Tutu and curse of self-doubt

Desmond Tutu is a consummate actor and a clever poker player - skills that have helped a little to make him one of the most important figures in modern South African history.

Through his long career, he has had many opportunities to combine those skills in acts of political brinkmanship that have influenced, if not changed the course of that history.

Tutu summed up other players at the table, calculated the odds and acted up a storm in September 1989, when he joined other prominent clergy to defy the government's state of emergency and lead 30 000 people on a peaceful march through the streets of Cape Town.

That play did bend the course of South African history. Like many other events in which Tutu played a role, it would not have happened without him.

I had planned today, the eve of his 80th birthday, just to recall a few anecdotes from times over the past 25 years when my job has put me into the space of the man I admire above all others - including, by a hair, Nelson Mandela.

But the Arch made himself topical again with his public rebuke of President Jacob Zuma on Tuesday, so his influence needs to be viewed both in the now and in the broader context of his well-lived life.

Drawing on the poker skills he learned as a boy on the train to school, Tutu has bet high on weak hands over the years and won. One such play may have been his 1985 speech in KwaThema following the necklace murder of Maki Skosana in nearby Duduza, when he told a volatile crowd: "If we use methods such as the one that we saw in Duduza, then, my friends, I am going to collect my family and leave a country that I love very deeply, a country that I love passionately."

His message was received in hostile silence. The reporters present wondered for a while whether he would survive.

His speech did not end the necklace murders of real or suspected government spies, but it stopped the escalation of the violence and fuelled an important debate about the practice.

On other days he made implausible bets against Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, PW Botha and, of course, against the then mighty Afrikaner establishment, which was supported in much that it did by the acquiescent silence of the rest of the white minority.

It is easy today to forget how much white South Africa hated the little bishop who went around the world campaigning for sanctions against his own country.

He was denigrated in dinner table conversation then in much the way that Julius Malema is now (which is where that comparison ends). Graffiti on suburban walls urged him to emigrate, criticised his modest wealth and called sometimes for physical harm to be done to him.

Watching Tutu flay Jacob Zuma on Tuesday, I recalled many days when I had seen him rage as only he can, and wondered for a moment whether this was all real or was his rage emphasised with some acting.

I would guess, based on what in poker terms I think is Tutu's "tell", that his outburst was entirely real, that it took him a little by surprise, too. The "tell" I refer to is that when Tutu rages for effect, he is entirely fluent, whereas on Tuesday he was sometimes at a loss for words.

He was no doubt disappointed that his friend, the Dalai Lama, had been denied a visa to attend his birthday party tomorrow, but the real anger seemed to be directed at "this president of ours", who has so disappointed his own party and the country.

With the frustration of a bullied boy on the verge of tears, all he could really say was "watch out, watch out".

Tutu's anger is unlikely this time to turn history, but it might influence it a little if it causes some of those within the ANC and the government who recognise the same decay that he sees to get down off the fence and fight for the restoration of the moral core that made the party great in its prime.

It might be an important moment if it finds somewhere within the party machine that quality which, for me, has always set Tutu apart from Mandela - the curse of self-doubt.

Mandela has seemed always to me to have the perfect pitch of a political prodigy. He instinctively knows the right thing to do, the appropriate response to wring the best from an opportunity or to rescue a situation as dangerous as the assassination of Chris Hani.

Tutu pits his wits against the challenges that come his way, prays to his God for guidance, worries about the possible consequences and then plays a hand he sometimes regrets.

Travelling with him for a few days in 1986 to research a profile for United Press International, I saw him snap at a middle-aged white woman in Grahamstown who asked him for reassurance about some aspect of being a white person in an apartheid state. She cried as he stalked off.

Hours later, in the car heading back to Port Elizabeth, he broke his own call for silence and said almost to himself: "I shouldn't have done that."

Once his chaplain had discovered what he was talking about, they started working out how to find the woman and apologise. I don't know if he managed, but he was visibly bruised by his own mistake.

If more of us could have Tutu's courage to do what we think is right and yet to think it possible that we might be wrong, surely ours would be a better world.