Peace Pipeline

Still, PeaceJam has spread. Events have been held in Bloomington, Indiana, Amherst, Massachusetts, and Vancouver, Washington. Other programs are getting off the ground in Minneapolis and Kansas City. Next year Menchœ Tum will be leading a PeaceJam in New Mexico.

Tutu's visit this weekend will be the eleventh conference PeaceJam has staged, the fourth in Denver. It will likely be Tutu's only visit to Colorado. Stricken with cancer, the 67-year-old laureate will attend the PeaceJam at Regis and will speak once in Denver and once in Boulder.

For the last two years, Tutu has served on South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which last month released a painful 2,750-page report documenting accounts of violence and torture and death during the country's apartheid era, which ended in 1991. Former president F.W. de Klerk, the man who freed Mandela and with whom Mandela shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize, tried to censor those parts of the report critical of him and his National Party. African National Congress officials also tried to block the report's publication, unhappy that it claimed the ANC tortured dissidents and killed civilians in its long fight against apartheid.

But Tutu's appearance in Boulder will be its own evidence of reconciliation. In the Eighties, students at CU waged large protests against the university for having business relationships with companies who had investments in South Africa. Students erected shantytowns; 23 were arrested in one 1988 protest. Such struggles against American financial involvement--and implicit endorsement of--apartheid were common throughout college campuses in the Eighties.

The anti-apartheid movement kept a high profile in the Eighties. But the work continues on many other fronts, carried out by everyday people. "There are no famous people in the world," says Betty Williams. "If you really say you're out there in the world of peace and justice and these schmaltzy words--don't keep flapping your lips.