Politics & Power Quote by Desmond Tutu

A punchy moral indictment disguised as a simple civic complaint, Tutu’s line turns the absurdity of apartheid into a verdict you can’t un-hear. He frames disenfranchisement not as an abstract “rights issue” but as a daily, humiliating arithmetic: in his own birthplace, adulthood and citizenship count for less than a teenager’s eligibility. That comparison is doing the heavy lifting. It collapses the regime’s pretenses of order and maturity by showing that power is assigned not by competence, contribution, or even age, but by pigmentation.

The rhetorical question - “And why?” - is courtroom theater. It invites the listener to search for a plausible justification, then denies them one. The phrase “wonderful biological attribute” is acid irony: “wonderful” borrows the language of pride and achievement, only to expose how grotesque it is when applied to melanin. Biology becomes the regime’s alibi, a supposedly natural fact enlisted to mask a political choice.

Context matters: Tutu is speaking from the heart of South Africa’s apartheid system, where whiteness functioned as a legal identity card granting mobility, representation, and safety. The subtext is that racism isn’t merely prejudice; it is bureaucracy with a gun behind it. By anchoring the injustice in voting - the basic mechanism of legitimacy - Tutu isn’t just protesting exclusion. He’s challenging the state’s claim to be a state at all, because a government that assigns the ballot by skin is confessing its own illegitimacy.