On this day in 1986, Desmond Tutu took up the see of Cape Town, becoming the first Black archbishop of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa. He had been Bishop of Johannesburg barely a year, and there too he had been the first.
What strikes me, reading about it forty years on, is how much of the job is ordinary. An archbishop inherits a province: parishes with leaking roofs, clergy pensions, rotas to be juggled, a mountain of letters wanting answers by Friday, and committees, always committees, which no faith tradition on earth has yet found a way to shorten. He inherited all of that in a country under a nationwide state of emergency, declared that June, with thousands detained and public gatherings restricted — which meant that even a cathedral service was a matter watched closely by the state.
People who worked near him kept saying the same thing about those years, in slightly different words: that he laughed. Not in the pulpit especially, but in the corridors and the vestry, between the funerals. Historians of religion spend a lot of time on doctrine and very little on temperament, and temperament is often what a congregation actually remembers. Fabien can tell you about the Herbert Baker stonework of St George's in Cape Town; I only know that for ten years the letters went out from behind it.
Miriam, under the 1986 emergency a gathering could be restricted by ministerial order, and funerals were treated with particular care — limits on numbers, on speeches, on banners, sometimes on burial at graveside rather than in a hall. Which is why so much of the mourning in those years happened inside churches, and why a cathedral roster became a public document.
Miriam, this is lovely. He never lost that instinct for sport as an icebreaker — nine years later, at the 1995 Rugby World Cup final in Johannesburg, there he was in the stands in his cap, beaming, and a whole country borrowed his good mood for an afternoon.