Church backs Tutu over Zuma
The United Congregational Church of Southern Africa has expressed support for Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu over his stance on the presidential succession race.
The United Congregational Church of Southern Africa has expressed support for Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu over his stance on the presidential succession race.
“You never mince your words when the word of God comes to you,” Uccsa general secretary The Reverend Dr Prince Dibeela told Tutu on Wednesday as he thanked him for launching the autobiography Sticking Around of retired missionary Bernard Spong.
“We despaired at the veracity of the attack… We felt we should respond on his (Tutu’s) behalf; call them to order,” he told a packed Founders’ Memorial Church in Coronationville on Wednesday night. Instead, the church had written him a letter to “express our love for him and our respect for him”.
“As I speak, that is on the way to you,” Dibeela told Tutu.
Need people like Spong
In August, Tutu urged former deputy president Jacob Zuma not to pursue the position of president. Delivering the Harold Wolpe Memorial lecture in Cape Town, Tutu said: “I pray that someone will be able to counsel him that the most dignified, most selfless thing, the best thing he could do for a land he loves deeply is to declare his decision not to take further part in the succession race of his party.”
Tutu said although he liked Zuma, he could not condone his sexual behaviour or his failure to stop his supporters vilifying his accuser in the rape case he was acquitted on earlier this year. Tutu himself did not refer to the controversy over his remarks, nor did he respond to Dibeela’s comment on Wednesday. Instead, he hailed heroes in the struggle against apartheid, “the struggle for justice and goodness”.
Tutu handed a copy of Spong’s autobiography to Brigalia Bam, Independent Electoral Commission chairwoman, who wrote the foreword. In it, Bam, who served as South African Council of Churches (SACC) general secretary wrote that the love and laughter she and Spong had shared “helped make the dark days of oppression lighter and the hope of new beginnings seem more possible”.
His was a human story with something to offer anyone interested in the possibility of personal change or the recent history of the country, she said. For his part, Spong described the book as an interweaving of his personal story of change with that of the ecumenical movement.
Originally from Manchester, in England, Spong came to South Africa as a missionary in 1963 and went on to spend more than 40 years serving the United Congregational Church in South Africa. South Africans were a wonderful people who had been served by some wonderful people, said Tutu. “We needed for the media to know what we were about…There was so much distortion in the media.
“We needed people like Bernard Spong, skilled in communication, who helped us no end in telling our story; who left their houses and came to serve us,” he said.