Nobel Peace laureate and South African anti-apartheid crusader, who helped to put an end to racial rule, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has died, aged 90
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa described Tutu’s death as marking “another chapter of bereavement in our nation’s farewell to a generation of outstanding South Africans.”
Archbishop Tutu had helped bequeath “a liberated South Africa,” he added.
One of the South Africa’ best known figures, both at home and abroad, Archbishop Tutu was a contemporary of anti-apartheid icon and former President Nelson Mandela; and 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.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 1984 for his role in the struggle to abolish the apartheid system.
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.
President Ramaphosa said Tutu was “an iconic spiritual leader, anti-apartheid activist and global human rights campaigner.”
He described him as “a patriot without equal; a leader of principle and pragmatism who gave meaning to the biblical insight that faith without works is dead.
“A 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.”
The Nelson Mandela Foundation, paying tributes, said Tutu’s “contributions to struggles against injustice, locally and globally, are matched only by the depth of his thinking about the making of liberatory futures for human societies.
“He was an extraordinary human being. A thinker. A leader. A shepherd.”
