“Let us work to be peacemakers, those given a wonderful share in Our Lord’s ministry of reconciliation. If we want peace, so we have been told, let us work for justice.”
— Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, Oslo City Hall, Norway (1984)
Desmond Tutu delivered these words in Oslo in 1984, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of a South Africa still locked in the grip of apartheid. He was not speaking from a place of victory. He was speaking from the middle of the struggle, which is precisely what gives these words their weight.
Tutu spent decades as one of apartheid’s most visible and persistent opponents, using his role as an Anglican Archbishop not as a shelter from politics but as a platform for moral clarity. He believed deeply that faith and justice were inseparable, and his life reflected that belief at considerable personal risk.
In this quote, he draws together two ideas that are often treated as separate: peacemaking and justice. For Tutu, you cannot have one without the other. Peace that rests on injustice is not peace at all. It is silence enforced by power. Real reconciliation, the kind he would later help shape through South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, requires confronting uncomfortable truths and repairing genuine wrongs.
The phrase “so we have been told” carries a quiet humility. He is not presenting a new idea. He is reminding his audience of something they already know but may have forgotten or chosen to set aside.
These words remain an invitation, not a verdict.
