Do we like Desmond Tutu?
Our score: 10 out of 10. He took on apartheid, then spent decades backing LGBTQ+ people, Palestinians and the climate, and a few spats don't dent that.
Desmond Tutu was an Anglican priest ordained in 1961 who became the first Black dean of Johannesburg and later Archbishop of Cape Town. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his anti-apartheid work. When the regime fell, Nelson Mandela asked him to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
He called apartheid “immoral” while it was still the law and the state was not shy about punishing critics. That is the whole point of him: he said it loudly when it cost something, and he kept saying it once the cameras left.
On the harm test he doesn't just pass, he's the benchmark. At a 2013 UN campaign launch in Cape Town he said he would “not worship a God who is homophobic”. He added that he was as passionate about the cause “as I ever was about apartheid”. Plenty of religious leaders go quiet on this; he went loud.
He took the same line on the planet. He called for an “apartheid-style boycott to save the planet” and described the climate crisis as the “apartheid of our times”. He also backed boycotts and divestment over Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory, and called Israel's 2014 response in Gaza “disproportionately brutal”. Where you land on that depends on whether you read it as a moral stand or an unfair comparison. It was a position taken openly, under his own name.
The nearest thing to a blemish is Oxfam. In 2018 he ended his role as a global ambassador after allegations that senior staff paid for sex with people the charity was meant to serve. His office said he was “deeply disappointed by allegations of immorality and possible criminality”. That is a man walking away from a famous cause rather than defending it.
There's nothing new on him lately in the reporting we could confirm. He died in Cape Town in December 2021 aged 90, and what turns up now is legacy business. We found no court rulings against him and no allegations of mistreating anyone.