by the 1970s, tutu was dean of the anglican church injohannesburg, and it was now that he took a step down the path that would come to define him, channelling the anger, the frustration of south africa's downtrodden. in a letter to the white apartheid prime minister, tutu warned that "a people made desperate by injustice and oppression will turn to desperate means." "i am frightened, dreadfully frightened," he wrote, "that we will soon reach a point of no return. i wish to god that i am wrong." basicallyjust saying to him that if the government doesn't show, by some dramatic, symbolic act, that they are taking seriously our anguish and our expression of it, that i had a nightmarish fear that we were going to have an explosion. and this was 1976, may.