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Heart and Soul: Thabo Makgoba the Archbishop of Cape Town.

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05/10/2013 GMT

Thabo Makgoba the Archbishop of Cape Town.

BBC World Service - Heart and Soul, Thabo Makgoba the Archbishop of Cape Town.

Desmond Tutu's successor talks about education, apartheid, gun running, and homosexuality

Desmond Tutu's successor as archbishop of Cape Town, Thabo Makgoba, talks about education, apartheid, gun running, and homosexuality.

Archbishop Thabo Madiye Makgoba is a man with a mission. He is also very well placed to fulfill it. The youngest ever bishop of Cape Town and Metropolitan of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa believes that the quest for social justice and equality is only attainable through education. 

He has an evangelical sense of purpose about this, so he uses whatever platform - pulpit, social media or political and business connections -  to  widen access to education for all. He believes that education is an end in itself - an end to poverty, and end to oppression, an end to injustice. 

How did he know this? Because of an innate sense that people need to have their sense of honour protected, their dignity restored. And as the great grandson of a king who was beheaded in the colonial wars of the 1890s, he has a historical sense of the importance of restoration. 

His family moved to Alexandra township after being dispossessed of ancestral land in what is now Limpopo Province in South Africa. Some of that land has been handed back to his community through a land restitution process. But the young Thabo and his family were once again displaced in the forced removals perpetrated by the apartheid government during the 1960s and 1970s, to clear black communities from lucrative land close to urban centres around the country.

Today Thabo Makgoba is well connected to the political elite in charge. But he's not afraid to tell his former comrades where they're going wrong. And with elections coming up next year, many of South Africa's poorest, most desperate people are thankful that he uses the pulpit to speak on their behalf. 

Just like his most illustrious predecessor, Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu.

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