Desmond Tutu
Teaching in South Africa and Lesotho: 1966–1972

In 1966, Tutu and his family moved to East Jerusalem, where he studied Arabic and Greek for two months at St George's College. They then returned to South Africa, settling in Alice, Eastern Cape, in 1967. The Federal Theological Seminary (Fedsem) had recently been established there as an amalgamation of training institutions from different Christian denominations. At Fedsem, Tutu was employed teaching doctrine, the Old Testament, and Greek; Leah became its library assistant. Tutu was the college's first black staff-member, and the campus allowed a level of racial-mixing which was rare in South Africa. The Tutus sent their children to a private boarding school in Swaziland, thereby keeping them from South Africa's Bantu Education syllabus.

Tutu joined a pan-Protestant group, the Church Unity Commission, served as a delegate at Anglican-Catholic conversations, and began publishing in academic journals. He also became the Anglican chaplain to the neighbouring University of Fort Hare; in an unusual move for the time, Tutu invited female as well as male students to become servers during the Eucharist. He joined student delegations to meetings of the Anglican Students' Federation and the University Christian Movement, and was broadly supportive of the Black Consciousness Movement that emerged from South Africa's 1960s student milieu, although did not share its view on avoiding collaboration with whites. In August 1968, he gave a sermon comparing South Africa's situation with that in the Eastern Bloc, likening anti-apartheid protests to the recent Prague Spring. In September, Fort Hare students held a sit-in protest over the university administration's policies; after they were surrounded by police with dogs, Tutu waded into the crowd to pray with the protesters. This was the first time that he had witnessed state power used to suppress dissent.

In January 1970, Tutu left the seminary for a teaching post at the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland (UBLS) in Roma, Lesotho. This brought him closer to his children and offered twice the salary he earned at Fedsem. He and his wife moved to the UBLS campus; most of his fellow staff members were white expatriates from the US or Britain. As well as his teaching position, he also became the college's Anglican chaplain and the warden of two student residences. In Lesotho, he joined the executive board of the Lesotho Ecumenical Association and served as an external examiner for both Fedsem and Rhodes University. He returned to South Africa on several occasions, including to visit his father shortly before the latter's death in February 1971.
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