LIghT ThE WAy ChAPTER 2 BUILDINg COMMUNITy The Importance of Respect


A community can be either successful or unsuccessful. So what makes a community successful? The following story may help to answer this question.


Desmond was amazed by what he had just witnessed. He had never seen a white person behave in this way. He asked his mother who that white man was. She told him that he was Trevor Huddleston, an Anglican priest and a man of God. Huddleston was a leading figure in the campaign to get equal rights for South Africa’s black population.


Archbishop Desmond Tutu makes an impassioned speech in Washington D.C. in 1985.


The year was 1940. At that time, South Africa was controlled by a white minority regime that treated the majority black community very badly. Black people had had their lands stolen from them and were given no say in how the country was governed.


Desmond Tutu was a nine-year-old boy living in Klerksdorp in the Transvaal province.


One morning he and his mother were walking down a street when they saw a tall white man dressed in black coming towards them. In those days, when a black person and a white person met while walking on a footpath, the black person was expected to step off into the gutter to allow the white person to pass and nod their head as a gesture of respect. However, that day, Desmond Tutu witnessed something he would never have thought could happen. Before he and his mother could step off the footpath, the white man stepped off the footpath and, as he and his mother passed, tipped his hat in a gesture of respect to them!


South African township.


Many years later, when Desmond Tutu was giving his acceptance speech upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace, he said that what Trevor Huddleston did that day long ago had changed the whole direction of his life. He was so struck by the example he gave that he too decided to become an Anglican priest and dedicate his life to serving God and his fellow human beings.


REMEMBER! Respect means showing that you care in what you say and do.


Why did Trevor Huddleston treat Desmond Tutu and his mother in this way? Because he believed that they were just as much members of the community as he was. As a Christian, he believed that all people are created by God and so are of equal value. The colour of their skin or their social status is of no importance.


18


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