below the rank of foreign secretary”.

Linda Chalker, minister at the British foreign office, who was herself “cut dead” at a diplomatic function by Tutu, recalled how the archbishop ­ at one stage considered to be in the running to succeed Robert Runcie as Archbishop of Canterbury – even managed to upset the Queen. “I was escorting … the Queen around and remember him coming up with a very sharp remark,” recalled Chalker. “She heard it and said to me afterwards, ‘Why does he have to be unpleasant?’ I said: ‘He’s just angry.'”

But there is a defence for Tutu, and it is not just anger. It is to be found in a remark by the rector of Trinity church, in Wall Street, Daniel P Matthews, who observed that Tutu had “a genius for intuitively sensing his audience”. To appreciate the point one needed to witness such moments as the archbishop jiving to drums around the altar of Cape Town’s St George’s Cathedral in front of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. Or, for that matter, weeping in front of that torture victim, or posing for cameras in front of that concentration camp memorial.

With that intuitive genius comes a confidence and courage that is all the more extraordinary in the South African context. Africa is a continent on which hierarchy of leadership means much. It takes particular courage, for a black man in this part of the world, to describe Robert Mugabe as “bonkers”; to tell the leadership of the ANC, “I have struggled against a tyranny; I didn’t do that in order to substitute another”; or, for that matter, to face down ­ as he did on so many occasions ­ white South Africa.

In an epilogue to the authorised biography Allen quotes a nun, an Anglican solitary, who wrote to Tutu saying: “You have been a celebrity too long and it is taking its toll. You need once more to realise your nothingness before God.” Tutu replied with the agonised protest: “I could not sit by quietly.”

New book on South Africa’s Tutu pokes fun at his ‘rabble rousing’

Reporting

http://www.eni.ch/articles/display.shtml?06-0772
Episcopal News International
Donwald Pressly

Cape Town (ENI). When Nelson Mandela was released from jail in 1990, he held his first press conference at the home of Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu in Cape Town. Many people had expected Tutu to take up a political career, like other clerics who had been vociferous in opposing apartheid.

“Tutu stayed away from the press conference and kept out of the formal [photo] shots. It was their day, not his,” writes John Allen, a former South African journalist, one time trade union leader and press secretary for Tutu, in his authorised biography of the Anglican leader: “Rabble Rouser for Peace”.

Weeks after Mandela’s release, Tutu told a journalist he would not take part in negotiations for democracy. “He had been an interim political leader, he explained, standing in for the real leaders. Now that role was over. He was a pastor, not a politician, and he had no intention of entering party politics. He wanted to have a lower public profile. He was more successful in fulfilling the first intention than the second,” writes Allen in the book which will be officially launched in Europe and the United States on 7 October, Tutu’s 75th birthday.

The book captures the spirit of Tutu in its title. The biography of Tutu recalls his colourful use of English which included the description of the new democratic South Africa as “the rainbow nation”. The books also notes the cleric has not stopped criticism of the new rulers in South Africa, when he believes they need it.

Allen joined Tutu’s staff as his media officer when he became archbishop in 1986. The author also worked with Tutu when he headed South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission – which focused on people telling the tale of human rights abuses of the apartheid era after the country became a fully-fledged democracy in 1994.

Tutu was born in humble circumstances in Klerksdorp, near Johannesburg. Later trained as a teacher, Tutu left the profession when apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd began to impose what was known as “Bantu education” on South Africa’s majority black population. After theological training Tutu became an Anglican priest in 1960, and in 1975 became the first black dean of Johannesburg – a post he held for a year, before becoming Bishop of Lesotho.

Tutu was appointed the first black general secretary of the South African Council of Churches in 1978. Here he became a vociferous proponent of economic sanctions against South Africa during the presidency of P.W. Botha whose rule from 1978 to 1989 witnessed increasing resistance to apartheid.

Allen records that despite his unflinching opposition to apartheid, Tutu also stood against violence used in the struggle against apartheid including the use of “necklacing”, or placing a burning tyre around the neck of a victim, often singled out, without proof, of being a police informer. Tutu once saved a near victim of necklacing by rushing into a gathered crowd and throwing his arms around the man. The crowd released the man.

Some of Tutu’s critics have accused him of being an attention-seeker, something journalist David Beresford of the British newspaper the Guardian alludes to in reviewing the book. “Tutu was a man who made much use of public gesture. During a hearing of the truth commission in Bloemfontein, he went on a pilgrimage to the memorial of an Anglo-Boer war concentration camp,” writes Beresford and he quotes from the book: “‘The next day Afrikaans newspapers featured a photograph of him in his cassock, bending his head in prayer in front of a statue of two women and a dying child,’ records Allen.”

From 2000 to 2004, Allen was director of communications at Trinity Church, Wall Street, in New York. He returned to South Africa in 2004 to write the biography.

Archbishop Tutu hailed as a ‘rabble rouser for peace’

Reporting

http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/content/news_syndication/article_06101tutu.shtml
ekklesia.co.uk News
01/10/06

When Nelson Mandela was released from jail in 1990, he held his first press conference at the home of Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu in Cape Town. Many people had expected Tutu to take up a political career, like some other clerics who had been vociferous in opposing apartheid – writes Donald Pressly for Ecumenical News International.

“Tutu stayed away from the press conference and kept out of the formal [photo] shots. It was their day, not his,” writes John Allen, a former South African journalist, one time trade union leader and press secretary for Tutu, in his authorised biography of the Anglican leader: Rabble Rouser for Peace.

Weeks after Mandela’s release, Tutu told a journalist he would not take part in negotiations for democracy. “He had been an interim political leader, he explained, standing in for the real leaders. Now that role was over. He was a pastor, not a politician, and he had no intention of entering party politics. He wanted to have a lower public profile. He was more successful in fulfilling the first intention than the second,” writes Allen in the book which will be officially launched in Europe and the United States on 7 October 2006, Tutu’s 75th birthday.

The book captures the spirit of Tutu in its title. The biography of Tutu recalls his colourful use of language, which included the description of the new democratic South Africa as “the rainbow nation”. The books also notes the cleric has not stopped criticism of the new rulers in South Africa, when he believes they need it.

Allen joined Tutu’s staff as his media officer when he became archbishop in 1986. The author also worked with Tutu when he headed South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission – which focused on people telling the tale of human rights abuses of the apartheid era after the country became a fully-fledged democracy in 1994.

Tutu was born in humble circumstances in Klerksdorp, near Johannesburg. Later trained as a teacher, Tutu left the profession when apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd began to impose what was known as “Bantu education” on South Africa’s majority black population.

After theological training Tutu became an Anglican priest in 1960, and in 1975 became the first black dean of Johannesburg – a post he held for a year, before becoming Bishop of Lesotho.

Desmond Tutu was appointed the first black general secretary of the South African Council of Churches in 1978. Here he became a vociferous proponent of economic sanctions against South Africa during the presidency of P.W. Botha whose rule from 1978 to 1989 witnessed increasing resistance to apartheid.

Allen records that despite his unflinching opposition to apartheid, Tutu also stood against violence used in the struggle against apartheid including the use of “necklacing”, or placing a burning tyre around the neck of a victim, often singled out, without proof, of being a police informer. Tutu once saved a near victim of necklacing by rushing into a gathered crowd and throwing his arms around the man. The crowd released the man.

Some of Tutu’s critics have accused him of being an attention-seeker, something journalist David Beresford of the British newspaper the Guardian alludes to in reviewing the book. “Tutu was a man who made much use of public gesture. During a hearing of the truth commission in Bloemfontein, he went on a pilgrimage to the memorial of an Anglo-Boer war concentration camp,” writes Beresford and he quotes from the book: “‘The next day Afrikaans newspapers featured a photograph of him in his cassock, bending his head in prayer in front of a statue of two women and a dying child,’ records Allen.”

From 2000 to 2004, Allen was director of communications at Trinity Church, Wall Street, in New York. He returned to South Africa in 2004 to write the biography.

Tutu: ‘Ashamed’ to Be an Anglican

Reporting

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/200/story_20034_1.html
Daniel Burke
Religion News Service

Sept. 27 – Anglican icon and Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu says in a new book that his church’s rejection of gay priests in 1998 made him “ashamed to be an Anglican.”

That comment, as well as others critical of the worldwide Anglican Communion’s bickering over the role of gays and lesbians in the church, are related in a new biography of the South African prelate, called “Rabble-Rouser For Peace,” written by his former press secretary, John Allen. The biography is scheduled to be released close to Tutu’s 75th birthday in early October.

In the book, Tutu is candid about his gradual acknowledgment “that sexual orientation, like race or gender, was a given,” Allen writes.

Because he had retired as archbishop of Cape Town in 1996, Tutu held his tongue publicly after Anglican prelates rejected “homosexual practice” as “incompatible with Scripture,” in 1998. However, in a letter to the spiritual head of Anglicanism, former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, Tutu wrote “I am ashamed to be an Anglican,” according to Allen.

Moreover, the uproar created by the 2003 election of openly gay Bishop V. Gene Robinson in New Hampshire filled Tutu with “sadness,” Allen writes.

That controversy now threatens to tear apart the Anglican Communion, which consists of 38 individual geographic provinces.

“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,” Allen writes.

Tutu also thinks that current archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, “was too accommodating of conservatives who demanded that the churches of the United States and Canada should recant their tolerance for gays and lesbians,” or be kicked out of the Anglican Communion, according to Allen.

Tutu tells Allen that conservatives “have the freedom to leave,” if they don’t like the inclusiveness of the Anglican Communion.

Tutu, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his campaign to overcome apartheid in his native South Africa, has become one of the world’s most famous Anglicans. Though retired, Tutu continues to lecture and speak throughout the world.

‘De Klerk should come clean’

Reporting

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=vn20060922030644650C325144
Independent Online News
September 22 2006 at 07:04AM
By 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.

FW ‘failed to act’ says Tutu book

Reporting

http://iafrica.com/news/sa/200920.htm
iafrica News
JOHANNESBURG, Fri, 22 Sep 2006

Former president F W De Klerk failed to act on his suspicions that the apartheid security forces were committing human rights abuses, he admits in an authorised biography of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu.

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

“I was at times maybe not strong enough on following up on my instincts,” he told Tutu’s former press secretary John Allen, who authored the biography, ‘Rabble Rouser for Peace’.

“Not a new position”

The admission was “not a new position”, De Klerk’s spokesman Dave Steward said on Thursday.

“He (De Klerk) has said what was said on a number of occasions in recent years.”

Steward did not believe De Klerk’s inaction could be likened to that of Former Law and Order Minister Adriaan Vlok.

Vlok recently washed the feet of former anti-apartheid activist Frank Chikane, now director-general in the Office of the Presidency, in an apology for atrocities committed by police under his command.

Word of honour

“His (De Klerk’s) colleagues swore to him on their word of honour there was nothing unusual or illegal about their activities whereas there probably was,” said Steward.

The biography quotes Britain’s former ambassador to South Africa, Robin Renwick, as saying De Klerk “did know that mayhem was going on” as a result of security force activities.

De Klerk’s mistake was that “he has never been prepared to say as bluntly as he should have done that he was by no means properly in control” of the security forces, Renwick told Allen.

However Steward pointed out that some elements in the security forces had “their own agenda”.

By and large there was no question of mayhem or that the security forces were out of control.

Security forces “were carrying out orders”

“They continued to carry out FW De Klerk’s orders loyally… until the end of his presidency,” he said.

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), which will be available from September 28, also contains a number of other revelations.

More revelations

It reveals that Mangosuthu Buthelezi and Oliver Tambo were shortlisted for the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, and that Albert Luthuli told the Norwegians of the African National Congress’s planned armed struggle before receiving the peace prize.

It also discloses that Tutu enlisted the help of former foreign minister Pik Botha in trying to keep his son, Trevor, out of prison after he was sentenced for making threats at airports.

Stance on gays makes Tutu “ashamed to be Anglican”

According to the biography, Tutu told the former archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, that he was “ashamed to be an Anglican” after the world’s Anglican bishops rejected a proposal to reconsider the church’s attitude towards gays and lesbians.

Tutu is also said to have also criticised Carey’s successor, Rowan Williams, for being too accommodating of conservative Anglican leaders working for the expulsion of North American Anglicans who were tolerant of homosexuality.

If the conservatives did not like the Anglican Communion’s inclusiveness, Tutu told Allen, “then [they] have the freedom to leave.”

Sapa

Dr Tutu was sought for Canterbury

Reporting

http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/80256FA1003E05C1/httpPublicPages/CE69E351EEF0AA31802571F0004D2BD3?opendocument
Church Times
By Rachel Harden

THE FORMER Archbishop of Cape Town and Nobel prizewinner Dr Desmond Tutu was considered as one of the candidates to become the Archbishop of Canterbury on the retirement of Lord Runcie in 1991.

 

Details of this are revealed in a new authorised biography* by John Allen, a journalist and a former member of Dr Tutu’s staff and of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. It is to be published next month.

 

A member of the Crown Appointments Commission contacted Dr Tutu’s staff for his birth details, saying that they were exploring his eligibility to become the next Archbishop. He was not considered a suitable candidate, however, as “he was in no position to swear allegiance to the Queen of England.”

 

In the book, Dr Tutu has criticised the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Williams, for being “too accommodating of conservatives” in the debate on homosexuality in the Anglican Communion. He said that it was wrong to demand that the Churches of the US and Canada should recant their tolerance of gays and lesbians under threat of expulsion from the Communion. If the conservatives did not like the inclusiveness of the Anglican Communion, “they have the freedom to leave,” he said.

 

The book also reveals how, after the debate on homosexuality at the Lambeth Conference in 1998, Dr Tutu wrote to the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, saying that he was “ashamed to be an Anglican”. Dr Tutu withheld public comment so as not to overshadow the work of his successor as Archbishop of Cape Town, the Most Revd Njongonkulu Ndungane. But he was unable to keep quiet, and “began to include in speeches and sermons careful remarks which made his position clear”.

*Rabble-Rouser for Peace by John Allen (Rider Random House, £18.99; 1-84413571-3).

A Canterbury tale for Tutu

Reporting

http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,,1878488,00.html
Stephen Bates, religious affairs correspondent
Friday September 22, 2006
The Guardian

One of the most revered figures of Christianity, the Nobel peace prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu, was sounded out about becoming Archbishop of Canterbury in succession to Robert Runcie in 1990, a new authorised biography reveals.The book, Rabble-Rouser for Peace, written by the archbishop’s former press officer, John Allen, says that a member of the Crown Appointments Commission asked for his place and date of birth in order to establish whether he was eligible to be appointed. It was decided that Tutu was not eligible because he was not in a position to swear allegiance to the Queen, as is required in the established Church of England. The evangelical George Carey was eventually appointed instead.The book says that had Tutu been offered the appointment “there is no doubt he would have been strongly tempted to accept, for he loved the Anglican communion”.Had he been appointed, the book makes clear, the Anglican communion – currently threatened by splits over homosexuality – would have been very different. In contrast to Anglican archbishops from equatorial Africa, Tutu has always been much more liberal and accepting of gay people in the church.