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Activism and the Nobel Peace Prize

Tutu testified on behalf of a captured cell of Umkhonto we Sizwe, an armed anti-apartheid group linked to the banned African National Congress (ANC). He stated that although he was committed to non-violence and censured all who used violence, he could understand why black Africans became violent when their non-violent tactics had failed to overturn apartheid. In an earlier address, he had opined that an armed struggle against South Africa's government had little chance of succeeding but also accused Western nations of hypocrisy for condemning armed liberation groups in southern Africa while they had praised similar organisations in Europe during the Second World War. Tutu also signed a petition calling for the release of ANC activist Nelson Mandela, leading to a correspondence between the pair.

After Tutu told journalists that he supported an international economic boycott of South Africa, he was reprimanded before government ministers in October 1979. In March 1980, the government confiscated his passport; this raised his international profile. In 1980, the SACC committed itself to supporting civil disobedience against apartheid. After Thorne was arrested in May, Tutu and Joe Wing led a protest march during which they were arrested, imprisoned overnight, and fined. In the aftermath, a meeting was organised between 20 church leaders including Tutu, Prime Minister P. W. Botha, and seven government ministers. At this August meeting the clerical leaders unsuccessfully urged the government to end apartheid. Although some clergy saw this dialogue as pointless, Tutu disagreed, commenting: " Moses went to Pharaoh repeatedly to secure the release of the Israelites."

In January 1981, the government returned Tutu's passport. In March, he embarked on a five-week tour of Europe and North America, meeting politicians including the UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, and addressing the UN Special Committee Against Apartheid. In England, he met Robert Runcie and gave a sermon in Westminster Abbey, while in Rome he met Pope John Paul II. On his return to South Africa, Botha again ordered Tutu's passport confiscated, preventing him from personally collecting several further honorary degrees. It was returned 17 months later. In September 1982 Tutu addressed the Triennial Convention of the Episcopal Church in New Orleans before traveling to Kentucky to see his daughter Naomi, who lived there with her American husband. Tutu gained a popular following in the US, where he was often compared to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., although white conservatives like Pat Buchanan and Jerry Falwell lambasted him as an alleged communist sympathiser.

This award is for mothers, who sit at railway stations to try to eke out an existence, selling potatoes, selling mealies, selling produce. This award is for you, fathers, sitting in a single-sex hostel, separated from your children for 11 months a year... This award is for you, mothers in the KTC squatter camp, whose shelters are destroyed callously every day, and who sit on soaking mattresses in the winter rain, holding whimpering babies... This award is for you, the 3.5 million of our people who have been uprooted and dumped as if you were rubbish. This award is for you.

— Desmond Tutu's speech on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize

By the 1980s, Tutu was an icon for many black South Africans, a status rivalled only by Mandela. In August 1983, he became a patron of the new anti-apartheid United Democratic Front (UDF). Tutu angered much of South Africa's press and white minority, especially apartheid supporters. Pro-government media like The Citizen and the South African Broadcasting Corporation criticised him, often focusing on how his middle-class lifestyle contrasted with the poverty of the blacks he claimed to represent. He received hate mail and death threats from white far-right groups like the Wit Wolwe. Although he remained close with prominent white liberals like Helen Suzman, his angry anti-government rhetoric also alienated many white liberals like Alan Paton and Bill Burnett, who believed that apartheid could be gradually reformed away.

In 1984, Tutu embarked on a three-month sabbatical at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York. In the city, he was invited to address the United Nations Security Council, later meeting the Congressional Black Caucus and the subcommittees on Africa in the House of Representatives and the Senate. He was also invited to the White House, where he unsuccessfully urged President Ronald Reagan to change his approach to South Africa. He was troubled that Reagan had a warmer relationship with South Africa's government than his predecessor Jimmy Carter, describing Reagan's government as "an unmitigated disaster for us blacks". Tutu later called Reagan "a racist pure and simple".

In New York City, Tutu was informed that he had won the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize; he had previously been nominated in 1981, 1982, and 1983. The Nobel Prize selection committee had wanted to recognise a South African and thought Tutu would be a less controversial choice than Mandela or Mangosuthu Buthelezi. In December, he attended the award ceremony in Oslo —which was hampered by a bomb scare—before returning home via Sweden, Denmark, Canada, Tanzania, and Zambia. He shared the US$192,000 prize money with his family, SACC staff, and a scholarship fund for South Africans in exile. He was the second South African to receive the award, after Albert Luthuli in 1960. South Africa's government and mainstream media either downplayed or criticised the award, while the Organisation of African Unity hailed it as evidence of apartheid's impending demise.