Moments after sitting down in Cape Town restaurant Maestro’s on the Beach, Archbishop Desmond Tutu flashes his impish grin at the waitress and asks if they have oxtail on the menu. It seems an odd lunch request to make at a fish restaurant but “the Arch”, as he is known to his devoted aides, can order anything he wants: he is a regular. It is a cloudless day and there is a stunning view of Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela spent most of his 27 years in prison. Briefly silent, Tutu gestures out to its rocky outline across the bay.

Tutu and his wife Leah moved to Milnerton, this north Cape Town suburb, in the mid-1990s, when he was appointed de facto confessor-in-chief to the nation, as head of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the body charged with exorcising South Africa’s tortured past. They still have their house in Soweto, the township outside Johannesburg; Leah misses it hugely and visits from time to time, Tutu says.