Archbishop Desmond Tutu

On February 16, 2004, at Church House, Westminster, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the South African Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, gave the Third Longford Lecture.

In addition to sponsorship by the Independent and support from the Prison Reform Trust, this lecture was also sponsored by Investec Asset Management.

Introduction to the 3rd Longford Lecture by Antonia Fraser

‘It was a privilege to be there... to hear him...  I felt privileged to be present...’  Afterwards - at the traditional party - I found that there was real unanimity in reaction to the Third Longford Lecture, given by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, despite a very disparate audience.  We all, in our various ways, understood that we had witnessed something special, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we had listened to someone special bearing witness.

There were various elements which went to make the occasion on 16 February 2004 at Church House, Westminster, so remarkable.  First of all, there was the timing.  As Archbishop Tutu reminded us, the tenth anniversary of the freedom of South Africa was approaching: in fact it fell on 27 April.  This was a time, perhaps, for assessment and if so, who better than the Archbishop himself?  For ten years as Archbishop of Cape Town and Metropolitan of South Africa, his noble career of fighting against apartheid was crowned in 1995 when he became the first Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  He is now an unbelievable 71 years old - I had to go home and look that up in Who’s Who to be convinced - incarnating in himself the whole history of his country’s struggle during that period.

And what an incarnation, by the way!  Archbishop Tutu’s energy, his bright sharp eyes transfixing us, his glee in answering questions (he even treated us to a little dance upon occasion), the dignity which never precluded humour: all this reminded me of a phrase learned in my Catholic convent girlhood.  ‘The saints were merry,’ declared Mother Ignatius.  That far-off lesson that true sanctity is not necessarily next to dolefulness suddenly made absolute sense.

The second remarkable element was the Archbishop’s emphasis on the practical meaning of the words ‘Truth’ and ‘Reconciliation’.  As he spoke they stopped being harmless do-gooder concepts, and became the planks of a real programme, hard to carry out at times but essential.  In this connection I was especially moved by the Archbishop’s reference to Frank Longford’s own valiant efforts at truth and reconciliation as Minister in charge of Germany in the immediate post-war Labour Government.  I can still remember the shock-horror of the tabloids (as they would now be called) when my father, then Frank Pakenham, declared that he was praying for the Germans.  The horrified headlines - PAKENHAM PRAYS! - might have been referring to the activities of a war criminal.  Yet, fending off the unthinking insults of my contemporaries about my father’s apparently heinous behaviour (something all the Longford children had to learn to do over the years in one context or another), I never really saw the other side of the question until after his death in 2001.  Then I received a letter from a German women who had been a 16 year old girl in 1946.  At the bottom of despair at what had been done in her country, starving and feeling she deserved it, she found that my father’s message of reconciliation gave her hope to go on.  In short, as Archbishop Tutu told us so memorably in 2004, ‘no one is a totally hopeless and irredeemable case.’

This is not to suggest that the Archbishop’s lecture was without bite: that was very far from being the case.  A storm of clapping greeted his reference to ‘Bush’s militarist policies’, calling the recent invasion of Iraq ‘an immoral war’.  The Archbishop made it clear that while preaching reconciliation, he had no time for ‘an unexamined and [thus] unacknowledged past’.  But the story on which he ended, the meeting of the American couple Peter and Linda Biehl with the parents of their daughter Amy’s black South African murderers, was the real measure of this awe-inspiring occasion.  Not only did the Biehls speak up for amnesty for their daughter’s killers: but they set up the Biehl Foundation to salvage black youths from the violence and dead end of ghetto life - a foundation for which their daughter’s murderers now work.  As the Archbishop concluded: the two mothers, American and South African, weeping as they embraced, symbolised ‘the possibility of new beginnings... of life out of death’.  It was an image which would have moved Frank Longford as it moved all of us present that night.

The Truth and Reconciliation Process - Restorative Justice

Archibishop Desmond Tutu

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