Detail
- Artist: Francois Smit
- Published in: The Sunday Independent
- Author of article: John Allen
- Date: 24/09/2006
- Paper: 280gsm 100% cotton acid free paper
- Ink: Epson ultrachrome archival pigment ink
- Image Size (printarea): 594mm x 420mm
- Frame: Optional
- Edition: Limited edition of 12
A short extract from the article
The independent voice for the voiceless.
An extract from John Allen's biography of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Rabblerouser for Peace
For those who struggle for fundamental change in societies built on longstanding and deeply -embedded structural injustice, it is rare to achieve that change in their own generation, and even rarer to live long enough to see its first fruits. Gandhi saw India become independent but did not survive the violence surrounding partition. Martin Luther King jnr, Jr., famously told the people of Memphis the night before his assassination that he had been to the mountain top and seen the “promised land,�, but he never entered it.
As Desmond Tutu approached his 75thseventy-fifth birthday this year in 2006, he felt both vindicated and blessed: vindicated because, as he put it, he loved to be loved, and the demise of apartheid brought to an end the calumny he endured as public enemy number one; and blessed to be part of a generation that saw the release of prisoners, the return of exiles, and the inauguration of democracy.
That is not to say Tutu believed the transition to democracy fulfilled his or God’s vision for South Africa.
Tutu’s own vision was built on the metaphor of a rainbow that he first used during the defiance campaign of 1989. Inspired by the thousands of demonstrators – including an unprecedented number of whites – waving their hands from side to side at his bidding, he described them as the “rainbow people of God.�. Nelson Mandela later appropriated this metaphor, incorporating it in his inaugural address.
After liberation, what critics called “rainbow-ism� fell on hard times. Some people, probably quite a small minority, rejected the non-racial vision. Opposition of more substance came from those who associated it with a naivenaïve, sentimental belief in a non-existent multiracial harmony – or, even worse, with acceptance of a status quo in which blacks still lived in poverty and whites in comfort. . .
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
