“There are two kinds of egoists in the world,” wrote Rowan Williams after meeting Tutu. “There are egoists who are so in love with themselves that they have no room of anyone else and there are those egoists that are so in love with themselves that they make it possible for everybody else to be in love with themselves.” Tutu was the second sort of egoist. Desmond Tutu loved being Desmond Tutu, but in such a way that he encouraged other people to believe that they could also be in love with who they are and take joy in it.

This cuts across what many in his generation thought about being a priest. When I was taught to celebrate the Eucharist, for instance, I was encouraged not to show any personality in my recitation of the holy words of consecration. The important thing as a priest is to get out of the way, to be a conduit between other people and God. Don’t put yourself, your personality, between the congregation and the divine. Don’t modulate your voice, don’t try to inject meaning into your words. Your job is to disappear. Say the words like you are reading from the telephone directory. The congregation don’t come to church for you.

Tutu did it very differently. Some in the old school thought what you got with Desmond Tutu was the Desmond Tutu Show, and they slightly disapproved. But this wonderful little man from South Africa, with his impish sense of fun and Old Testament prophet morality, had a totally different theology from that of the Old School. And it was from this theology that all his activism and politics cascaded — “the glory of God is a human being fully alive”, as the second-century church father Irenaeus put it. Tutu loved that line and it often cropped up in his sermons. It captured his theology in a nutshell.

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In other words, Desmond Tutu was very much a Christmas Christian. God comes into the world as a human being so that human beings might regard themselves as divine, a part of the divine life. Tutu once remarked that as all human beings contain the image and likeness of God, we ought to genuflect before everyone we meet.

Tutu often told the story of his parish priest in Johannesburg, the legendary Fr Trevor Huddleston, once doffing his hat to his mother — a white man simply acknowledging the humanity of a black woman being a revolutionary act in the context of South Africa in the Forties. It was a genuflection, of sorts. And this is where Tutu’s theology and politics grows from: all human beings reflect God’s glory, all of them. His hatred of apartheid was at root theological, rather than political — though this is a false binary, of course. His point was that apartheid was a heresy. It was a failure to see God in others; in those who are of a different colour, in those who are lesbian and gay, and most radically of all, in the oppressor too.

But this theology of the person was in no sense individualistic. Perhaps the most important contribution that African Christianity has made to Christianity has been through the development of the idea of Ubuntu — the idea that “I am because you are”. We are not individual cells of separate Godliness, but through God’s presence within us all, we are all brothers and sisters. And so in order to be fully what God intended, we have to be reconciled with those from whom we have become estranged. Forgiveness was not some sentimental touchy-feely emotional weakness, but a tough-minded determination to recognise our own humanity as inescapably bound up with others. Confessing past wrongs with the hope of some sort of reconciliation was a way of putting the pieces of the self back together.

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Tutu was hated for this insight as much as he was loved. When he chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he was putting into practice a version of this theology: that only through forgiveness could a community find the gift of a common future. Forgiveness meant breaking the cycle of tit-for-tat revenge. It wasn’t about having warm and fuzzy feelings about those that had participated in the evil that was apartheid. It was the belief that a future was possible, but only through a process of confession and forgiveness in which the image of God is restored in others. This was a basic priestly insight turned into a political process.

There were times when he got it wrong, of course. His extension of the apartheid tag to the situation in Israel/Palestine was a mistake. Perhaps inevitably, he saw the world too much through the lens of his own history, and was sometimes blind to its differences. That’s why many Jews think of Tutu as a much more morally ambivalent figure.

He was also hated by the hard Left as much as by the Right. Tutu had absolutely no time for Marxism. At heart, he was a prayerful cassock-wearing Anglo-Catholic Anglican priest of a very familiar sort. He wasn’t a political radical, but a faithful servant of the church, with a huge personality, preaching what he saw with enormous courage in wicked times. And it was because he was a priest that the apartheid regime never dared to touch him. He called it as he saw it, including in his vociferous condemnations of the ANC as they descended into corruption and petty infighting. Tutu could be the friend of anyone, yet he was no one’s patsy.

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Tutu once said that if he ever walked on water, the South African press would have chosen the headline “Tutu cannot swim”. We forget now how much he was hated and traduced by the whole apparatus of racist apartheid. How his life was threatened. He is now seen as a hero of human rights, which isn’t quite accurate. Yes, he used the secular language of human rights, but it was the Imago Dei — the imprint of God in us all — that was his basic guiding insight.

Will we see his like again in the Church? These days our bishops are largely chosen for their management skills and abilities to run a spreadsheet. Tutu showed us God by being so wonderfully himself, a human being, flawed no doubt, but fully and magnificently alive. His theology and his personality were perfectly aligned. That’s why we loved him. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.

Three days after Christmas, at around 7pm, President Cyril Ramaphosa performed his version of Boris Johnson’s code red speeches: the ornate briefing room, the national flag, the fatherly tone of a GP proffering a late stage cancer diagnosis.

The situation had devolved, he announced. Rates were rising. Hospitals were filling up. Effective immediately, bars would close. There would be a national curfew of 9pm, and all the beaches would be closed. Alcohol, it almost went without saying, would be banned again. Only this time, to beat the bootleggers, the transportation of alcohol would be banned along with it.

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South Africans largely shrugged. Every country wraps Covid around its national character, and here there is little of that John Bull spirit, of Magna Carta and “on whose authority”. In a perverse sense, it makes the whole experience much more doable — without the grinding cognitive dissonance of Brits begrudging every fresh filing down of their liberties.

Here, recent memory is more of the Native Beer Act, of dry Sundays and the rolling curfews of the 1980s State Of Emergency. Freedom may be hymned publicly, but the reigning ANC is at heart merely a different kind of corporatist state to the National Party that preceded it, with the same fetish for public ownership, the same centralising tendencies. What it lacked, till now, was the same cold steel of authoritarianism. Covid may have decisively changed that.

In March, the country had the luxury of a few weeks’ notice as to what was about to hit. Back then, it seemed obvious that Africa would be the hindmost that the devil took. Countries that were a virtual fiefdom of health NGOs, with the globe’s highest HIV rates, would be the driest tinder. The world wished the continent luck, and waved it goodbye.

Only, it didn’t turn out that way.

For a start, Ramaphosa was decisive and bold, as were many of the continent’s leaders. Nigeria was already screening airport passengers in February. Rwanda closed its frontiers on 19 March. South Africa would be put into strict lockdown, and the response would be overseen by a panel of medical advisers: SAGE, but with some direct authority.

A big gamble, for a place where there were no Rishi Bucks falling from heaven. Britain’s AAA credit rating means it can still defer its debt reckoning. But since South Africa was downgraded to junk in 2019, it has had to balance its books carefully. Eventually, a relief grant was settled upon for those left unemployed. It would be R350 a month. That’s £17. Not a typo.

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But what had seemed like a Western luxury good, lockdown, did seem to work. By 20 June, only 1,877 deaths had been recorded, in a country of 57 million. And despite comprising a billion people, the continent as a whole made up only 4% of global fatalities. Even now, 195 million-strong Nigeria sits at just 1,324 deaths. Back then, people began talking about “the African Paradox”. In township slums that made real distancing impossible, the question became: why weren’t people dying?

“A young population” was one obvious answer. It’s hard to reach the average age of a fatality — 82 — when life expectancy is 63. But even infection rates remained persistently low.

In part, it seemed that this was because of early and forceful government action. In South Africa, borders were shut totally until October, and even now, entry is provisional on a PCR test, special travel insurance, and notification of abode. Britain did none of this. The same strictures also apply internally. Right now, key roads between the nine provinces are subject to police roadblocks. Passengers are temperature checked. The hot ones are immediately PCR tested.

In a land of cheap labour, many shops have employed staff to spritz every patron’s hands as they enter. Outdoor masks are compulsory: a measure about as scientifically useful as throwing your shoes at the sky to dislodge the clouds, but one that sets a tone, constantly drawing the bead of danger back to the front of the public mind.

This fit of decisiveness has come with some positive consequences. Hotheaded Police Minister Bheki Cele was mighty impressed, back in April, at how endemic burglary rates had tumbled thanks to the simple expedient of imprisoning everyone in their homes. On New Year’s Eve, the southern hemisphere’s biggest hospital, Chris Hani Baragwanath, received precisely zero trauma patients. A minor miracle.

Sometimes it seems as though South Africans themselves have been stunned by their sheer compliance. The long arm of the law has always felt stunted here. Without the dense norms of Europe, people tend to just do what they feel. Yet now, a full hour before curfew, the suburbs are tumbleweed. Could it be that this country is suddenly falling into a mesmerism of law abiding? That something coltish is being tamed?

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Deep down, the rule of law is nothing written down so much as a feeling: the uneasy sense that you will be made to answer, somewhere, somehow. Covid has demanded an unprecedented degree of surveillance. In the same way that Peter Hitchens is right when he argues that masks are symbols of assent to government policy, the pandemic has served to re-frame the kinds of people who have lived entire lives beyond the aegis of bureaucracy as being subjects of the state. This year, even the goatherds of KwaZulu have had to interact with the man from the ministry of mask-face-space.

As Aris Roussinos points out, state infrastructure and state competence are seldom correlated: the UK has all the gear and no idea. South African infrastructure is patchy, state competence is positively holey. But there is another quality beyond that, which comes into play in rare moments like these, when all the pieces are chucked up anew. It’s the question of what ordinary citizens actually perceive “common sense” to be — how the national character reacts to setbacks.

With far fewer resources, South Africa kept its exam system going through lockdown. In November, school leavers wrote their finals. The marking emphasis has been on maintaining standards, so that learners will have an equally valid qualification. Compare that to the quivering heap of cancellations and grade inflations that has slithered through British schooling like The Blob.

But all good things must pass. This week, the African Paradox resolved itself via an infection spike that is almost double that of the previous mid-year peak, and still climbing. Ambulance drivers are waiting eight hours to discharge their cargo. There are rumours of an oxygen shortage.

As it happens, our new wave also blows up what you might call the Ivor Cummins theory — that, as a respiratory disease, Covid-19 tracks winter very closely — which was sort of borne out by Covid’s return in the Northern hemisphere. Here it’s braai weather every day, yet the bug rolls remorselessly on. Increasingly, it feels as though Covid’s favourite victim is master-narratives. As we stagger into year two, it’s as if we now know less about the nature of our enemy.

Yet still almost none of the chatter here is about the “Mutant Strain”. In England, so far as I can gather, the Mutant Strain practically has its own talk show, Matt Hancock’s constant companion. But in SA, the government still has a measure of trust on the issue of the pandemic, and a huge majority in Parliament. The need to soft-soap each fresh lockdown to the public is absent. Mutancy or otherwise remains only a footnote to what’s playing out.

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After all, why worry about an incrementally different transmission rate when there is still no finishing line in sight? In the vaccine bidding wars, Ramaphosa’s administration was reluctant to put multiple chips on the roulette table by laying down non-refundable deposits for various pharmaceutical trials. So it now finds itself at the back of the queue. For 2021, the aim is to vaccinate 67% of the population (to reach “herd immunity”). Even that can feel optimistic. An ANC administration that coined its own word for a crooked procurement contractor — tenderpreneur — will have to deploy all of its decisive authoritarianism to get that long-awaited vaccine distributed, and none of its talents at graft.

Of course, if there isn’t a more rapid vaccine rollout, then there will be time enough for the appearance of The Mutant Son Of The Mutant Strain, and so it could roll endlessly on, into 2022 and beyond in a kind of poverty trap.

In another sense, the finishing line was only ever the starting line to a new set of dominoes tumbling. In October, as economic activity finally surged back to life, so too did the rolling blackouts that have plagued the country for a decade. Once, we exported electricity to the continent. Now, years of chronic under-investment have crippled the power grid.

It was a reminder that, in fact, South Africa teeters between twin abysses. No one could really forget that, with a 28% unemployment rate going into the crisis — a worse figure than under Apartheid —  it has effectively added a nose dive to a nose dive. Through the pandemic, every state has had to find a pax between the economy and public health. Few others illustrate that dilemma quite so well, of how the two can become locked in a downward spiral.