Famous South African anti-apartheid rule hero, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is dead.
The freedom fighter died at the age of 90.
Tutu’s death comes just weeks after that of South Africa’s last apartheid-era president, FW de Clerk, who died at the age of 85.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa announced the arcbishop’s death in a statement on Sunday.
He said Tutu’s death opened “another chapter of bereavement in our nation’s farewell to a generation of outstanding South Africans who have bequeathed us a liberated South Africa,”.
Arcbishop Tutu was awarded the Nobel prize in 1984 for his role in the struggle to abolish the apartheid system.
As anti-apartheid icon and Nelson Mandela’s contemporary, Tutu was one of the driving forces behind the movement to end the policy of racial segregation and discrimination enforced by the white minority government against the black majority in South Africa from 1948 until 1991.
President Ramaphosa described Tutu as an “an iconic spiritual leader, anti-apartheid activist and global human rights campaigner.”
He said as “a patriot without equal; a leader of principle and pragmatism who gave meaning to the biblical insight that faith without works is dead.
“As man of extraordinary intellect, integrity and invincibility against the forces of apartheid, he was also tender and vulnerable in his compassion for those who had suffered oppression, injustice and violence under apartheid, and oppressed and downtrodden people around the world.”
Ordained as a priest in 1960, he went on to serve as bishop of Lesotho from 1976-78, assistant bishop of Johannesburg and rector of a parish in Soweto. He became Bishop of Johannesburg in 1985, and was appointed the first black Archbishop of Cape Town. He used his high-profile role to speak out against oppression of black people in his home country, always saying his motives were religious and not political.
After Mandela became South Africa’s first black president in 1994, Tutu was appointed by him to a Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up to investigate crimes committed by both whites and blacks during the apartheid era.
