Tutu celebrates the leaders of tomorrow

Published 9:00 pm Monday, May 6, 2002

Associated Press

SEATTLE — He loves to laugh and his remarks are punctuated with funny voices and dramatic pauses. For a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu is a hoot.

But amid the jokes and high-fives, Tutu offered wisdom, charity and strength Monday to students at the city’s African American Academy and to visitors from T.T. Minor Elementary School and the John Stanford International School.

Tutu was honored with the Nobel Prize in 1984 for helping lead the nonviolent battle against apartheid in his native South Africa.

The advantage of that, he told an audience of several hundred students, is that people will listen to you. The honor won him an invitation to the White House, though then-President Reagan previously "wasn’t interested in meeting me," Tutu said.

"It was important because it opened doors that had previously been closed," Tutu said, responding to a student’s question. Though the message may not change, once a person is a Nobel laureate, "they treat you like an oracle."

And the prize was important to his people "because up to that time it looked like apartheid" — legally sanctioned racism — "was winning."

Students also asked about South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which offered forgiveness to those who confessed to wrongdoing — including murder — under apartheid. Tutu served as chairman for the hearings that followed South Africa’s first all-race elections in 1994. More than 6,000 people applied for amnesty.

Forgiveness is not easy, he said, but the alternative can be an endless cycle of violence.

"Then you have what you have in the Mideast," Tutu said. "And it goes on and on and on."

Was it difficult to reconcile with white South Africans?

"It depends," he said, conceding that some were very difficult. But "when you nurse a grudge, it eats away at your vitals. … Forgiveness is good for your health, both physically and spiritually."

Tutu is here primarily to mark the opening of the Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation USA. Its president, the Very Rev. Robert Taylor of St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral, is a white South African who forged early bonds with Tutu when the black leader helped him flee their country, thus avoiding military service that would have required Taylor to help enforce apartheid.

Before his address Monday, Tutu had a roundtable discussion with 16 King County teens who received the foundation’s inaugural Desmond Tutu Emerging Leaders Award. The students — some American-born, others from Vietnam or the Congo or with strong roots in their ethnic communities — have worked in tutoring, AIDS-HIV awareness and advocacy for social justice.

Tutu marveled at their being "so passionately committed" at an age when he was still playing ball on dusty ghetto streets.

"So many times we take for granted what we have," he said. "Sometimes I wish it were possible for people to lose freedom a little bit in order to cherish it."

One young award winner, Franklin High senior Annasara Guzzo Purcell, asked how one fights injustice while respecting cultural differences.

If the issue is, for example, policies that would appear to oppress women, Tutu said: "Ask the women." Then proceed "as gently as we can" in defense of human rights.

"Culture is not infallible," he said.

Another award winner, Garfield High School junior Kim-Khanh Van, asked how one could reconcile the teachings of many of the world’s religions with tolerance for homosexuality.

If a thing is "intrinsically wrong" — like slavery — "there is no way we can countenance it," he said. And there are times one might make a case for some things — polygamy, perhaps, if many men have been lost to war.

But Tutu compared sexual preference to race, gender or ethnicity, saying science has shown it is not a matter of choice. Few people would choose a path that is so difficult in so many cultures, he said — a path that can lead to "vilification, even murder."

"We make a very big mistake when we assume religion is something good," he said.

Religion is like a knife, Tutu said. When one uses a knife to prepare food, the knife is good. When used to stab someone, the knife is bad.

Van also worried about having doubts.

Life is full of ambivalence, Tutu told her. "Someone once said the awful thing is not doubt, it is certainty."

More than 1,000 people crammed into St. Mark’s on Sunday to greet Tutu at the start of his four-day visit. Today he is being presented with an honorary degree from the University of Washington. He will address the Seattle Rotary on "Truth and Reconciliation" on Wednesday.

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