South Africa’s Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Desmond Tutu has died at the age of 90.
(Photo: dpa)
Cape Town The fighter against apartheid in South Africa, Desmond Tutu, is dead. The South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced on Sunday and expressed the grief of the whole country. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate, world-famous human rights activist and former archbishop turned 90.
“The death of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu is another chapter of grief in our nation’s departure from a generation of outstanding South Africans who left us a liberated South Africa,” said President Ramaphosa.
Tutu was diagnosed with prostate cancer in the late 1990s. In recent years he has had to be hospitalized several times for infections related to his cancer. Tutu passed away peacefully in the Oasis Frail care center in Cape Town, said Ramphela Mamphele, chairwoman of the Archbishop Desmond Tutu IP Trust, on behalf of the family. She did not provide any information about the cause of death.
Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his non-violent resistance to racial segregation in South Africa. A decade later, he saw the end of apartheid. In 1994 Tutu stood at the side of his friend and colleague Nelson Mandela when he became the first black president of South Africa after many years of imprisonment.
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In 1996 Tutu retired after ten years as Archbishop of Cape Town. He coined the term rainbow nation for the South African people. In his last years he regretted that his dream of the rainbow nation has not yet come true. “Sometimes shrill, often tender, never fearful and rarely without humor, Desmond Tutu’s voice will always be the voice of the voiceless,” Mandela, who died in December 2013, once described his friend.
Criticism of the black political elite
Tutu chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up to expose the atrocities of apartheid. But even with criticism of the black political elite, he did not save. She met the ruling African National Congress (ANC) as well as the presidents Jacob Zuma, whom he accused of corruption, and Thabo Mbeki, who publicly questioned the connection between HIV and AIDS.
Tutu was considered the conscience of their nation for blacks and whites alike in South Africa. Tutu called his attitude towards apartheid moral rather than political. In a Reuters interview he once said: “In South Africa it is easier to be a Christian than anywhere else because the moral issues in this country are so clear.”
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