Tutu Urges Continued War Against Bias : South Africa: Anglican prelate ends visit to the Southland. He charmed audiences on 12-day tour while warning that anti-apartheid effort must not wane.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the diminutive church leader who has become synonymous with the nonviolent anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, preached, smiled, joked--even danced--his way through a whirlwind 12-day tour of Southern California that ended Tuesday after more than two dozen appearances.

Whether he was speaking on a campus to students or seminarians, touring a renovated downtown Skid Row hotel, being honored at a $200-a-plate fund-raising dinner for his pet project--U.S. scholarships for disadvantaged African blacks--or, wearing a sweat shirt and Reeboks while spending a day in Disneyland with his 3-year-old grandson, Tutu’s message was always the same:

Apartheid, the racial segregation system in South Africa, “has come a cropper.” Freedom “is breaking out in the most unlikely places, and South Africa has caught the disease.”

Then, characteristically honing a serious point with a barb of humor: “If you had said this would happen, even in January, you would have been told, ‘Look here, see a shrink!’ ”

The Nobel Peace Prize winner and head of the Anglican Church in the Province of Southern Africa had also come to Southern California to thank his supporters and to warn that economic sanctions must continue until the demise of apartheid is “irreversible” and South African blacks have the right to vote.

“To rid the world of injustice, God depends on you and you and you and you and you and all of us,” said an emphatic Tutu, vested in white and crimson, as he gestured to an overflow crowd of 1,800 attending a Sunday service at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena.

Wherever he went, he drew sustained applause, ovations--and admiration.

“He’s such an engaging person . . . a man of great hope,” declared Roman Catholic Archbishop Roger M. Mahony after the Anglican prelate had met with a group of Southern California religious leaders. “He knows you can’t make changes overnight, but there is a momentum moving across South Africa that can’t be stopped, and it’s grounded in faith.”

Organized opposition to Tutu--who frequently praised both Nelson Mandela, the recently freed black leader of the African National Congress, and the white, reform-leading South African president, Frederik W. de Klerk--was minimal.

Six activists from the Jewish Defense League heckled Tutu, disrupting an outdoor reception at the Pasadena church, calling him an “un-Christian murderer . . . an evil man who doesn’t understand the issues.”

JDL spokesman Irv Rubin said Tutu should “lay off Israel,” an apparent reference to Tutu’s recent trip to the Middle East, where he spoke out in favor of a separate Palestinian state and urged Jewish leaders to put the Holocaust behind them.

Although the Rev. George Regas, All Saints’ rector, hustled Tutu away from the demonstrators, Tutu told him, “In South Africa, they couldn’t do this, George, so let them have their say.”

In Santa Ana, where Tutu spoke in a sold-out 1,500-seat auditorium on Monday night, about 25 teen-age skinhead protesters showed up outside and shouted “white power” slogans. Police kept them well away from the main entrance.

Tutu, 58, seemed as much an apostle of joy when sounding his clarion call for faith and love to the high and the mighty as he did talking simply, yet eloquently, to children and young people.

At the star-studded tribute dinner at the Biltmore Hotel, Tutu spent 10 minutes thanking virtually everyone for putting on the affair: the police, the caterers, even the busboys.

Then, Tutu, dressed in a high-collared silk jacket, appealed for scholarship funds. South Africa will need “many, many skilled young people” in a post-apartheid era, he said.

Tutu likened the future of blacks and whites in his country to two manacled prisoners who fall into a ditch and can’t get out without each other’s help. “Our humanity is bound together,” Tutu said. The interracial crowd of 400 applauded loudly when he added: “Sorry, you won’t be free until we are free!”

And on Monday, Tutu urged a crowd of more than 1,000 ministerial and missions students at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena to “change the moral climate of the world. . . . Tell the tyrants of all sorts . . . that God is on the side of the weak, the hungry and the oppressed.”

By Tuesday, more than $150,000 had been raised, according to Jonae Watts, spokeswoman for Tutu’s scholarship dinner. The Presbyterian Synod of Southern California donated another $1,000, and $550 was presented by the children of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Altadena, where a brilliantly colored stained-glass window portraying the archbishop with his arms around two children was dedicated last Wednesday.

Indeed, it was the youngest that the archbishop most seemed to charm--and be charmed by.

During a short stop at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, an ever-beaming and bantering Tutu visited the “preemie ward” and cooed at the babies, calling them all “beautiful.”

Sitting on the top step of the altar at St. Mark’s in Altadena, where he was surrounded by a cluster of grade-school children, the cleric seemed no larger than his admirers.

He gladly autographed church bulletins for them and laughed when one of the children, Jason Brown, told the guest of honor: “You don’t leap off tall buildings, shoot the bad guys or slam dunk and score touchdowns. But you have always spoken of the need for peace and tranquility and freedom.”

A few minutes later, as a folk combo belted out a Peter, Paul and Mary song, a nimble Tutu pranced about a stage set up on the church school playing field. “No Easy Walk to Freedom,” the group sang, adding a special verse for their guest: “Keep on walkin’ and apartheid will go.”

The Archbishop of Cape Town danced his heart out.