Saturday, Apr 13, 2013
Dubai: Before Archbishop Desmond Tutu was an internationally recognised human rights activist, he was a teacher.
It’s a bit of a family tradition - his father, Zacheriah Zililo Tutu, was also a teacher. After graduating from Pretoria Bantu National College, Tutu taught at Johannesburg Bantu High School and later the Munsienville High School in Mogale City.
It was here where he would begin his fight against South Africa’s apartheid regime. Tutu resigned from the school to protest the poor educational standards for black South Africans after the passage of the Bantu Education Act in 1953. The law legalised segregation of blacks from whites in educational institutions and led to the closure of many schools that could no longer afford to stay open after the apartheid government refused to continue to help them.
But despite his resignation, Tutu would continue in education. He began studying theology at St Peter’s Theology College and in 1960 was ordained as an Anglican priest, and later received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in theology from King’s College London. When he returned to South Africa in 1967, he became the chaplain at the University of Fort Hare and lectured at the National University of Lesotho.
During this time Tutu was very vocal about his stance on the South African government both inside and outside the country, but it was in 1976 that he began supporting economic boycotts and disinvestment as methods of pressuring the government to change its policies. Once again, the driving force was an issue of education.
In June of that year, thousands of school students in Soweto came out to protest the introduction of Afrikaans as the language of instruction in their schools, and 176 people were killed in what is known as the Soweto riots. The protests were a turning point in the fight against apartheid, igniting international condemnation of the South African regime, and Tutu’s drive for disinvestment helped weaken the country’s economy and place it under increasing pressure to change.
Tutu left teaching early on, but his life’s work against apartheid and injustice remain a lesson to the world today.
By Nadia Eldemerdash ?Web Producer
Gulf News 2013. All rights reserved.
