Archbishop Desmond Tutu -- S. Africa's moral conscience

By Jeremy Lovell

CAPE TOWN (Reuters): Archbishop Desmond Tutu wept for his people under apartheid and wept with them while they struggled to come to terms with the hurt they had suffered under three centuries of white rule.

But for the past two years, while he has battled to keep prostate cancer at bay, his moral guardianship has been missed at home, where friend and foe had come to value his consistently fair judgment on political and social issues.

Tutu, 68, returned to Cape Town from the United States on Thursday after two years based at Emory University in Atlanta, where he taught, wrote and traveled as much as his failing health allowed.

"The Arch is going lala," Tutu told journalists on Thursday, using his nickname and the indigenous word for "sleep".

Talking and traveling tirelessly throughout the 1980s, Tutu forced the West to focus on the anguish of South Africa's black majority under white rule, urging sanctions against a government clinging to power in the face of rising international opposition.

He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his tireless non- violent campaign against apartheid and used it as shield to work beyond the grasp of the white-minority government.

In February 1990, he led Nelson Mandela on to a balcony at Cape Town's City Hall overlooking a square where the African National Congress leader made his first public address after 27 years of political imprisonment.

He was again at Mandela's side four years later -- when his friend was sworn in as the country's first black president.

And while Mandela, who retired last year, introduced South Africa to democracy, Tutu headed up a sometimes controversial Truth and Reconciliation Commission that laid bare the terrible truths of the war against white rule.

Tutu was as tough on the new democracy as he was on South Africa's apartheid rulers, castigating the new ruling elite for boarding the "gravy train" of privilege and chiding Mandela for his long public affair with Graca Machel, whom he later married.

In his truth commission report, Tutu refused to treat the excesses of the African National Congress in the fight against white rule any more gently than those of the apartheid government in the war against a tide of black opposition.

Only when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had delivered its report to the new government did Tutu step down from his role as the moral conscience of a nation.

A small, snowy-haired figure with a puckish sense of humor and an infectious giggle who radiated genuine warmth, Tutu often used his sharp wit to make serious points.

One of his favorite aphorisms was to tell his audience that whenever he felt depressed he would go down to parliament and sit in the public galleries to watch "all those terrorists" in Mandela's ANC government at work running the country.

Tutu was born in October 1931 and ordained an Anglican priest in 1961. He was thrust into the limelight in 1978 when he was appointed secretary-general of the South African Council of Churches.

He was enthroned as the first black archbishop of Cape Town in 1986, becoming the head of the Anglican church, South Africa's fourth largest, and retained the position until 1996.

Tutu married his wife Leah in 1955. They have four children and six grandchildren and homes in Cape Town and Soweto township, Johannesburg.