Rev. Naomi Tutu And Mungi Ngomane’s Advice to Young Leaders
Catherine Lang | September 30, 2025
Rev. Naomi Tutu smiles for a photo in 2022. (Andrew Dunsmore/Picture Partnership)
Prominent anti-Apartheid activist Reverend Naomi Tutu and her daughter Mungi Ngomane visited Warren Wilson College (WWC) to recognize the first anniversary of Hurricane Helene.
Naomi Tutu was born in South Africa during Apartheid, a brutal 50-year regime of racial segregation and political violence. Her parents, Nomalizo Leah and Reverend Desmond Tutu, were global figures in the anti-Apartheid movement. As an Archbishop in the Anglican Church, Desmond Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his nonviolent leadership against racial oppression.
Naomi is a public speaker, educator, race and gender activist and an ordained Episcopal priest. She is an alumna of Berea College, a historic liberal arts work college in Kentucky.
Mungi Ngomane is an author, public speaker and human rights activist. She approaches her work and her life through the African philosophy of Ubuntu, a belief that “I am because we are.” Her book Everyday Ubuntu has been translated into 16 languages.
Naomi, who was previously a commencement speaker at WWC, and Mungi were interviewed by the Echo.
The following conversation has been edited for clarity.
What brought you back to Warren Wilson?
Naomi: Your director of wellness, Milly Morrow, was actually a clergy colleague of mine at the Cathedral of All Souls. I lived in Asheville for a little while, and I have many friends who were impacted [by Helene].
Milly and I had been talking, and she said, ‘I'm thinking that we want to mark the anniversary of Helene with both an acknowledgement of the high level of loss, and also with talking about our resilience.’
That combination of acknowledging the pain and also our strength as a community is work that I've been doing since growing up in South Africa. And so we ended up working with Mungi because of her work around Ubuntu, and having a keynote, and then having smaller sessions of conversations with students.
What would you say to students at Warren Wilson who want to affect institutional or political change?
Naomi: I would say it's not going to happen overnight. It never does. Power never concedes anything easily.
Remember that this is not the first time that [a] struggle is happening. When I was in college, it was the anti-Apartheid movement against South Africa, and trying to get colleges and universities to divest.
We protested, we built shanty towns. We met with trustees when I was in Berea College. We started a Students United Against Apartheid organization, and we often felt as though we were talking to a blank wall, or that we were beating our heads against the wall [when] talking to the administration.
We never got my college to divest, and [I was] feeling so disheartened and often just angry, that here I am, a black South African, trying to explain the impact of U.S. support for the South African government, and the [administration] doesn't seem to be hearing my voice.
We were able to get a section of the freshmen curriculum [to study] Apartheid and South Africa, [and] we were able to have the university sponsor us to go to anti-Apartheid conferences in New York [and] in DC.
Be looking for the small victories and remember that you are on the side of right, that in the long run, as Dr. King said, the pendulum swings towards justice.
One of the things that I held on to was to remember the people who struggled against Apartheid who died before we were liberated. They never gave up the struggle, even as they probably realized that Apartheid was not going to end in their lifetime. But they believed they were struggling for the greater good of all South Africans, and even if they were not going to see that day, they knew that somebody was.
So do not give up. Do not feel that what you are doing is not worthwhile. Do not feel as though what you are doing is too little. Do not feel as though when you meet a barrier, that it is the end of the story. It's part of your chapter in that story, and the full story is going to be written in a world of justice.
Mungi: And student movements have never been wrong. What I would say is, continue having the conversations. They're gonna be uncomfortable. They're gonna be difficult. Not everyone needs to be in the conversation at all times.
My mom talks about how during Apartheid, they used to tease my grandfather about continuing to talk to the Apartheid government, and that he had said to them, ‘As long as someone will talk to me, I will talk to them.’
I believe the only way things change is because of conversations, and so nothing is going to happen if these conversations don't continue.
How can people get more familiar with movement history?
Naomi: [In Asheville] you're not that far from the Highlander Center, which is an amazing resource about the struggle in this country. It was at the Highlander Center that people like Dr. King gathered and gave training on the [civil rights] movement.
The reality is that a lot of the knowledge resides in people. The stories reside in people, rather than in official histories, because most people aren't willing to publish certain things. In 2020, people of color in the U.S. were getting tips on how to deal with tear gas from Palestinians who have dealt with this for years. Struggle is passed through storytelling.
Take advantage of the lynching memorial, the King Center, the Carter Center…all of these places have resources that we don't often get.
I think [the lynching memorial] is an important place not just for issues about race, but also to make the connections about how much oppressors learn from one another. When the South African government was thinking about the Bantustan policy, they looked at the U.S. reservation system. It is incumbent on us to be willing to share information with one another in the ways that those who strive against justice continue to share information with one another.
Look at some of the books that came out of the anti-Apartheid movement. Books like Country of My Skull and A Human Being Died That Night. Films like Long Night's Journey into Day.
Also, be looking at alternative resources in terms of media. Access something like Al Jazeera, the Guardian newspaper in England, Zeteo [or] Mondoweiss. Because the U.S. corporate media is not going to give the full story.
I continue to be amazed that major newspapers [in the U.S.] are still talking about the Israel-Hamas war. What Israel-Hamas war? No, we are facing a genocide. The Palestinian people are facing a genocide, and if we stay on U.S. media, we will continue to listen to these sources that are biased and not covering the full story.
How did growing up in a politically active family shape you?
Naomi: [I was] very aware [of] the real possibility of [my parents] being arrested, [or] of them being killed. And that was knowledge I lived with constantly. And yet, because of their activism, we were part of a community that I knew was always invested in my being the best person [I could be]. Even in the midst of the oppression.
I loved foreign languages. I fell in love with French when I was thirteen and [I thought], what does that do in the situation we are in? What is the benefit of loving French? And [I remember] having very clear encouragement from my parents and my community that, ‘If that's what makes you want to get up in the morning, you will find a way to use it for liberation and justice.’
Mungi: I used to joke that the family business wasn't handed down to me, specifically because I am not a priest. But it wasn't forced upon me. I ended up working with the peace and conflict side and the Ubuntu side.
Along with my grandparents saying to my mom, ‘whatever you do, it will be enough,’ she [also] said [this] to my brother and me.
‘No matter which struggle for justice you choose, they're all interconnected.’