Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 6 November 1994
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The castaway in Desert Island Discs this week is the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, the Most Reverend Desmond Tutu. He'll be talking to Sue Lawley about his childhood and his first realisations that black children were treated very differently from their white counterparts, as well as his initial work as a teacher, which he gave up when he realised he was expected merely to train his black pupils for a life of service. He'll also be talking about the new freedom and responsibilities of South Africa following the election of Nelson Mandela earlier this year, and describing his optimism for its success.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: We Are The World by U.S.A. For Africa Book: Parting The Waters by Branch Taylor Luxury: Ice-cream maker (especially for rum and raisin flavour)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 1994, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My cast away this week is a priest. His father was a schoolmaster, his mother a domestic |
| 0:34.0 | servant. He wanted to be a doctor but his parents couldn't afford the fees so he |
| 0:38.5 | trained as a teacher and then transferred to the priesthood in his mid-20s. |
| 0:43.4 | In itself, it's not a particularly unusual story, |
| 0:46.5 | except that this priest was a black South African, |
| 0:49.6 | brought up in the system of apartheid. |
| 0:52.3 | For the past 30 years, he's used his position in the Anglican Church to speak out against |
| 0:57.0 | the injustices which oppressed his people. |
| 0:59.0 | Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, he's today recognized as one of the principal |
| 1:05.0 | architects of South Africa's multiracial future. He is the Anglican Archbishop |
| 1:09.8 | of Cape Town, the most Reverend Desmond Tutu. |
| 1:13.4 | You spent a lifetime fighting the evil of apartheid and this year in April, as we all know, |
| 1:19.4 | black South Africans queued up to vote in their country's first democratic elections. |
| 1:25.0 | Was that day a miracle for you or was it something you had always known would happen? |
| 1:29.9 | No words anywhere in the world would ever be able to describe adequately how we all felt |
| 1:38.9 | on that day and of course I mean we recognize now. Yeah, it was a miracle. But it has to be said in |
| 1:46.0 | I think it was 1979 you predicted that Nelson Mandela would lead South Africa. |
| 1:50.8 | I mean you were five years out. But that's what you said. So you were |
| 1:55.5 | were you always so convinced that that the unbelievable would happen or were |
| 2:00.0 | you just understandably being encouraging. Most of the time one had this as an article of faith, you know, the issue is not in doubt if God before us who can be against us. But there were times |
... |
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