That Championship Season

1990: The jubilant-looking man on the left is Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The equally jubilant-looking man on the right is Nelson Mandela. What's got them in such a good mood? Well, they're old pen pals who only very recently finally got to meet face to face. It's been about a week since Mandela was released from a 27-year prison stay for championing the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa. If you don't already know, apartheid was the white-implemented policy that all blacks in the country remain second-class citizens. Now, second-class citizenry is hardly something uncommon in world (or U.S.) history, but what made apartheid even more distressingly unjust was that the blacks constituted a majority of the population. How weird is that? Whole cities became exclusive country clubs, that's how weird. Disenfranchising nine out of ten people didn't make much economic sense, either. It's as if you dismantled the Eiffel Tower and then charged to use the observation deck. Anyway, in his time behind bars, Mandela himself became part of the cause he had fought for, and an inspiration for those outside the prison walls, such as Tutu, who helped turn what initially was seen as one nation-state's internal matter into an international outrage.

Apartheid came to an end not too long after Mandela was released, and the former political prisoner ascended to the presidency. As I wrote when he died in 2013, it's up to the South African people to decide how well he did in that job, but one thing is certain, the widespread retaliatory oppression of the white minority never came to pass, as so many in that white minority had feared.

As for Desmond Tutu, he turns 87 today. In recent years he's spoken out against LGBTQ discrimination, and was in attendance when his daughter married another woman in the Netherlands in 2016. He probably figured, enough with the second-class treatment already.