Desmond Tutu, South Africa’s anti-apartheid icon and Nobel laureate, dies at 90

TIL Desk/World/Johannesburg/ Archbishop Desmond Tutu, South Africa’s revered anti-apartheid icon who won the Nobel Peace Prize for fighting racial segregation and discrimination enforced by the white minority government against the black majority in the country, died on Sunday. He was 90.

President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that Tutu passed away in Cape Town in the early hours of Sunday. He was the last surviving South African laureate of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize. Tutu, who previously survived tuberculosis, had undergone a surgery for prostate cancer in 1997. He was also hospitalised several times in recent years for various ailments.

A contemporary of anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela, Tutu, known affectionately as “the Arch”, was one of the driving forces behind the movement to end the policy of racial segregation and discrimination enforced by the white minority government against the black majority in South Africa from 1948 until 1991.

“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 as he shared condolence with the family and friends. “Desmond Tutu was a patriot without equal; a leader of principle and pragmatism who gave meaning to the biblical insight that faith without works is dead.