Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who helped end apartheid, dies

Mr Tutu’s death in Cape Town was confirmed in a statement by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who did not say what the cause was. Mr Tutu was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1997 and has been hospitalized repeatedly in recent years.

“The passing of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu is another chapter in our country’s farewell to a generation of outstanding South Africans who have given us a free South Africa,” said Mr Ramaphosa. “He expressed universal outrage at the ravages of apartheid. And displayed the touching and profound of the meaning of Ubuntu, reconciliation and forgiveness.”

Affectionately known as the “Ark”, Mr Tutu had withdrawn from much of South Africa’s charged political scene, but he used his rare public appearances and his foundation to call attention to his country’s new leaders. Announcing his retirement in 2010, Mr. Tutu said that he wanted to sip tea with his wife and spend more time with his grandchildren, and less in airports and hotels.

Small in stature, Mr. Tutu was a great figure in South African politics.

Along with his friend and fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Nelson Mandela, he is credited with leading the charge against a white-minority government that was guided by a policy of racial segregation, known as apartheid. Is. Nevertheless, after the African National Congress came to power in the 1994 democratic elections, he criticized the party for corruption and greed. As a result, Mr Tutu became known as the “moral conscience” of South Africa.

As a bishop during the apartheid era, with police brutality in the country, he went from the town’s funeral to the settlement’s funeral for peace. Mr Tutu served as Secretary General of the South African Church Council from 1978 to 1985, and his position in the religious community has given him protection from the apartheid government.

Sometimes Mr. Tutu’s teachings made people laugh; In silence for the second time. Once, he broke into a frenzied mob to save a suspected police informer from burning. The mob had thrown a petrol-soaked tire around the man’s neck and was about to throw him into a burning car that Mr. Tutu pushed to stop the murder.

He had his own style. Whether he was preaching for racial equality or an end to the HIV pandemic, Mr. Tutu let out whispers of joy.

“Wow, yippie!” He cried after voting at the age of 62 in South Africa’s first democratic elections in April 1994, according to his memoir, “No Future Without Forgiveness”. A month later, he introduced Mr. Mandela as the country’s first black president.

He later told reporters: “I told God, ‘Lord, if I die now, I don’t mind.'”

Born on October 7, 1931, in the North West Province of South Africa, Mr. Tutu was raised by his father, a teacher, and his mother, a domestic servant. When he was 12, his middle-class family moved to a small town called Ventersdorp, which later became the headquarters of the country’s most prominent white-supremacist group.

Mr Tutu followed in his father’s footsteps and became a teacher after graduating from the University of South Africa. A year later, he married a woman named Leah, a former student of his father.

Disillusioned with teaching in South Africa’s inferior education system for black students, Mr. Tutu accepted a scholarship to study theology at King’s College at the University of London. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees there. Living in England, far from apartheid, helped him to rid himself of the self-contempt generated by racism, he was quoted as saying in his 2006 biography “Rabble-Russer for Peace”.

Mr Tutu returned to South Africa in 1975, when several leaders in the fight against apartheid were living in exile. The resistance movement, which was still largely underground, faced new urgency. Mr Tutu wrote to the Prime Minister of South Africa in 1976: “The people can only take so much and no more.”

Two weeks later, protests by youth and school children broke out in South Africa’s largest settlement, and police responded with gunfire, killing hundreds.

In 1984, Mr. Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for leading the nonviolent movement against apartheid. But he first saw himself as a spiritual leader, and in 1990, when Nelson Mandela was released from nearly three decades of prison, Tutu returned to preach mostly.

There were notable turning points. After Mr. Mandela took office as president in 1994, Mr. Tutu headed South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the first judicial committee of its kind, which charged apartheid-era criminals from victims of their crimes. Bari shared his stories in India. Mr Tutu helped bring the newly democratic but fractured nation together by embracing both the abusers and the oppressed.

Mr Tutu spoke on causes including gay rights, global warming and autocratic rulers. He called Zimbabwe’s long-time strongman Robert Mugabe “a cartoon figure of a staunch African dictator”, while other prominent African leaders were reluctant to take a stand on Mr. Mugabe’s actions on the opposition.

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor,” Mr. Tutu once said. “If an elephant’s foot is on a rat’s tail and you say you are neutral, the rat will not appreciate your neutrality.”

It meant speaking up, even when it clashed with institutions close to his heart.

In 2016, he supported the marriage of his daughter Ampho to a woman, despite the teachings of the South African Anglican Church that marriage was a union between a man and a woman. “I would refuse to go to a homosexuality’s paradise,” he said.

Mr. Mandela once said that Mr. Tutu’s clarity, while sometimes not strategic, was critical to democracy. Mr. Tutu may have agreed. “Our world is a work in progress,” he told Oprah Winfrey in 2005. “Its going to be alright.”

Mr Tutu grew more distant from South Africa’s post-apartheid ruling party, the ANC, whose officials he criticized for focusing on personal gains, while much of the country still lived in poverty. In 2017, he and his wife, Leah Tutu, joined a nationwide demonstration calling for the resignation of then scandal-hit President Jacob Zuma.

“Do you remember the price we paid for our freedom?” He said at a 2009 memorial service for members of the ANC’s apartheid-era armed wing in Cape Town. “We had some wonderful young people. They paid a very heavy price. We all paid a very heavy price. And for what? So some of us might have three motor cars.”