Posted on September 21, 2007
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, recipient of the 1984 Nobel Peace prize, accepted the inaugural Mahatma Gandhi Global nonviolence award at the JMU Convocation Center Friday night.
Ambassador of India to the U.S., Ronen Sen, introduced Tutu as “a living legend of our time.”
“We in India regard him as a living Gandhi.”
Tutu received the award and an honorary doctorate, the 27th to be awarded in the institution’s 99-year history.
“We all search for people who, through their hard work and actions, show us the way,” JMU President Linwood Rose said in his welcoming remarks. “Tonight, we honor one of those people. He has earned the respect and admiration of people all over the world.”
During his presentation entitled “Goodness is Powerful,” Tutu said he was accepting the award on behalf of the millions of South Africans who struggled for freedom from apartheid.
“I usually say what is so patently obvious,” Tutu said, “that when you are in a crowd and you stand out, it is only because you are being carried on the shoulders of others.
Tutu told the audience that the South African activists’ belief in prevailing right and goodness was vindicated when apartheid was finally toppled. But he noted that telling people suffering in the world today “take heart…your suffering will end” disregards the reality of their daily struggles.
“Look at the morass in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Middle East,” he said. “You couldn’t have better evidence that God had lost the plot and my assertion about our inhabiting a moral universe being shown to be utter poppycock, baloney, unrealistic daydreaming.”
But Tutu countered those places of current suffering with success stories including Slobodan Milosevic’s fallout in Yugoslavia and former Liberian president Charles Taylor’s downfall and subsequent charges of atrocities by the International Criminal Court as proof that “there is no way in which evil, wrong and injustice can have the last word.”
People arrived at the Convo hours before the doors opened, resulting in lines that stretched around both sides of the building. Samuel Horst, a former professor at Eastern Mennonite University, was the first to arrive.
“I have a niece who lived in South Africa, so I wanted to hear [Tutu] speak,” Horst said.
Grace Rice, a Madison College alum (‘61), drove from Staunton to hear Tutu speak for the second time.
“I heard him at Duke University 25 years ago,” she said. “I was most anxious to hear him again. It was one of the highlights of my life in North Carolina.”
For more on the ceremony and the Mahatma Gandhi Center for Global Nonviolence, see Monday’s print edition of The Breeze.
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