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Desmond Tutu Facts & Worksheets

Desmond Tutu was a South African Anglican bishop and theologian most recognized for his work as an anti-apartheid and human rights activist.

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Desmond Mpilo Tutu, a South African Anglican bishop and theologian most recognized for his work as an anti-apartheid and human rights activist, lived from October 7, 1931, to December 26, 2021.

See the fact file below for more information on Desmond Tutu, or you can download our 26-page Desmond Tutu worksheet pack to utilize within the classroom or home environment.

Key Facts & Information

EARLY LIFE

  • Desmond Mpilo Tutu was born in Klerksdorp, Transvaal (currently Gauteng), South Africa, on October 7, 1931. 
  • His mother, Allen Dorothea Mavoertsek Mathlare, was born in Boksburg to a Motswana family. His father, Zachariah Zelilo Tutu, grew up in Gcuwa, Eastern Cape, and was a member of the AmaFengu branch of the Xhosa. 
  • The pair conversed in isiXhosa at home. After getting married in Boksburg, they relocated to Klerksdorp in the late 1950s and settled in the “native location,” or black residential sector of the city, which is now called Makoetend.
  • The Tutus were not wealthy; Tutu later recalled his family, “while we weren’t wealthy, we were not penniless either.” Sylvia Funeka, his older sister, called him “Mpilo,” which is Swahili for “life.” His parents had lost their first son Sipho when he was just a baby. Therefore he was their second son. After him, Gloria Lindiwe, another daughter, was born. 
  • Tutu was born sickly, polio atrophied his right hand, and he once suffered severe burns that required hospitalization.
  • Although he was upset by his father’s binge drinking and abusive behavior against his wife, Tutu had a close relationship with his father. 
  • The family relocated to Tshing in 1936, where Zachariah took the helm of a Methodist school. Tutu began his primary education there, picked up Afrikaans, and started working as a server at St. Francis Anglican Church. 
  • He was passionate about reading and liked comic books and European fairy tales. His parents also had a third son in Tshing named Tamsanqa, but he passed away infancy.
  • Tutu enrolled in the Johannesburg Bantu High School in 1945 and quickly rose to academic success there. His lifelong love of rugby began when he joined the school squad. 
  • He peddled oranges and worked as a caddie for white golfers to support himself financially outside school. Before returning to live with his parents when they moved to Munsieville, he briefly lived with family closer to Johannesburg to save the cost of a daily train ride to school. 
  • After returning to Johannesburg, he moved into an Anglican hostel near the Church of Christ the King in Sophiatown. 

COLLEGE AND TEACHING CAREER

  • Tutu became a server at the church and came under the influence of its priest, Trevor Huddleston, a political activist. A biography of Tutu suggested that Huddleston was “the greatest single influence” in Tutu’s life.
  • Huddleston frequently visited Tutu while hospitalized in Rietfontein for 18 months in 1947 after contracting tuberculosis.
  • Tutu was accepted at the University of the Witwatersrand to study medicine, but his parents could not pay the tuition. Instead, he decided to pursue a career in teaching and was awarded a government grant in 1951 to study at Pretoria Bantu Normal College, a school for teacher preparation. 
  • He oversaw the Cultural and Debating Society, helped form the Literacy and Dramatic Society, and served as treasurer of the Student Representative Council.
  • Tutu started teaching English at Madibane High School in 1954. The following year, he taught English and history at Krugersdorp High School. 
  • He started courting Leah Nomalizo Shenxane, a friend of his sister Gloria who was studying to become a primary school teacher.
  • They married in June 1955 at the Krugersdorp Native Commissioner’s Court before having a Roman Catholic wedding ceremony held at the Church of Mary Queen of Apostles. Although Tutu was Anglican, he agreed to a Catholic marriage because of Leah’s Roman Catholic faith.
  • After marriage, the couple moved to Tutu’s parents’ house for six months before renting their own. Their daughter Thandeka was born 16 months after their son Trevor was born in April 1956.
  • The pair attended St. Paul’s Church, where Tutu served as a lay preacher, subdeacon, church counselor, Sunday school teacher, assistant choirmaster, football team manager, and other volunteer roles.

JOINING THE CLERGY

  • The Bantu Education Act was introduced in 1953 by the white-minority National Party government to advance the apartheid system of racial segregation and white dominance. Disliking the Act, Tutu and his wife left the teaching profession. With Huddleston’s encouragement, Tutu chose to become an Anglican priest. 
  • Due to his obligations, he was denied membership in the Ordinands Guild in January 1956; nevertheless, billionaire manufacturer Harry Oppenheimer later paid off all of his debts. 
  • Tutu was accepted at St Peter’s Theological College in Rosettenville, Johannesburg, run by the Anglican Community of the Resurrection.
  • Tutu lived at the residential college while his wife completed her nursing program in Sekhukhuneland; their kids resided with Tutu’s parents in Munsieville. His wife gave birth to Naomi, their second daughter, in August 1960.
  • Tutu received a Licentiate of Theology degree from the institution where he studied the Bible, Anglican doctrine, church history, and Christian ethics. He also won the archbishop’s annual essay competition.
  • Tutu was consecrated as an Anglican priest at St. Mary’s Cathedral by Edward Paget in December 1960. After that, Tutu was granted the position of assistant curate in St. Alban’s Parish in Benoni, where he reunited with his children and wife. 

CAREER DURING APARTHEID

Teaching in South Africa and Lesotho: 1966–1972

  • Tutu and his family relocated to East Jerusalem in 1966, where he attended St. George’s College for two months to study Arabic and Greek. After that, they returned to South Africa, settling in 1967 in Alice, Eastern Cape. 
  • There, the Federal Theological Seminary (Fedsem), a fusion of educational institutions from several Christian denominations, had just been founded. Leah started working as a library assistant at Fedsem, where Tutu was employed to teach doctrine, the Old Testament, and Greek. 
  • Tutu was the first black employee of the college, and the campus permitted a degree of racial mixing that was uncommon in South Africa.
  • Tutu left the seminary in January 1970 to take a position as a professor at the University of Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland (UBLS) in Roma, Lesotho. In addition, offering him twice the pay he received at Fedsem placed him closer to his kids. 
  • He and his wife relocated to the UBLS campus; most of his coworkers were British or American white ex-pats. He took on the roles of teaching, Anglican chaplain, and warden of two dorms for students at the college.

TEF Africa director: 1972–1975

  • Tutu accepted TEF’s offer to work for them in England as their director for Africa. 
  • Initially, after refusing to grant him permission because of the Fort Hare riots, the South African government eventually agreed after Tutu argued that his acceptance of the job would benefit the country’s image.
  • He visited Britain once more in March 1972. The Tutu family settled in the neighborhood of Grove Park, where Tutu served as the honorary curate of St. Augustine’s Church, while the TEF’s offices were in Bromley.
  • Tutu’s position involved evaluating funds for schools and students pursuing theological education. For this, he had to travel to Africa in the early 1970s and chronicled his experiences in books. 
  • He lamented the pervasive corruption and poverty in Zaire, for instance, and claimed that Mobutu Sese Seko’s, 
  • In contrast to many African theologians, like John Mbiti, who saw black theology as a foreign product irrelevant to Africa, Tutu sought to integrate African theology with black theology inherited from African-Americans.

Dean of St Mary’s Cathedral, Johannesburg, and Bishop of Lesotho: 1975–1978

  • Tutu was considered for Johannesburg’s next bishop in 1975, but Timothy Bavin ultimately won. Bavin proposed Tutu take the vacant dean’s job at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Johannesburg. 
  • In March 1975, Tutu became the first black man to be elected to this position—the fourth highest in the South African Anglican hierarchy—an election that made national headlines in that country. August 1975 saw Tutu’s inauguration as dean. 
  • The cathedral was crowded with attendees. After relocating to the city, Tutu lived in a home on a middle-class street in the Orlando West township of Soweto, a mostly underdeveloped black neighborhood, rather than the official dean’s residence in the white suburb of Houghton.
  • Tutu utilized his platform to advocate for social causes, publicly backing an economic boycott of South Africa due to its history of apartheid. He met with leaders of Black Consciousness and Soweto and spoke out against the government’s Terrorism Act 1967 with anti-apartheid activist Winnie Mandela.
  • He warned that racial violence would break out in the country if the government upheld apartheid in a letter to Prime Minister B. J. Vorster in May 1976. Black youth clashed with police six weeks later, sparking the Soweto uprising. 
  • At least 660 people died in ten months, most of whom were under 24. Tutu was angered by what he saw as white South Africans’ lack of outrage at the violence. He brought up the subject in his sermon on Sunday, calling the white silence “deafening” and speculating whether they would have acted in the same way if white adolescents had been killed.
  • He returned to South Africa in September 1977 to deliver a eulogy at the funeral of Steve Biko, a Black Consciousness activist who police had slain in the Eastern Cape. 
  • Black Consciousness, according to Tutu, is “a movement by which God, through Biko, strove to awaken in the black person a feeling of his innate dignity and worth as a child of God.” Tutu made this statement at the funeral.
  • In 1984, while in New York City, Tutu was notified that he had received the Nobel Peace Prize; he had previously been nominated in 1981, 1982, and 1983. 
  • Tutu was chosen over Nelson Mandela or Mangosuthu Buthelezi because the Nobel Prize selection committee wanted to honor a South African and believed he would be a less divisive choice. He traveled through Sweden, Denmark, Canada, Tanzania, and Zambia on his way home in December after attending the award ceremony in Oslo, which was delayed by a bomb scare. 
  • Along with his family, SACC employees, and a scholarship fund for South Africans living abroad, he split the US$192,000 prize money.
  • He was the second South African to get the distinction after Albert Luthuli in 1960. The Organization of African Unity hailed the award as proof of apartheid’s approaching demise, while South Africa’s government and mainstream media either downplayed or criticized it.

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

  • Tutu began to pay attention to international happenings. “It pains us to have to admit that there is less freedom and personal liberty in most of Africa now than there was during the much-maligned colonial days,” he said in his keynote address at the All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC) in Lomé, Togo, in 1987. 
  • Elected president of the AACC, he worked closely with general-secretary José Belo over the following decade. They went to Zaire in 1989 to persuade the churches there to break ties with Sese Seko’s regime.
  • In his remarks on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Tutu claimed that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians was comparable to apartheid in South Africa. He also questioned how the Jewish state could cooperate with a government that included Nazi supporters and condemned Israel for selling weapons to South Africa. 

LATER LIFE

  • Tutu stated in October 1994 that he would step down as archbishop in 1996. The other bishops accorded him the new title of “archbishop emeritus,” even though retiring archbishops typically resume their role as a bishop. In June 1996, a farewell ceremony was held at St. George’s Cathedral, and prominent figures, including Mandela and de Klerk, were there. 
  • From Mandela, Tutu received the Order for Meritorious Service, South Africa’s highest accolade.
  • Tutu used the phrase “Rainbow Nation” to describe post-apartheid South Africa under ANC leadership starting in 1994. He initially employed the metaphor in 1989 when he referred to a diverse protest gathering as the “rainbow people of God.” 
  • Tutu promoted “critical solidarity,” as liberation theologians refer, by supporting pro-democracy groups while reserving the right to criticize his comrades.
  • How the post-apartheid administration would react to the myriad human rights violations that had been committed over the years by both the state and anti-apartheid demonstrators was a crucial question. 
  • The ANC wanted former state officials to face trials, whereas the National Party desired a full amnesty program. 

DEATH

  • On December 26, 2021, Tutu, who was 90 years old, passed away from cancer at the Oasis Frail Care Center in Cape Town. Tutu’s passing was referred to as “another chapter of mourning in our nation’s farewell to a generation of remarkable South Africans who have handed us a liberated South Africa” by Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa.
  • Before the funeral, Tutu’s body lay in state for two days. The cathedral rang its bells for ten minutes each day at noon in Tutu’s honor for a few days before the funeral, and famous locations like Table Mountain were decorated in purple. 
  • On January 1, 2022, Tutu’s funeral was celebrated in St. George’s Cathedral in Cape Town.
  • The former bishop of Natal, Michael Nuttall, preached after President Cyril Ramaphosa’s eulogy. One hundred people could only attend the burial because of COVID-19 pandemic limitations. To avoid any excessive displays, Tutu requested a “simple pine coffin, the cheapest available, to be used for the funeral. 
  • Tutu’s ashes were to be aquamated and buried in St. George’s Cathedral after the funeral.

Desmond Tutu Worksheets

This is a fantastic bundle that includes everything you need to know about Desmond Tutu across 26 in-depth pages. These are ready-to-use worksheets that are perfect for teaching kids about Desmond Tutu, a South African Anglican bishop and theologian most recognized for his work as an anti-apartheid and human rights activist.

Complete List of Included Worksheets

Below is a list of all the worksheets included in this document.

  1. Desmond Tutu Facts
  2. The Story of Desmond Tutu
  3. Desmond Tutu
  4. Equality
  5. A Dedication
  6. Spread Kindness
  7. Can You Still Observe?
  8. Desmond in News
  9. We Are All Important
  10. Our Society
  11. Valuable Quote

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Desmond Tutu best known for?

Desmond Tutu was a well-known human rights activist from South Africa. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 because he worked hard to stop apartheid.

What will Desmond Tutu be remembered for?

Tutu worked as an anti-apartheid activist and human rights defender in South Africa. He was also the first Black bishop of Johannesburg from 1985 to 1986, and then he later became Archbishop of Cape Town where he served until 1996.

What did Desmond Tutu do to fight against apartheid?

He said that people should disobey the laws to end apartheid. In 1986, Tutu became the first black bishop of Cape Town and head of the Anglican Church of the Province of Southern Africa.

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