By the 1976 uprisings, Tutu had returned to South Africa to assume the historic role of first black dean of Johannesburg at a time when most black political leaders had been banned, jailed, exiled or murdered.
Refusing government permission to live in the suburbs as “honorary whites,” the Tutus chose to live in Soweto, which burnt with the unrest of black youth frustrated and fired up by Biko’s gospel.
On the eve of the Soweto uprisings, Tutu launched his first political salvo in a May 6 open letter to Prime Minister John Vorster, warning of his “growing nightmarish fear that unless something drastic is done very soon bloodshed and violence is going to happen in South Africa almost inevitably”.
Barney Pityana, who had been in and out of detention since his 1968 expulsion from Fort Hare, wrote to his former chaplain expressing appreciation for his stand, while warning that appealing to Vorster as a grandfather and “writing letters is a useless gesture”.
In the end, Vorster ignored Tutu as Pityana had predicted. On June 16 1976 Vorster’s guns opened fire on unarmed black children in the worst state massacre since Sharpeville — 176 black schoolchildren died and hundreds more were injured.
Panicked by the international attention and the national unrest that followed, the state clamped down further. More than 4,000 young black people left the country to join the ANC and PAC’s armed wings.
The next year the regime made a martyr of Steve Biko, murdering him in their custody after detaining him without trial under the Terrorism Act.
It blamed Black Consciousness for the continuing unrest, outlawed 20 Black Consciousness organisations and black newspapers, and detained leaders and black journalists.
Standing before more than 15,000 mourners from across the country and world gathered for Biko’s funeral in King William’s Town [Qonce], Tutu delivered these words:
“God called him to be the founder father of the Black Consciousness movement, against which we have had tirades and fulminations. It is a movement by which God, through Steve, sought to awaken in the black person a sense of his intrinsic value and worth as a child of God, not needing to apologise for his existential condition as a black person, calling on blacks to glorify and praise God that he had created them black.
"Steve, with his brilliant mind that always saw to the heart of things, realised that until blacks asserted their humanity and their personhood, there was not the remotest chance for reconciliation in South Africa. For true reconciliation ... can happen only between people who assert their own personhood and who acknowledge and respect that of others. You don't get reconciled to your dog, do you?”
Invoking Biko’s declaration that Black Consciousness and black solidarity was the ticket price on “the quest for a true humanity,” Tutu called for a costly reconciliation.
In Biko’s words: “For the liberals, the thesis is apartheid, the antithesis is nonracialism, but the synthesis is very feebly defined ... The failure of the liberals is in fact that their antithesis is already a watered-down version of the truth whose proximity to the thesis will nullify the purported balance.”
Biko’s death drew the world’s attention to apartheid’s terror and solidified African and Afro-diasporic solidarity around a common black consciousness
Biko’s death drew the world’s attention to apartheid’s terror and solidified African and Afro-diasporic solidarity around a common black consciousness.
In paying Tutu tribute on his death in December 2021, [Cornel] West recalled his and James Cones’s July 1985 journey to South Africa on the invitation of the South African Council of Churches (SACC), where Tutu served as secretary-general.
Barely off the plane, West was soon at the funeral of four young anti-apartheid activists in Duduza township and found himself witness to Tutu’s powerful ministry at the first political funeral since the state of emergency had been declared earlier that year.
Tutu invited the then 31-year-old “comrade from California” to deliver his message of solidarity: “Justice is indivisible and love is unstoppable!”
Recognising the indivisibility of black struggle, West and Cone met with Tutu and several other black South African theologians and discovered the urgent need to convene around the common concerns of black theology on both sides of the Atlantic: if global apartheid was the thesis, global black solidarity would be their antithesis.
The result of their revelation was two major milestones in the development of the then 20-year history of systematic black theology — a December 1986 Union Theological Seminary conference and its edited collection We Are One Voice: Black Theology in the USA and South Africa (1989).
“Black theology ... is for us ... African theology,” Tutu wrote.
Tutu understood that like African theology, the hermeneutics of black theology cannot be found in the abstracted theologies of Euro-America’s formal liturgical orders.
Rather, black and African theologies are heard, seen and, most importantly, felt in the embodied theologies uttered, expressed, and enfleshed in the call and response; the stomp, shout, sweat and scream; the breath and beat; the hurl, thrust and gesture; the leap, lift, and swing from silence to rapture in the religions of African peoples scattered across the world by the death-dealing terror of history.
In the beginning was the Word, but before the Word was the Sound.
More than a jazzman in the world of theology, Tutu was a tsotsi theologian in search of God. Tutu articulated his lively, incarnated and indigenised tsotsi theology through the word, song and dance of this improvisatory ethic of survival and struggle.
Improvisation, after all, is simply the English word for what black people know as “being led by the spirit,” an ethic which amaNdebele capture when they say, “Ngihamba lakho” (I go with it), which we can express theologically as, “I go where the spirit takes me”.
Tutu reconciled black critique with African cosmos, and his black theological praxis embraced embodied utterance, not only on the pulpit but also on the burning streets of apartheid South Africa’s townships.
His praxis demonstrated that African and black theology exist dialectically and can only be understood in mutual relation vis-à-vis one another as “soul mates”. Tutu understood that questions of self-image and self-determination are central to black struggle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Where Mbitian African theology strove for African self-image, Conian black theology strove for black self-determination. Tutu understood that we need both.
Pushed at gunpoint to find a God who participates in history, Tutu drew on jazz’s dialectic synthesis of black critique and African cosmos to incarnate a theology that could answer the burning political and existential questions facing the Black Consciousness generation of the 1970s.
Today, more than three decades after the end of the global anti-apartheid movement, a new generation of black activists, “born-frees” — born after Jim Crow, the Cold War, born after apartheid — on both sides of the Atlantic search the rubble for its self-image and for a vision of self-determination.
Globally, the Berlin Wall’s fall and Mandela’s release signalled the universal triumph of Western liberal capitalist democracy at the so-called “end of history”, and with it, the premature end of the global anti-apartheid movement that held Africa and her diaspora together in struggle. Theologically, this triggered the contextual shift from a theology of liberation to a theology of reconstruction.
The South African political reforms which most powerfully manifested themselves in the ANC’s transformation from an underground liberation movement into a governing party elected into power with its reconstruction & development programme manifesto thrust nonracialism and liberalism onto the political and ecclesiastical centre stage.
Already in the ’80s, the United Democratic Front (UDF) and, later, the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM), emerged under the leadership of the Rev Allan Boesak, Tutu and others, and embraced what Vincent Ntintili called the “non-racialist strand” of black theology, as part of their explicit support for the ANC and its non-racialist philosophy.
The UDF took its initiative from a Black Consciousness Movement weakened by Biko’s death and the subsequent banning of all BC organisations.
More than a jazzman in the world of theology, Tutu was a tsotsi theologian in search of God. Tutu articulated his lively, incarnated and indigenised tsotsi theology through the word, song and dance of this improvisatory ethic of survival and struggle.
As the combination of a debt crisis, declining economy, sanctions and internal protest pushed the end of apartheid in sight, Tutu’s increasingly non-racialist vision began to build itself on the metaphor of a rainbow, which he first used during the 1989 Defiance Campaign.
Inspired by the sight of a thousands-strong multiracial throng of demonstrators — including an unprecedented number of whites — waving their hands from side to side on his instruction, Tutu described them as the “rainbow people of God”.
Mandela later appropriated this metaphor in his inaugural address.
Nine months after Mandela’s release, Tutu set out his theological vision for racial reconciliation in his opening sermon at the watershed 1990 Rustenburg conference which convened churches that had been at odds under apartheid.
There would be no Nuremberg, Tutu declared. Instead, there would be a three-stage confession-forgiveness-restitution model: “Let us go ... the Christian way, the way that says, yes there is a risk in offering people forgiveness ... But that’s not ... our business, that God’s business, with that particular individual.”
In response to Tutu’s reconciliation sermon, Willie Jonker, a theologian from Stellenbosch University, Afrikanerdom’s intellectual heart, offered an apology for apartheid. Tutu accepted the apology, and the white Dutch Reformed Church endorsed it the next day, sending ripples throughout the religious community.
From one side, a furious former apartheid president PW Botha telephoned the church’s moderator to protest. From the other, black and coloured Dutch Reformed Churches questioned the sincerity of the white church and, with it, Tutu’s right to accept the confession. Tutu denied that he had spoken for the conference but said he refused to impose limits on God’s grace.
Meanwhile, Bishop Khoza Mgojo, then SACC president, provided a prophetic warning: there would not be much forgiveness unless the white government and churches faced up to the historic issue of land restitution to black people, saying, “The land must be returned to the people. It cannot be owned by the few and worked by the many.”
Without the mandate to right the historic conquest of the land, Tutu’s impossible task as the head of the TRC was to wield ubuntu to reconcile the conflicting worlds of abantu and abelungu into a unified Rainbow Nation.
On December 16 1995 — what would have been the Day of the Vow, the apartheid-era national commemoration of the 1836 covenant between God and the Afrikaner Voortrekkers made manifest with the overflowing blood of Zulu people — a purple-robed Tutu presided over the TRC’s commencement.
Describing the rationale for amnesty at the TRC as based in ubuntu, Tutu said: “African jurisprudence is restorative rather than retributive.” Ultimately, Tutu’s theology of grace and forgiveness was grounded in what his former comrade and colleague Boesak later critiqued as a “Christianised ubuntu”.
“We do not want to rainbow without bread,” the poet Makhafula Vilkazi reminds us. What is the rainbow to us when we have no land to live, nor land to bury, no land to be at a time when white South Africans, 9% of the population, hold 72% of the land, while we, black people, 79% of the population, hold 1%. What is the rainbow to us when the world’s highest rate of inequality lives in the divide between Soweto and Sandton?
Painfully aware of the enduring global apartheid that inspired the likes of Dylann “The Last Rhodesian” Roof, the then 21-year-old terrorist behind the June 2015 Mother Emmanuel AME Church massacre, the so-called “born frees” who formed part of the 2015-2016 Rhodes Must Fall/Fees Must Fall student decolonisation movement rejected Tutu’s postapartheid vision of a “Rainbow People of God” and the deracialised, deradicalised and Christianised ubuntu that came to be associated with him.
Instead, they embraced Black Consciousness, black feminism and Pan-Africanism. “Our parents were sold dreams in 1994. We want the refund,” born-frees declared.
If global apartheid is still the thesis, then global Black Consciousness and solidarity must remain our antithesis.
In this crisis of separation — of sister from sister, struggle from struggle, struggle from spirit, and spirit from study — returning to Tutu’s earlier black radical reconciliatory spirit will help us move forward.
When the classic debate over black and African theology reached a tenor in the 1970s, Tutu’s theological heritage — grounded in the black prophetic lineage uNtsikana had sounded with the bells of his Great Hymn — allowed him to cut through the noise, to hear and to understand. Africanness is the outer circle.
Blackness is the inner circle, the suture, the call and response between Africa and Afro-diaspora. Blackness strums us tight into echo chambers, reverberating together, blackening each other with the cries of our sufferings and strivings in our search for personhood.
• A longer version of this article first appeared in the Boston Review to mark the first anniversary of Tutu’s passing. The above is a shortened part of the article.
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