The Spirit of Struggle

Cornel West and Panashe Chigumadzi contemplate how Desmond Tutu worked to reconcile "African" and "Black" theology. |

Via Boston Review /

"While many across the world remember postapartheid Tutu as the purple-robed presider of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, who tried to reconcile Black and white South Africa into a failed 'Rainbow Nation,' few remember the earlier Tutu who, at the height of apartheid, reconciled Africa and Afro-Diaspora by reminding us that Blackness and Africanness are two 'concentric circles.' At a time when many young Black South Africans reject the reconciliatory racial politics of leaders such as Tutu and Nelson Mandela, few remember the blood-soaked cassock Tutu who was first baptized into political activism by bullets aimed at Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement and the Black liberation theology that inspired it." | Read the FULL ARTICLE.