(Dobbs) We Just Lost A Giant Among Men

Desmond Tutu was among the greatest I ever interviewed.

As I learned firsthand over the years in a pair of interviews with Archbishop Desmond Tutu on different trips to shoot documentaries in South Africa, he was a beautiful man. A brave man. A giant among all men. If there’s anyone out there who isn’t saying that on this day of his death, they’re keeping it to themselves.

On one of those trips, about twelve years after apartheid was broken, I asked Tutu why fulfillment of the long-held dream of prosperity for South Africa’s black majority had not gone hand-in-hand with fulfillment of the long-denied dream of black majority rule? Why, in everything from housing to education to economics, there still was an impregnable gap between rich and poor?

He answered with his uncommon quality of sincerity and plainspokenness. “How naïve we were, thinking that just because our struggle was noble and our motives were altruistic, we would govern without many of the flaws of the governments that preceded us. What we have learned the hard way is, corruption and selfishness and greed are not just products of people with white skin.”

"You know,” he went on, “original sin has in fact also infected us.” In other words, incompetence and corruption are colorblind. 

And then he laughed. A hearty, full-throated laugh. A laugh that filled the room. A laugh borne not of self-consciousness but of self-reflection. A laugh I’ll never forget.

Tutu wasn’t a politician, and that’s what made his voice so peerless, and so persuasive.

Not that he wasn’t long reviled in his own nation. During the reign of apartheid, he never knew when he might be arrested and sentenced to hard labor, likely to join Nelson Mandela chopping rocks in the limestone quarry on Robben Island off Cape Town.

<Nelson Mandela’s cell on Robben Island>

But until that day might come, Tutu leveraged the freedom the government inexplicably allowed him— speaking candidly and critically with an American reporter like me, for example, in the days before apartheid met its death— to wage war on his own government’s discriminatory and demeaning policies.

Ultimately… as with Mandela… he was the victor.

Thanks in no small part to the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, this is the triumph of South Africa. The blacks, the majority, are confidently in control of their own country. But to this day, it also is the tragedy of South Africa. Blacks won their battle to sever the shackles of racial separation, but they are losing their battles with the worsening privations of poverty, the proliferating violence of crime, the ongoing epidemic of AIDS, and now, the onerous challenge of the coronavirus.

It was already on this downhill course the second time I talked with Tutu. But he never equivocated when he gave an appraisal of what happened to his people’s elusive dreams. “I think we were naïve,” he told me. “Many of us thought that because the cause we were striving for, this cause against apartheid, was such a noble cause, people were incredibly altruistic, but come freedom, these noble attributes and values would be transferred automatically to the post-freedom faith. It hasn’t happened, I think. We have found in fact that, in fact, we are human.”

“No surprise,” I said to his observation, and then, again, he filled the room with his boundless laughter.

Part of Desmond Tutu’s greatness was that even in times of crisis, he saw a glass half full, not half empty like most of us.

“I believe those who were oppressed, those who had their hand and feet manacled, would say, ‘There’s nothing to beat being free.’ Now that’s a categorical statement. There’s nothing to beat being free. How do you ever describe to someone who’s blind, a red rose?”

The death of Desmond Tutu is South Africa’s loss. The world’s loss. Humanity’s loss. In my long career I had the privilege of interviewing leaders, men and women of all stripes, good and bad, honest and dishonest, righteous and self-righteous. Few were as riveting, few were as selfless, few were as inspiring, as Tutu.

For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his writing also appears on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.