Abstract:
This article explores the lifework and legacy of Archbishop
Desmond Mpilo Tutu who passed away on 26 December
2021. It relates the reaction of visitors to the newly
installed exhibition, Truth to power: Desmond Tutu and
the churches in the struggle against apartheid, in the
historic Old Granary Building, home of the Desmond &
Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation in Cape Town. The Victims
Wall forms part of the exhibition, in a room dedicated to
the unfinished business of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC). The article argues that the cries and
bruised bodies of the victims of apartheid, such as those
of Mrs Calata, widow of Fort Calata, one of the Cradock
Four victims, and of thousands of “ordinary people”, are
still reverberating down the decades to be heard and
acknowledged by specifically White South Africans. The
example and the courage of the poet and journalist,
Antjie Krog, who covered the TRC hearings and who is
still speaking poetry to power as a public intellectual, are
used to reflect on the author’s own culpability and that of
other White Afrikaans-speaking South Africans and their
involvement in the TRC process. The article concludes
with the immense and joyful task of the Foundation to
raise a thousand Tutu voices, in an attempt to answer
questions on how to keep the memories of the bodies of
those who suffered under colonialism and apartheid alive,
while seeking reconciliation and fighting for a just, equal,
and inclusive society in a deeply divided South Africa and
how to become more fully human.
