Nobel Prizes: Searching for New Worlds

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Born in the western Transvaal, Tutu was forced to drop his dreams of completing medical college when his father, a teacher, ran short of money. After Tutu's teaching years, seminary training, ordination in 1960 and graduate study in England, he taught theology in Lesotho, an independent nation surrounded by South African territory. He returned to England to administer World Council of Churches scholarships, and became South Africa's first black Anglican Dean in 1975. He pointedly spurned Johannesburg's posh suburban deanery to live with the black masses in Soweto.

The bishop, who is currently on a leave to teach at New York City's General Theological Seminary, flew home with his wife Leah last week to celebrate the peace award with friends. He has said he will donate his prize money of about $195,000 to a scholarship fund for black African youths.

Much of white South Africa reacted grumpily or indifferently to the news of Tutu's award. The Afrikaans daily Beeld complained that many of Tutu's "outbursts" make him "an unlikely peace-prize recipient." The word from the office of State President P.W. Botha: "No comment." But in Addis Ababa, the Organization of African Unity said the award is "an urgent reminder to the racist authorities of Pretoria that their inhuman regime is doomed."

Tutu joins an illustrious gallery of human rights activists who were snubbed by their own countries in the past several years after winning the peace prize, including Andrei Sakharov of the Soviet Union, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel of predemocratic Argentina and Lech Walesa of Poland. Unlike Sakharov and Walesa, however, Tutu is expected to collect his prize in person in Norway on Dec. 10. —By Richard N.Ostling. Reported by Peter Hawthorne/Johannesburg