Her job is all about “the Arch”. We sit down with Janet Jobson, CEO of the Desmond & Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation in Cape Town, to find out how she’s sustaining his inspirational legacy.
Sitting at her desk, Janet Jobson’s field of vision is dominated by the dazzling wall hanging that adorned Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s office for years. “We are the rainbow people,” it says. “And we make a difference.” Out of the corner of her eye, Jobson can see the life-size resin casting of Tutu that gazes down at people going about their business in the Cape Town city centre.
If it feels like Tutu is omnipresent in her life, this is just the start of it. As CEO for the past two-and-a-bit years of the Desmond & Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation, Jobson’s job is all about “the Arch”. The unspoken consideration behind every move she makes is, “What would he have done?”
Is it a burden? “No, it’s the honour of a lifetime,” says Jobson in her office at Desmond and Leah Tutu House (formerly The Old Granary) in Buitenkant Street in the East City. The magnificent 1809 building has been the foundation’s headquarters since 2018, and it houses the people and programmes dedicated to sustaining the legacy of a man whose incomparable activism left an indelible mark on South Africa and the world.
FRACTURED COMMUNITIES
It’s not a job Jobson could ever have dreamt of, but activism and leadership run in her blood. Her grandmother was an early member of the Black Sash and her mother, Dr Marjorie Jobson, co-chaired the Pretoria branch of the organisation. In the late 1980s, Dr Jobson was also a leader in the Pretoria Crisis Committee, which worked with the trauma of political prisoners experiencing detention, solitary confinement and death row.
At the time, Jobson was a preschooler, but the atmosphere as the apartheid regime approached its death throes was inescapable. “I became politically aware at a very young age,” she admits.
She completed her honours degree at Rhodes University as a Mandela Rhodes Scholar, a master’s at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and spent a year in Canada on a Jeanne Sauvé Foundation fellowship. Throughout these years of leadership training, “I kept coming up against the woundedness of our society, kept encountering fractured communities”, she says.
Her determination to make a difference, particularly in the lives of young people, led her to the DG Murray Trust, and after an 11-year journey there which took her to the deputy CEO’s office, she was approached to lead the Tutu Foundation. She started work in June 2022, six months after the Arch’s death at the age of 90.
TRUTH TO POWER
Although she never met Tutu, since taking the job she has heard so many testimonies about the impact he had on people, even in brief encounters, that the foundation has started collecting these stories. They’ll become part of the vast Tutu archive, which is the subject of a project by the Tutu IP Trust to build a digital repository.
To deepen her understanding of Tutu, Jobson also has archival access to his personal diaries covering his years on the front lines of the struggle against apartheid. Pages from the diaries are among the exhibits at the foundation’s permanent Truth to Power exhibition on the ground floor of Desmond and Leah Tutu House.
The exhibition’s name is a reference to Tutu’s habit of speaking out against injustice and oppression, starting when he and his wife Leah quit teaching in 1953 in protest at the introduction of the Bantu Education Act. His activism eventually went well beyond apartheid and South Africa, and Jobson has had to spend time carefully sifting the causes he supported to refine the foundation’s role in these early years without his guiding hand.
The Israel-Palestine conflict, about which he was especially outspoken, gets a nod in the presence of a keffiyeh around the neck of the Tutu resin statue that looks out over Buitenkant Street. “We’ve decided it will stay there until the bombing of Gaza stops,” says Jobson.
RECONCILIATION, REPAIR & REIMAGINING
But South Africa is the focus, and the foundation uses three words to describe its role in society: reconciliation, repair and reimagining. And it recognises that making an impact in these areas will require what it calls “powerful voices of uncompromised bravery”.
The Truth to Power exhibition is an important part of that – Jobson says she was delighted when a young visitor emerged declaring “I never knew Tutu was such a badass” – but two leadership programmes for young people are a more directed way to nurture the moral courage embodied by the Arch.
These programmes are still in their early stages, but Jobson says they are among the “strong roots” the foundation has established. Her next focus will be on building global relationships, as Tutu did so effectively.
That starts at this year’s Desmond Tutu International Peace Lecture, held annually on or around his birthday on 7 October. To mark the 40th anniversary of Tutu’s Nobel Peace Prize, this year’s lecturers at Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC) on 23 November will be the 2021 winner of the prize, Filipino journalist Maria Ressa, and Ukrainian human rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviichuk, who leads one of the 2022 winners, the Centre for Civil Liberties.
Jobson was just six months old when Tutu went to Oslo in December 1984 to collect the prize. In his acceptance speech, he pointed out that “oppression dehumanises the oppressor as much as, if not more than, the oppressed … We can be human only in fellowship, in community, in koinonia [spiritual communion], in peace.”
It was this search for a shared humanity that defined Tutu’s life, and which remains at the heart of the legacy foundation’s mission. It’s a mission Jobson gladly chose to accept, and she’s made an impressive start.
IMAGES: Ed Suter
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