Editorial:
Western leaders’ tributes to anti-apartheid
veteran Desmond Tutu drip with hypocrisy

Desmond Tutu with Nelson Mandela

AS WITH the death of Nelson Mandela eight years ago, Desmond Tutu’s passing has prompted tributes from world leaders who stand for everything he spent a lifetime struggling against.

The South African archbishop was famed for his struggle against apartheid. Since this racist political system was brought down in 1994, US and British politicians have sought to identify themselves with the struggle against it, a matter of shared “democratic” values.

Boris Johnson, who has praised Tutu’s “critical role” in the anti-apartheid struggle, has even in the past sought to identify the fight against apartheid with the cold war against communism, linking its eventual defeat to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

This is a perverse inversion of reality given the truth — that Britain and the United States were the armers and funders of the apartheid regime, while communists were at the heart of the fight against it, from the leading role of the South African Communist Party (of which Mandela was at one point a member) within the country, to the international solidarity shown by Cuba (which sent troops to rout the South African army at Cuito Cuanavale in Angola), the Soviet Union (which supplied weapons and training to Umkhonto we Sizwe, the African National Congress’s military wing, for three decades) and Western communists such as the London Recruits.

The rewriting of history matters — because burying the revolutionary nature of the anti-apartheid struggle is aimed not just at whitewashing the criminal record of Western support for apartheid but at disguising parallels with today’s injustices and suppressing awkward questions about today’s rulers.

It is to Tutu’s immense credit that in his case this will be difficult. He did not rest on his laurels or use his celebrity status to cosy up to power but remained a trenchant critic of Western imperialism to the end.

Most famously this took the form of his condemnation of the modern system of apartheid imposed by Israel on the Palestinian people. Tutu was not afraid to state that Israel’s systematic racism — the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian neighbourhoods, the Jewish-only roads — was directly comparable to the experiences of black South Africans.

He was an explicit supporter of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, noting the role of such tactics in raising international pressure on apartheid South Africa.

A British government that seeks to suppress solidarity with Palestine in our universities, which is reportedly looking at an “absolute ban” on BDS “within a year or two,” wallows in hypocrisy when it claims to honour Tutu’s “spiritual leadership.”

So does Labour leader Keir Starmer, who praises Tutu for “standing with the oppressed” while condemning the BDS movement and presiding over a party which brands protesters against Israel’s racist ambassador to Britain, Tzipi Hotovely, anti-semites.

Nor was Palestine the only issue on which Tutu was capable of embarrassing Western leaders.

This “turbulent priest” called for Tony Blair and George W Bush to be tried at The Hague for war crimes over the illegal and unprovoked invasion of Iraq, declining to appear at a Johannesburg leadership summit when he learned Blair would be a fellow speaker.

He savaged the US programme of targeted drone assassinations that reached its height under Barack Obama (who called him a “friend and mentor”) as evidence that Washington believed foreigners’ lives “are not of the same value as yours.”

Few of the tributes to Tutu we will hear this week will mention this. Like others before him he will be sanitised for capitalism, a hero of a struggle safely confined to the history books.

Our responsibility as socialists is to learn from the real Desmond Tutu and the real history of the anti-apartheid struggle — to reinforce our own fight against racism, imperialism and war in the here and now.

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