Tutu: a man of empathy, moral ardor, and some silly jokes

Desmond Tutu was, for many around the world, an icon

One Christmas Day in the 1980s, Desmond Tutu led a packed church service in Soweto, the Black Johannesburg township and fulcrum of protest against white racist rule in South Africa. An American family — mine — found standing room at the back.

We were among the few white people in the congregation and, as we shook hands with Tutu on the steps upon leaving, he made a joke. Something like: “So, it really is a white Christmas.”

Evoking the Irving Berlin song ‘’White Christmas,’’ famously crooned by Bing Crosby, in tense, dusty Soweto was quintessential Tutu. He couldn’t resist a pun about race in an inflamed country suffering the agonies of apartheid, the system of white minority domination that was extinguished in 1994.

(Actually, every once in a very long while, it has snowed in Johannesburg, but certainly not at Christmas time, which falls in the Southern Hemisphere's summer).