Desmond Mpilo Tutu was born in Klerksdorp in the North West Province (formerly known as the Transvaal) on 7 October 1931, the second of the three children of Zacheriah Zililo Tutu and his wife, Aletta. Tutu was the only son. As a youngster he attended mission schools in Klerksdorp.

His father was a teacher and his mother a cleaner and cook at a school for the blind. Tutu is raised in an atmosphere of tolerance and sympathy where, he later says, "I never learnt to hate."

Klerksdorp, Krugersdorp, and Ventersdorp – these small Transvaal mining towns were home to Desmond Tutu when he was a child. At the heart of each town was an upper stratum of white farmers, teachers, and mine managers, plus a white middle class of artisans and storekeepers. And on the outskirts were the slums known as townships, where black families lived in corrugated iron shanties or three-room concrete houses without sewage or electricity.

Tutu's family moved to Johannesburg when he was 12 years old. Here he met Trevor Huddleston who was a parish priest in the black slum of Sophiatown.

“Well, like any other black child, we lived in a ghetto, and yet, it wasn't as if you went around feeling sorry for yourself I had two -- still have two sisters. My brothers died in infancy so I was the only boy in the family and to some extent perhaps a little bit spoiled.”

“I grew up in a town called Ventersdorp and today -- well, Ventersdorp became notorious because it's the town where somebody called Eugène Terre'Blanche, who headed up the Afrikaner “Weerstandsbeweging”