Searching for New Worlds

By Richard N.Ostling

Honors celebrate eight remarkable achievers

PEACE: PROUD AND SAD

It was only a small courtesy, but it changed the young man's life. One day in a black shantytown near Johannesburg, South Africa, Primary Schoolteacher Desmond Mpilo Tutu saw a white man respectfully tip his hat to a black woman. Tutu had never seen a white make such a gesture. The woman was Tutu's mother; the white was the Rev. Trevor Huddleston, now an Anglican bishop. The priest subsequently befriended the young black, and after Tutu was hospitalized in 1953 for tuberculosis, Huddleston visited him daily for 20 months. Tutu, profoundly impressed, followed his white friend into the clergy, rising rapidly in the Anglican Church in southern Africa and becoming Bishop of Lesotho in 1976. Along the way, Tutu also became a leading voice in the battle against apartheid. His outspoken courage, coupled with the nonviolent nature of his message, last week brought Bishop Tutu, now 53, the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize. "You feel humble, you feel proud, elated and you feel sad," said Tutu in Johannesburg. "One of my greatest sadnesses is that there are many in this country who are not joining in celebrating something that is an honor for this country."

Tutu is a prophet without honor in his own country. The South African government seized his passport in 1981, and he now needs special permission for his numerous speaking trips outside the country. The government, which is elected by the country's 18% white minority, also conducted an investigation into the liberal South African Council of Churches (membership: 13 million), which Tutu has headed since 1978. That inquiry resulted in a verbal public denunciation that charged the feisty preacher and the council with waging "massive psychological warfare" against the government and sympathizing with outlawed liberation groups such as the Zambia-based African National Congress (A.N.C.).

In his racially torn nation, Tutu walks a tricky tightrope. Although many members of the white establishment look upon him as a dangerous radical, black militants see him as too temperate. Tutu, who rejects government categories and calls himself "detribalized," says he faces a "rough passage" in pleading with young black audiences for interracial concord and peaceful change. And although Tutu does not advocate violence, he warns continually of a coming "bloodbath" if whites do not share power with the black majority. Afrikaners, he notes, praise their own gun-toting forebears but "suddenly become pacifists when it involves black liberation. Blacks don't believe they are introducing violence into the situation. They believe the situation is already violent."

Though two of his four children live in the U.S., Tutu is embittered over the current U.S. hands-off policy toward South Africa. The black leader advocates political, diplomatic and especially economic pressures from overseas to force whites to negotiate a sharing of power with blacks. But the bishop has never explicitly advocated boycotts or a cutoff of investments, which the A.N.C. last week declared would be a fitting response to Tutu's prize. Nonetheless, Tutu states that "I find what I have seen of capitalism and the free-enterprise system quite morally repulsive."

Born in the western Transvaal, Tutu was forced to drop his dreams of completing medical college when his father, a teacher, ran short of money. After Tutu's teaching years, seminary training, ordination in 1960 and graduate study in England, he taught theology in Lesotho, an independent nation surrounded by South African territory. He returned to England to administer World Council of Churches scholarships, and became South Africa's first black Anglican Dean in 1975. He pointedly spurned Johannesburg's posh suburban deanery to live with the black masses in Soweto.

The bishop, who is currently on a leave to teach at New York City's General Theological Seminary, flew home with his wife Leah last week to celebrate the peace award with friends. He has said he will donate his prize money of about $195,000 to a scholarship fund for black African youths.

Much of white South Africa reacted grumpily or indifferently to the news of Tutu's award. The Afrikaans daily Beeld complained that many of Tutu's "outbursts" make him "an unlikely peace-prize recipient." The word from the office of State President P.W. Botha: "No comment." But in Addis Ababa, the Organization of African Unity said the award is "an urgent reminder to the racist authorities of Pretoria that their inhuman regime is doomed."

Tutu joins an illustrious gallery of human rights activists who were snubbed by their own countries in the past several years after winning the peace prize, including Andrei Sakharov of the Soviet Union, Adolfo Perez Esquivel of predemocratic Argentina and Lech Walesa of Poland. Unlike Sakharov and Walesa, however, Tutu is expected to collect his prize in person in Norway on Dec. 10. --By Richard N.Ostling. Reported by Peter Hawthorne/Johannesburg

With reporting by Peter Hawthorne/Johannesburg