Veneration without Understanding? A Reflection on the Death of Archbishop Desmond Tutu
By Hadje Cresencio Sadje, SOAS University of London Hadje Cresencio Sadje is an associate member of the SOAS Center for Palestine Studies, University of London, UK. Mr. Sadje obtained his MA in Crosscultural Theology at the Protestant Theological University, The Netherlands, and MA in Ecumenical Studies (specializing in Sociology of Religion) at the University of Bonn. He is a visiting Ph.D. research fellow at the University of Vienna, Austria, a student ambassador at the Paris Institute of Critical Thinking, and a visiting lecturer at the Divinity School Silliman University Philippines. Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Hamburg Germany and teaches at Barcelona Applied Social Sciences Spain and the Foundation Academy in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Mr. Sadje’s research interests include pentecostalism, decoloniality, sociology of religion, and political/public theologies.
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his last year 2021, I have seen the world with great sadness on the death of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Archbishop Tutu is one of the great religious activists who devoted his entire life to dismantling the South African apartheid system. Many people believe that Archbishop Tutu’s public ministry is a moral compass, above all, a testament to the importance of convergence between the religious institution and the protest movement against white supremacy and settler colonialism in South Africa. They have admired Archbishop Tutu’s resolute and uncompromising commitment to non-violent protests and reconciliation as the way to eradicate the South African apartheid system (Battle, 2021; Tutu, 2000). As a global religious icon, his ideas and pastoral works are an ongoing source of guidance and inspiration to the young generation. If many people venerated Archbishop Tutu, some people had made serious criticisms, for instance, on his Nobel Peace Prize award and his method of non-violence struggle (Lester and Osborne, 2021). For them, Archbishop Tutu’s political and social vision did not work out so well, particularly his South African post-apartheid paradigm of forgiveness and reconciliation. For example, many South Africans viewed Archbishop Tutu’s post-apartheid paradigm of the ‘Truth and President Barack Obama greets Archbishop Desmond Tutu as he arrives at the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation Youth Centre in Cape Town, South Africa, June 30, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza) Reconciliation Commission’ as a massive failure because survival perpetrators of the South Africa apartheid system had never been faced the court of justice in the immediate post-apartheid period. Aside from this, accordingly, Archbishop Tutu’s political ideas and actions based on the post-apartheid paradigm of the Truth and Reconciliation alienated the progressive South African groups. Despite these troubling legacies, many people are convinced that Archbishop Tutu’s ideas and accomplishments to challenge and dismantle white settler colonialism remain politically and socially important (Lester and Osborne, 2021). But what are my personal takeaways from the death of Archbishop Tutu? First of all, to a great degree, I have observed the bandwagon effect in the death of Archbishop Tutu. The bandwagon effect, according to social psychologists, refers to people’s behaviour, attitude, and opinions simply because everyone else is doing it or due to its popularity (Kastanakis and Balabanis, 2012). As usual, this bandwagon effect is evident in the passing of Archbishop Tutu, most especially, among the highest world leaders (Ojelu, 2021). Social media shows that condolences pour in from the highest world leaders, and even, pay homage and described Archbishop Tutu as ‘one of the great leaders’. For me, I find that as a smack of hypocrisy. Perhaps, this might sound like an utterly inappropriate statement to many people. However, the reason why I called them ‘hypocritical’ is because one of the legacies of Archbishop Tutu is challenging traditional power structures that continue to produce various injustices across the world and are neglected by these world leaders, especially by Western powers (Bramble, 2021). Aside from the bandwagon effect, I have noticed that these Western political leaders ignore and never supported Archbishop Tutu’s condemnation of human rights violations of the Zionist State of Israel against Palestinian people. Archbishop Tutu is one of the outspoken critics of the Zionist State of Israel apartheid system, the Zionist Jewish supremacist ideology, and its brutal colonialist project in the Palestinian territory (Aharoni 2021). In fact, his popular and widely quoted statement, ‘When I see Palestinians at a checkpoint, it reminds me of South Africans at checkpoints during apartheid,’ garnered international attention to atrocities of the Zionist State of Israel against Palestinian people (Polya 2022).
22 INSiGHT FEBRUARY 2022
