Tutu’s Daughter Accepts Honors for Mandelas

Mpho Tutu, daughter of Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, accepted two honorary degrees Saturday for jailed black South African leader Nelson Mandela and his wife, recognizing the Mandelas’ “heroic struggle for the cause of human dignity and freedom.”

“I am proud and honored to accept these awards on behalf of Nelson and Winnie Mandela,” Tutu said in a brief segment of a graduation ceremony at the United Nations for medical and veterinary doctors from Ross University, which has three campuses in the Caribbean.

Unable to Come to U.S.

Robert Ross, chairman of the university he founded 15 years ago, said officials failed in two weeks of attempts to make contact with Winnie Mandela in South Africa. A telex from her Johannesburg attorneys indicated that she was “deeply moved and honored” by the degree but was unable to come to the United States.

Her husband, Nelson Mandela, a leading figure of the black liberation movement, has been imprisoned on sedition charges since 1962.

Personal Friends

Tutu, 23, dressed in the black and green vestments of Howard University in Washington, D.C., said that her longstanding relationship with Winnie Mandela made it easy to represent her at the New York ceremony.

“I call her Aunt Winnie; she lives up the street,” she said. “Both her daughters went to high school with me. We have always run in and out of her house as if it were a second home.”

The two diplomas will be delivered to Winnie Mandela by the offices of the Rev. John Walker, the Anglican Bishop of Washington, D.C.

Tutu, a senior electrical engineering major who plans to graduate in June, is the daughter of the Archbishop of Cape Town who was the recipient of the 1984 Nobel Peace Price.