Desmond Tutu
Archbishop of Cape Town: 1986–1994

After Philip Russell announced his retirement as the Archbishop of Cape Town, in February 1986 the Black Solidarity Group formed a plan to get Tutu appointed as his replacement. At the time of the meeting, Tutu was in Atlanta, Georgia, receiving the Martin Luther King, Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize. Tutu secured a two-thirds majority from both the clergy and laity and was then ratified in a unanimous vote by the synod of bishops. He was the first black man to hold the post. Some white Anglicans left the church in protest. Over 1,300 people attended his enthronement ceremony at the Cathedral of St George the Martyr on 7 September 1986. After the ceremony, Tutu held an open-air Eucharist for 10,000 people at the Cape Showgrounds in Goodwood, where he invited Albertina Sisulu and Allan Boesak to give political speeches.

Tutu moved into the archbishop's Bishopscourt residence; this was illegal as he did not have official permission to reside in what the state allocated as a "white area". He obtained money from the church to oversee renovations of the house, and had a children's playground installed in its grounds, opening this and the Bishopscourt swimming pool to members of his diocese. He invited the English priest Francis Cull to set up the Institute of Christian Spirituality at Bishopscourt, with the latter moving into a building in the house's grounds. Such projects led to Tutu's ministry taking up an increasingly large portion of the Anglican church's budget, which Tutu sought to expand through requesting donations from overseas. Some Anglicans were critical of his spending.

Tutu's vast workload was managed with the assistance of his executive officer Njongonkulu Ndungane and Michael Nuttall, who in 1989 was elected dean of the province. In church meetings, Tutu drew upon traditional African custom by adopting a consensus-building model of leadership, seeking to ensure that competing groups in the church reached a compromise and thus all votes would be unanimous rather than divided. He secured approval for the ordination of female priests in the Anglican church, having likened the exclusion of women from the position to apartheid. He appointed gay priests to senior positions and privately criticised the church's insistence that gay priests remain celibate.

Along with Boesak and Stephen Naidoo, Tutu mediated conflicts between black protesters and the security forces; they for instance worked to avoid clashes at the 1987 funeral of ANC guerrilla Ashley Kriel. In February 1988, the government banned 17 black or multi-racial organisations, including the UDF, and restricted the activities of trade unions. Church leaders organised a protest march, and after that too was banned they established the Committee for the Defense of Democracy. When the group's rally was banned, Tutu, Boesak, and Naidoo organised a service at St George's Cathedral to replace it.

You have already lost! Let us say to you nicely: you have already lost! We are inviting you to come and join the winning side! Your cause is unjust. You are defending what is fundamentally indefensible, because it is evil. It is evil without question. It is immoral. It is immoral without question. It is unchristian. Therefore, you will bite the dust! And you will bite the dust comprehensively.

— Desmond Tutu addressing the government, 1988

Opposed on principle to capital punishment, in March 1988 Tutu took up the cause of the Sharpeville Six who had been sentenced to death. He telephoned representatives of the American, British, and German governments urging them to pressure Botha on the issue, and personally met with Botha at the latter's Tuynhuys home to discuss the issue. The two did not get on well, and argued. Botha accused Tutu of supporting the ANC's armed campaign; Tutu said that while he did not support their use of violence, he supported the ANC's objective of a non-racial, democratic South Africa. The death sentences were ultimately commuted.

In May 1988, the government launched a covert campaign against Tutu, organised in part by the Stratkom wing of the State Security Council. The security police printed leaflets and stickers with anti-Tutu slogans while unemployed blacks were paid to protest when he arrived at the airport. Traffic police briefly imprisoned Leah when she was late to renew her motor vehicle license. Although the security police organised assassination attempts on various anti-apartheid Christian leaders, they later claimed to have never done so for Tutu, deeming him too high-profile.

Tutu remained actively involved in acts of civil disobedience against the government; he was encouraged by the fact that many whites also took part in these protests. In August 1989 he helped to organise an "Ecumenical Defiance Service" at St George's Cathedral, and shortly after joined protests at segregated beaches outside Cape Town. To mark the sixth anniversary of the UDF's foundation he held a "service of witness" at the cathedral, and in September organised a church memorial for those protesters who had been killed in clashes with the security forces. He organised a protest march through Cape Town for later that month, which the new President F. W. de Klerk agreed to permit; a multi-racial crowd containing an estimated 30,000 people took part. That the march had been permitted inspired similar demonstrations to take place across the country. In October, de Klerk met with Tutu, Boesak, and Frank Chikane; Tutu was impressed that "we were listened to". In 1994, a further collection of Tutu's writings, The Rainbow People of God, was published, and followed the next year with his An African Prayer Book, a collection of prayers from across the continent accompanied by the Archbishop's commentary.
punctuation:no_comma, detectable_format:multiple_sections[2], keywords:frequency