Clearly he was in a more privileged position than a random person from a black township, who would have been swiftly packed into the back of a Land Rover and de

Clearly he was in a more privileged position than a random person from a black township, who would have been swiftly packed into the back of a Land Rover and dealt with extremely harshly. Even people with public prominence weren't exempt, as the case of Steve Biko shows. But Tutu was using the little power he had - as an official representative of the church - to challenge the apartheid laws in an obvious way. There were much easier routes he could have taken - challenging the laws with words, but living somewhere that wouldn't provoke the police. I don't know you, but I get the feeling you don't know quite how vicious the apartheid regime was, and the kind of physical risk that this entailed. Because no-one had done it before, he didn't really know what kind of response he was going to get. "Cheek" doesn't really cover it.