Desmond Tutu, S Africa's anti-apartheid icon and Nobel laureate, dies at 90

| | Johannesburg
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Desmond Tutu, S Africa's anti-apartheid icon and Nobel laureate, dies at 90

Monday, 27 December 2021 | PTI | Johannesburg

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, South Africa's anti-apartheid icon who won the Nobel Peace Prize for fighting racial discrimination 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 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 a various ailments.

"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.

"A man of extraordinary intellect, integrity and invincibility against the forces of apartheid, he was also tender and vulnerable in his compassion for those who had suffered oppression, injustice and violence under apartheid, and oppressed and downtrodden people around the world," Ramaphosa said.

The president also lauded Tutu for his role in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where he was often driven to tears as victims of apartheid shared their inhumane treatment at the hands of apartheid-ear security forces.

Then newly-elected president Nelson Mandela had appointed Tutu to lead the Commission in 1995.     

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