In 1981, the apartheid government of South Africa summoned Desmond Tutu to appear before their tribunal. Alistair Sparks describes the encounter in his book:
The Little Black Bishop stabbed a finger toward the five white commissioners sitting before him and declared: "You whites brought us the Bible; now we blacks are taking it seriously. We are involved with God to set us free fom all that enslaves us and makes us less than what He intended us to be."
It was a curious scene, the black bishop all intensity and animation delivering a theological lecture strewn with Biblical quotations to [his five staid, stony faced inquistors].
He sat bouncing and twisting, his hands shaping out the outline of his ideas with vivid gestures, .... his voice [also contributing to] this vituoso performance, sometimes sonorous, playing with the cadences of his African accent, and sometimes breaking into a high-pitched chuckle as he hit on a pertinent new insight. His delivery was somber, joyful, impatient, humourous, reflective, switching rapidly through all the registers in response to a quicksilver spirit.
"The God of the Exodus is subversive of all situations of injustice. And the Bible is the most revolutionary, most radical book there is. If any book should be banned by those who rule unjustly and as tyrants, then it is the Bible."
Tutu ended with a ringing declaration of determination to continue his Christian mission as he saw it, [regardless of penalties or prohibitions by the government].
"I want Government to know now and always that I do not fear them. They are trying to defend the utterly indefensible and they will fail. They will fail because they are ranging themselves on the side of evil and injustice against the Church of God. Like others who have done that in the past, the Neros, the Hitlers, the Amins of this world, they will end up as the flotsam and jetsam of history."
The commissioners stared stonely ahead of them.
[Never man spake like this man.]
Desmond Mpilo Tuto was not yet the Anglican metropolitan of Southern Afica, not yet a Nobel Prize winner, not yet an international figure, yet this was perhaps his finest hour.
