On 12 April 2012, Mpho Tutu’s life changed forever. The youngest daughter of Nobel prize laureate and retired archbishop Desmond Tutu returned home to find her housekeeper stabbed to death in her daughter’s bedroom, her hands and feet bound with cloth.
“She was on the floor. There was so much blood,” recalls Mpho. “We would never be able to call it home again.”
The harrowing events of Angela Machinga’s death had a devastating effect on Tutu and her family, the reverberations of which she says are still very present two years on. Their former gardener was held in connection with the murder and Mpho and her two daughters, the youngest aged just five at the time, fled their Cape Town Home.
Yet the process of coming to terms with the brutality has now provided the inspiration for Mpho, herself also an Episcopal priest, to co-author a new book with her father on learning how to forgive.
Tutu draws on his experiences as the Chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was established to hear testimony on the apartheid era, and championed the idea of South Africa having no future without forgiveness. He also draws on the pain of having witnessed his father physically abuse his mother when he was a child. For Mpho, it was Machinga’s death that proved a turning point.
I am not as vocal as my father but I am every bit as annoyed at those in power in South Africa, if not more so
“The murder of Angela was the event that made real for me the idea of forgiveness as a process rather than an event. Writing this in the book felt to me like the way of honouring my own process and also honouring Angela. I don’t want her story to get stuck away in a corner somewhere. This was a beautiful person who was an important part of our lives and I want to hold her up.”
In the book, titled The Book of Forgiving, Mpho said it was important to convey how she went from “nausea, disgust, fear, confusion” to finding her own peace with the atrocity through the stages of forgiveness she and her father lay out.
She confessed to the feelings of rage and helplessness that overwhelmed her as she gazed down up on the blood-soaked body of Angela.
“How could anyone be so vile? How could any person be so brutal? Why Angela? What harm had she done? How dare anyone violate my home? There are moments when the anger turns to rage and there are moments I want to strike back.”
Mpho added: “It’s not finished, it’s still an ongoing process, not only in terms of the legal process but also in terms of how it reverberates in our family. A couple of weeks ago my father and I were doing a reading at a literary festival in South Africa and my daughter was in the audience and when we started talking about that moment and about Angela’s death, my daughter just fell apart. She was just
sitting there weeping so it’s still very real, it’s still very present, it’s still very alive.
She continued: “It’s not forgive and you’re done, there’s a disposition of mind and disposition of being that you need to bring into the process and that’s what our book is about.”
Born in London and educated in America, Mpho is the only one of Tutu’s four children who followed him into the church, though admits she took the “scenic route” after first studying art, then electrical engineering before running several non-profit organisations.
“Being a priest is absolutely not something that I always wanted to be. In the list of top ten professions that I wanted to do, I always say that being a priest was number 983,” she said. “It was only later I recognised that becoming a priest was something I had been running away from for a long time.”
While her and her father’s book addresses the individual necessity and pursuit of forgiveness, Mpho says it is also a fundamental part of the future of South Africa, the country she still lives in, and said there are still palpable resentments that need to be addressed.
“In South Africa we’ve had something of a truncated process of forgiveness,” she said with a sigh. “At the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, we heard the stories and we named the various hurts and offered forgiveness but at the point of renewing the relationship we sadly returned to the status quo. Economically the realities of South Africa have barely changed and there are some people who are quite satisfied with the idea that, well you forgave us, now let’s just march on into the sunset together without anything having to change. That’s not a full forgiveness process, full forgiveness is when the relationship after is different from the relationship before and that has not happened yet.”
Full forgiveness is when the relationship after is different from the relationship before and that has not happened in South Africa yet
While her father has been a powerful political figure for much of her life – from his strident anti-apartheid stance to his vocal criticism of the current South African President Jacob Zuma – publicly Mpho remains less politically outspoken.
“I am not as vocal as my father but I am every bit as annoyed at those in power in South Africa, if not more so,” Mpho said. “The younger generation are disaffected because they look at these clowns in power and they feel there’s no point in voting because it’s either these clowns or another set of clowns. The recognition needs to be, well look at these clowns, if you don’t vote the next government will be exactly the same.”
She added: “There is not disappointment in democracy but there is disappointment in the current leadership. Those who hold the power in South Africa need to realise it is not only authority they hold but accountability.”
The Book of Forgiving by Desmond and Mpho Tutu is out now (William
Collins, £14.99)
