I have always understood clearly that indeed church ministry is about service because the master they follow was a great servant for humanity. At this year's Cape Town Book Fair, we the writers were placed on the same level as clerics - or at least the spiritual leader in Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu described writers as people who only respond to their vocation because it is a calling. "I tell you - you have an incredible calling - this is a vocation. You don't know just how important your calling is: being able to inform the sensitivities of people; being able to help form the longing for freedom," Tutu said when officially opening the fair on Friday. He recounted the days when he was a boy growing up in the ghettos of apartheid South Africa, where the regime dictated for him what to read and not to read in fear that he and his contemporaries might get wild and develop strange ideas of toppling the white regime. He lauded writers and publishers as well as anyone involved in the book industry for liberating the masses and "fostering the longing for freedom in South Africa and elsewhere, where there has been oppression against humans".
He said it was reading that sparked his imagination as a child and led him to dream of rising above the drab circumstances in apartheid South Africa. Luckily, his father was a school teacher and allowed his son to only read comic books contrary to conventional wisdom.
