TUTU

SOUTH African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu is one man of God with an indisputably interesting approach on how to attract and keep people by improving their overall humane relations with one another.
The retired Anglican archbishop of Cape Town is currently in Zambia with chairperson of an organisation called Girls Not Brides, Princess Mabel van Oranje, to support Zambia’s efforts to end child marriages, which stand at an alarming rate of 42 per cent.
This surely may be good news for Southern Province Minister, Daniel Munkombwe, who yesterday urged traditional leaders to get involved in scaling up the fight against child marriages. The South African clergyman is also here to assist.
Of course as a man of the collar, the first thing that comes to the minds of everyone is that Archbishop Tutu’s primary role is soul-winning, especially winning lost souls back to the Creator, God.?I
n his calling spanning a good five decades, Archbishop Tutu has obviously effectively done this. This, together with other struggles for humanity which he has been involved in, have made him a much-loved figure across the world.
When he flew in on Monday, Archbishop Tutu immediately commended Zambia for the role the country played in assisting fight apartheid in his country, South Africa.?Incidentally, the Anglican cleric received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1984 specifically for his role in the opposition to apartheid in South Africa.
Since 1978 when the archbishop accepted an appointment as general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, he was a leading spokesperson for the rights of black South Africans, who were denied their rights by the white minority regime of the apartheid-era.
This struggle continued in the 1980s during which time Archbishop Tutu is said to have played an unrivaled role in drawing national and international attention to the iniquities of apartheid.?He is one of those anti-apartheid icons who emphasised non-violent means of protest, and encouraged the application of economic sanctions by Western countries that were then doing business with white minority-ruled South Africa.
Archbishop Tutu made it clear to all South Africans and the people all over the world that the first thing they needed to understand was the fact that there was only one race, and this was the human race.
Thus Africans, Asians, Europeans, Americans, Arabs, Caucasians and Jews, for instance, were not different races but, rather, they belonged to different ethnicities of the human race.?The Anglican cleric’s argument was that all human beings had the same physical characteristics, of course with minor variations, and he was absolutely right.
Even much more important was his point that all human beings were created in the image and likeness of God, as clearly pointed out in Scripture.?Here we may add the well-known Bible passage that God loved the world so much that He sent Jesus to lay down His life for the human race (John 3:16), and this ‘world’ obviously includes all ethnic groups.?This clearly shows that God does not show partiality or favouritism.
So, as Archbishop Tutu campaigned, neither human beings, who were created in God’s image, should.
The impact this message by Archbishop Tutu had was so much that it helped end apartheid in his own country and multiplied a million-fold his admirers world-over, leading to him being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize the year South Africa gained majority rule in 1984.?Zambians, who are playing host to Archbishop Tutu and Princes Oranje should surely be expectant of the duo’s positive contributions in the country’s ongoing struggle against early marriages, which Mr Munkombwe says has become a threat to the lives of particularly girls being married off at tender ages.