A GIANT HAS LEFT US

I have just had the sad news that Desmond Tutu has died at the age of 90. Desmond Tutu was one of the truly great human beings of the past hundred years and it will be a long while before the world sees the likes of him again. I had the great good fortune to meet Tutu twice, for the first time in 1990 and for the second time in 2011. Rather than cobbling together a tribute from Wikipedia and similar sources, let me honor him in my own personal way by telling the stories once again of my two meetings with him. Unlike the other famous people I have met, such as Bertrand Russell or Henry Kissinger, my meetings with Tutu had a profound and continuing effect on my life.

 

I met Tutu for the first time in 1990. I had taken over the job of unpaid Executive Director of an anti-apartheid organization of Harvard and Radcliffe alums trying (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to get Harvard to divest itself of investments in companies doing business in South Africa. I managed to get Tutu elected to the Board of Overseers, foolishly imagining that the Harvard administration would be shamed by his presence into adopting at long last a moral stance against apartheid. (Instead, Harvard simply change the rules for electing Overseers so that that sort of thing would not happen again.) In February 1990 Tutu came to Cambridge to attend a meeting of the Board and I drove in from Western Massachusetts to meet him for the very first time. I spent an hour with him in his hotel room. It was days before Nelson Mandela was due to be released from prison, a fact that was public knowledge by then, and Tutu spoke movingly about the need for reinvestment in the new South Africa. I went home and thought about what he had said. It was clear to me that the old anti-apartheid struggle had entered a new phase and that divestment was no longer what was needed. On my initial trips to South Africa in 1986 and 1987 I had met Mala Singh, chair of the philosophy department at the historically black university of Durban Westville. Mala had written to me about the problems graduate students at the University were having in getting funding and I had raised some money from the American philosophical community, using the fundraising computer skills that I had developed as the Executive Director of the Harvard Radcliffe organization.

 

It occurred to me that perhaps I could make a contribution to the new South Africa by creating a little charitable organization, staffed and run by me, to raise money for poor young black men and women in South Africa who had gained the right to attend historically black universities there by getting through the impossibly difficult school leaving examinations of the South African secondary school system, but who were unable to matriculate because they did not have the money up front for tuition fees. So I created University Scholarships for South African Students and for the next 23 years I ran it, managing in all of that time to help maybe 1600 young black men and women in South Africa to attend universities. My meeting with Tutu and the effect that his words had on me resulted in an effort that I pursued for fully a quarter of my lifetime.

 

By 2011 I was working with students at the University of the Western Cape, and as a way of thanking me for the bits of money I had brought to the University, the Vice Chancellor (who is, in the South African system, the person who runs the University) decided to give me an honorary degree. Susie and I flew off to Durban and on the day of the commencement I sat on the platform with the other honorary degree recipients. In South African University commencements, the Chancellor, some bigwig who has an honorary title at the University, sits on a raised chair in the middle of the platform, wearing a soft doctoral hat. As each student’s name is read out, he or she walks across the platform and kneels before the Chancellor, who “caps” the degree recipient, tapping him or her on the head with the hat and in that way officially conferring the degree.

 

When it was my turn to receive my honorary degree, my name was read out and I walked across the platform and knelt before the Chancellor, who was Desmond Tutu! He capped me, in that way conferring the degree upon me. It was the greatest moment of my academic life.

 

I am quite sure Tutu did not recall having seen me 21 years earlier in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  I was simply one of the millions of men and women whose lives had been changed by that great man.

 

 He will be missed.