WEALTH GAP, AIDS TROUBLE SOUTH AFRICA

When Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, 78, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, is interviewed, he speaks with passion and twirls around in his chair.

Tutu, who remains energetic and effervescent, recently visited Indianapolis to speak at Butler University's commencement ceremony. For more than 25 years, he has helped unite South Africa and fight against apartheid, its system of racial segregation.

Y-Press spoke with Tutu about the role of youth in society. He attributed his personal success to a variety of early influences.

"I had a wonderful mother," he said. "She wasn't educated, but she was a very gentle person and almost always took the side of the one who was having the worst of an argument. . . . I think that that was the greatest influence on my life."

As a boy, Tutu was aware of the injustice of segregation.

"I recall when I was a boy of 9 picking up a tattered copy of Avenue Magazine . . . in South Africa. . . . It was one that was describing Jackie Robinson breaking into Major League baseball, going to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Now, I didn't know baseball from pingpong. . . . And yet across the seas, all of those many, many, many miles, his accomplishment will touch you."

Just as South Africa's struggle touched the world.

"Some people are interested in Tibet," Tutu said. "Some are interested in Burma. But we, in a way that we can't explain, engaged the support of the entire globe. I mean, you could go to almost any country and you found an anti-apartheid group there.

"We would not have made it without the support of the international community . . . especially the young people. I used to come here and go to college campuses in about April, when students ought to be worried about grades, and you were finding students demonstrating, wanting their colleges to divest (from South Africa), and it was fantastic. We had no doubt at all that the outcome would be a victory for justice."

That victory included the release from prison in 1990 of Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress leader.

"Could anything be more sublime than having committed yourself to the liberation of your people, to be alive when it happens?" he asked. "I mean, I said, 'God, if you like, I don't mind dying now.' "

In 1994, Mandela became the country's first democratically elected president.

Despite the triumph of democracy, South African youths continue to face challenges.

"I think the most obvious and most devastating is the challenge of HIV/AIDS," he said. "One in nine people are infected; just think of the number of AIDS orphans! Unless something happens drastically, we are going to end up being a devastated land."

Other issues call for attention: South Africa has yet to overcome the effects of segregation.

"We are facing a major problem in our country today with a legacy of apartheid -- poverty, homelessness, crime," he stated. "It is amazing the transition that has been made to a nonracial society. But the divide between the rich and the poor is still very much what it was under apartheid. I would say really 99.9 percent of the poor are black, and 99.9 percent of the affluent are white. And we need the gap to be narrowed.

"(We look forward to) the creation of a genuinely nonracial society, where skin color, ethnicity are the total irrelevance that they are. For our people, there are very wonderful signs of that happening, you know. If you heard that there are race riots in some country, you would imagine it must be South Africa, and it isn't. It's Britain. Or you hear things are so bad (that) children, when they go to school, have to be accompanied by armed police. You say, 'Oh, that is a scene that can happen only in South Africa.' It's not; it's happening in Northern Ireland."

Although these problems might seem insurmountable, Tutu is hopeful. And while the leadership of Mandela and others has been critical to the rebirth of South Africa, he said, the people deserve credit, too. "When you are in a crowd and you stand out in a crowd, it is only because you are being carried on the shoulders of others."

The people's hopes have been buoyed by the 1995 National Unity and Reconciliation Act. Through the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which Tutu chairs, South Africans have the opportunity to show the world the wrongs that occurred under apartheid.

"People were able to tell their story," Tutu said, "and tell their story in a forum that was sympathetic, officially. And people who had been anonymous, faceless, would come, and they were splashed on the newspapers' front pages. They were on television.

"I actually wonder whether you people should not consider having something like a truth and reconciliation commission," he continued. "I'd say almost all African-Americans have a pain in here that wants to come out, and frequently comes out. I myself think that your country has really not come to terms with slavery, has not come to terms with what you did to the Native Americans. Let them get the bile out of their system. Let them speak because unless you do that, you are constantly going to be surprised in this country."

ASSISTANT EDITORS: Emma Hulse, 15; Stephanie Smith, 14; Zach Tuchman, 14.

REPORTER: Kellie Moore, 12.