Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace prize laureate who helped end apartheid in South Africa, has died aged 90. Tutu was one of the country’s best known figures at home and abroad.
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”. He said Archbishop Tutu had helped bequeath “a liberated South Africa”.
“Ultimately, at the age of 90, he died peacefully at the Oasis Frail Care Centre in Cape Town this morning,” Dr Ramphela Mamphele, acting chairperson of the Archbishop Desmond Tutu IP Trust and Co-ordinator of the Office of the Archbishop, said in a statement on behalf of the Tutu family.
She did not give details on the cause of death.
Born on Oct. 7, 1931, in Klerksdorp, west of Johannesburg, Tutu worked as a teacher before entering a theological seminary. He was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1961, obtained a master’s degree in theology at King’s College, University of London, and in 1975 was appointed Dean of Johannesburg, the first Black person to hold the post.
With many of South Africa’s Black leaders in jail, including Nelson Mandela, and others in exile, Tutu emerged as a leading voice of Black defiance against apartheid.
He became general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, an organization at the forefront of the struggle against White-minority rule, in 1978. He called for economic sanctions against the apartheid regime, in defiance of a law that made it illegal to advocate such actions. The government responded by withdrawing his passport.
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(With inputs from agencies)