Tutu spoke truth to power
The warm tributes that poured in from around the world stand testament to the extraordinary contribution Archbishop Desmond Tutu made to fight what was the greatest evil of the most modern era — apartheid. He played a crucial role in post-apartheid reconciliation in heading the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The very fact that both sides of polar opposites criticised the commission’s work in identifying the evils perpetrated by those who ran apartheid as a policy as well as the violent excesses of the protesters of the African National Congress and their wrongdoing brought out his credibility as an independent voice. He was a prophet as well as a priest, they said in acknowledging the work he did to bring his "rainbow Nation" together.
Along with Nelson Mandela, he was an architect of the liberation of South Africa from despicable racial segregation that lasted into the early 1990s. One of the saddest developments in recent times was that Tutu should renounce the ANC as a political force, saying in 2013 that he would no longer vote for the party. This was three years after he had retired from public life in the wake of a cancer diagnosis since when he had emerged occasionally to speak truth to power. But then succeeding generations of corrupt politicians, economic problems and social discord have led to evaporation of Tutu's dream of a multi-ethnic democracy in which the groups would live in harmony and prosper.
Mandela’s tribute to Tutu still resonates: “Sometimes a student, often a teacher, never afraid, seldom without humour, Desmond Tutu will always be the voice of the voiceless.” Two giants like them with the clearest vision of a free and democratic South Africa had rewritten its history with their steadfast belief in standing up for the cause and calling out abuses of human rights. Men like Tutu and Mandela come only once in a few generations. The least the South African leaders of today can do is to follow the example such men set or face a descent into disharmony and disorder that would do no justice to the struggles of such titans of history.