The Rainbow People of God; The Making of a Peaceful Revolution
New York: Doubleday, 1994. First Edition. First Printing. Hardcover. xxii, 281, [1] pages. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. Bookplate signed by the author (Desmond Tutu). Foreword by Nelson Mandela. Archbishop Desmond Tutu is the dedicated spokesman for the anti-apartheid movement; John Allen is a journalist who became the archbishop's media secretary. Letters, sermons, and other moving documents written by the Nobel Prize-winning Archbishop of Capetown--together with connecting narrative by journalist John Allen--provide a firsthand history of his long, courageous leadership of South Africa's anti-apartheid movement. This chronologically arranged collection of speeches, writings, and letters by Nobelist Desmond Tutu, Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, offers some gripping primary source material from the battle against apartheid. In the first selection of the volume, a letter dated May 6, 1976, Tutu, then dean of St. Mary's Cathedral in Johannesburg, asks Prime Minister John Vorster, ``How long can a people, do you think, bear such blatant injustice and suffering?'' The book ends with a prayer given by Tutu at Nelson Mandela's inauguration as the South African president on May 10, 1994. What emerges is a documentary history (albeit in only one voice) of the protracted death of apartheid and an affirmation of nonracial democracy by a man whose political acts are emphatically motivated by his Christian faith. John Allen is a writer and editor . He worked for Archbishop Tutu for 13 years, as his press secretary, then as communications director of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and finally in Tutu’s office at Emory University in Atlanta. More