The laughing bishop

Desmond “Mpilo” (which means “life” in native Xhosa) Tutu is a South-African bishop, who was born in Klerksdorp in 1931 and took care about the protection of black-consciousness after the murder of the leader Steve Biko in King William’s Town. Tutu also won a Nobel Prize for peace in 1984 as a leader to a hundred commissions, charities and causes, a kind of conscience to the world. During Biko’s funeral he stood before a crowd talking about the end of white rule after the defeating of the apartheid.

He talked to crowd explaining that white people were wrong and immoral (according to the Lord’s word), so they had to lose anyway.

John Allen wrote a biography (Rabble-Rouser for Peace) about Tutu, the bishop that with a huge laugh became the world guardian. “God is biased, horribly in the favor of the weak. The minute and injustice is perpetrated, God is going to be on the side of the one who is being clobbered” said the laughing bishop, this is his philosophy that fuses Christianity with African culture.

It isn’t a message that ends his effect in Africa, but it can be expanded to all the world, in particular it’s perfect in zones of the globe where someone is oppressed from someone who doesn’t follow the ideals of peace and mutual respect.

Tutu could involve all these crowds because of his talent as a showman, his charisma isn’t common at all. He also talked and danced at the opening concert for South Africa World Soccer Cup. The secret of his success is in the faith. Something so simple and so difficult to find at the same time. Mpilo says: “In the end, the perpetrators of injustice or oppression, the ones who strut  the stage of the world often seemingly unbeatable – there is no doubt at all that they will bite the dust.”
( from Time, 15 October 2010)

Chiara Tinè IV O

Giuseppe Torchiano IV O