South Africa’s Most Popular Figure Has Passed On

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace prize laureate who helped end apartheid in South Africa, has died at age 90.

President Cyril Ramaphosa said the churchman’s death marked “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.

Tutu was one of the nation’s most popular figures at home and abroad.

A contemporary of hostile to anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela, he was one of the main impetuses behind the development to end the strategy of racial isolation and separation implemented by the white minority government against the black larger majority in South Africa from 1948 until 1991.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu was awarded the Nobel prize in 1984 for his role in the struggle to abolish the apartheid system.

Desmond Tutu’s passing comes only weeks after that of South Africa’s last politically-sanctioned racial segregation period president, FW de Clerk, who died at 85 years old.

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”, he said.

The Nelson Mandela Foundation was among those paying tributes, saying 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.”

It is impossible to imagine South Africa’s long and tortuous journey to freedom – and beyond – without Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

While other struggle leaders were killed, or forced into exile, or prison, the diminutive, defiant Anglican priest was there at every stage, exposing the hypocrisy of the apartheid state, comforting its victims, holding the liberation movement to account, and daring Western governments to do more to isolate a white-minority government that he compared, unequivocally, to the Nazis.

When democracy showed up, Tutu used his moral authority to oversee the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that sought to expose the crimes of the white-minority government. Later he turned that same fierce gaze on the failings, in government, of South Africa’s former liberation movement, the ANC.

Numerous South Africans today will remember Tutu’s own fortitude, and the clearness of his ethical fierceness. In any case, as the people who knew him best have so frequently reminded us, Tutu was consistently, decidedly, the voice of hope.

And it is that expectation, that good faith, went with, so regularly, by his brand name chuckles and clucks, that appears prone to shape the way the world remembers, and celebrates, Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

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Referred to lovingly as The Arch, Tutu was immediately conspicuous, with his purple clerical robes, bright disposition and practically always smiling.

He was not hesitant to show his feelings in broad daylight, including importantly snickering and dancing at the opening ceremony of the football World Cup in South Africa in 2010.

Regardless of his fame, although he was not a man who was cherished by all. He was extremely condemning of the African National Congress (ANC) government in the post-politically-sanctioned racial segregation time, when, now and again, he felt it was distorting South Africa – even warning in 2011 that he would pray for its downfall over a cancelled visit by the Dalai Lama.

In response, the national police commissioner Gen Bheki Cele told Tutu to “go home and shut up”.

“He is not a vice-Jesus Christ,” he said.

Ordained as a priest in 1960, Tutu 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 the following year. 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.

He was also credited with creating the term Rainbow Nation to depict the ethnic blend of post-politically-sanctioned racial segregation South Africa, but in his last years, he expressed regret that the country had not combine in the manner by which he had envisioned.