Bishop and Nobel Prize Winner – Anti-Apartheid Icon Desmond Tutu is dead – News

  • Former Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and veteran of the South African fight against the white minority in South Africa, is dead.
  • He died at the age of 90 after a long illness.
  • “The death of 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 Cyril Ramaphosa.

Desmond Tutu was one of the founding fathers of democratic South Africa. As a leader of the nonviolent resistance to apartheid, he resolutely fought against racial discrimination and injustice. Even after the apartheid regime was overcome in 1994, Tutu persistently campaigned for peace and reconciliation with clear words.

Legend:

Desmond Tutu in 1998 as Chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Reuters

For a moral and ethical orientation in the new South Africa, Tutu was just as lacking in charisma and authority as his friend Nelson Mandela, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and first black president of the country. But Tutu didn’t need political office to be heard.

During apartheid he condemned the systematic discrimination of the black majority as immoral and incompatible with God’s word. In democratic South Africa he then became an advocate for reconciliation between blacks and whites: “Without forgiveness there can be no future.”

There can be no future without forgiveness.

In 1996, at Mandela’s request, he took over the chairmanship of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which dealt with the crimes of the apartheid period, using Tutu’s motto “Forgive, but don’t forget!” followed. Millions of people watched Tutu in tears on TV screens as apartheid victims told the panel about their suffering. More than 20,000 victims, their relatives and other witnesses testified before the commission, 3500 former perpetrators were granted waiver of prosecution.

Legend:

In 1998, Tutu delivered the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report to Nelson Mandela in which he sharply criticized the ANC.

Reuters

Vision of a “rainbow nation”

Many of his black fellow citizens, especially the families of the victims, found this too indulgent. For example, murderers were forgiven as long as they were ready to confess publicly. But Tutu was deeply convinced that a reckoning could only harm his country. Forgiveness has less to do with Christian principles than with realpolitik, he once said. Tutu fought for the vision of a “rainbow nation” in which people of all skin colors and ethnicities live together peacefully.

Legend:

Tutu 2001 alongside Nelson Mandela.

Reuters

Tutu only rarely spoke politically, but then clearly. His criticism of the government of then President Jacob Zuma did not stop. When the Dalai Lama was denied a visa to visit South Africa in 2014, apparently under pressure from China, he was angry: “I am ashamed to call this salivary bunch my government.” With his own sense of humor, when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in January 1997, he said: “It could have been worse: I could have lost my memory!”

Long illness

His health recovered, although he had to be hospitalized several times from 2015. When he addressed the World AIDS Congress in a video message in 2016, he seemed thin, but still keen. Already clearly frail, he presented himself again in public in September 2019 when the British Prince Harry introduced him to his family in Cape Town and he breathed a kiss on the forehead of his little son Archie.

Tutu leaves behind his wife Leah, a son and three daughters. He would like to spend his last 24 hours with his family, he told the magazine “Cicero” in 2014 – and added with a twinkle in his eye: “I will tell them to take care of themselves and care for each other – especially for their mother; otherwise I will return and visit them! “

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