Desmond Tutu, Archbishop who helped end apartheid, dies at 90

Desmond Tutu, an Anglican archbishop who led a global campaign to end South Africa’s racist policies, has died. He was 90 years old.

Tutu’s death in Cape Town was confirmed in a statement from South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.

Tutu had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1997 and had been hospitalised repeatedly in recent years.

“The passing of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu is another chapter of bereavement in our nation’s farewell to a generation of outstanding South Africans who have bequeathed us a liberated South Africa,” Ramaphosa said. “He articulated the universal outrage at the ravages of apartheid and touchingly and profoundly demonstrated the depth of meaning of ubuntu, reconciliation and forgiveness.”

Tutu was a towering figure in South African politics. With his friend and fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner, 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.

Still, after the African National Congress came to power in the 1994 democratic elections, he criticised the party for corruption and greed. 

Born in South Africa’s North West province on 7 October, 1931, Tutu was brought up 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.

Tutu followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming 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’s.

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

Tutu returned to South Africa in 1975, when many leaders in the fight against apartheid were living in exile. The resistance movement, still largely underground, faced new urgency. Tutu wrote to the South African prime minister in 1976: “The people can only take so much and no more.”

In 1984, Tutu was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for spearheading the nonviolent movement against apartheid.

After Nelson Mandela took office as president in 1994, Tutu headed South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a first-of-its-kind judicial committee that called on apartheid-era perpetrators to publicly apologize for their crimes to victims, who in turn shared their stories.

Tutu’s embrace of both abusers and the abused helped bring together the newly democratic but fractured nation. “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor,” Tutu once said. “If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”