divine image

Desmond Mpilo Tutu (1931-2021) was a South African Anglican archbishop who became one of the moral authorities of his century, leading nonviolent resistance to apartheid and later guiding his country through the painful work of reckoning with what apartheid had done. Born in Klerksdorp to a schoolteacher father and a domestic-worker mother, he trained first as a teacher before entering the priesthood, ordained in 1960. He became Bishop of Lesotho in 1976, then Bishop of Johannesburg, and in 1986 became the first Black Archbishop of Cape Town, using the pulpit and the press with equal skill to make apartheid’s injustice visible to a world that preferred not to look. Tutu’s resistance stayed deliberately nonviolent even as the system he opposed grew more brutal, a discipline that cost him surveillance, threats, and the revocation of his passport, and that earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. After apartheid fell, Nelson Mandela appointed him to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where he insisted that justice required truth-telling before it could require forgiveness, and that forgiveness, rightly understood, was not an erasure of harm but a costly act of repair. He also popularized the Zulu-rooted concept of ubuntu for audiences well beyond South Africa, teaching that personhood is not a private possession but something realized only through other people. That teaching, captured in his own words, that his humanity is bound up in others’ humanity, for people can only be human together, names a relational view of personhood that resonates with a Mormon transhumanist emphasis on growth achieved in community rather than isolation. Tutu held that every person carries the image of God, and that cruelty against one person wounds that image everywhere. His life’s work, holding truth and reconciliation together rather than letting either substitute for the other, offers a model of moral seriousness for any tradition that hopes human beings might yet become more fully what they were created to be.