South Africa’s anti-apartheid icon, Desmond Tutu is dead

Story from Yakubu VENTIM

South African anti-apartheid icon, Desmond Tutu, is dead. Archbishop Tutu died of prostate cancer, aged 90 in his home town in South African. He was a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and veteran of South Africa’s struggle against white minority rule.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu was described as the country’s moral compass who fought against the regime of white minority rule, President Cyril Ramaphosa said in a statement.

“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,”

“A tireless activist, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for combatting white minority rule in his country. Famously outspoken, even after the fall of the racist apartheid regime, Tutu never shied away from confronting South Africa’s shortcomings or injustices.

Decades ago, the people of South Africa witnessed the ends of the white apartheid regime that was chaired by Tutu to ensure a true reconciliation trust commission set up to unearth the atrocities committed during those dark days.

Even in the aftermath of the apartheid Tutu never wavered in his struggle to fight for a fairer South Africa and he called on the black politician elite to account with as much feistiness as he had the white Afrikaners.

The late President Nelson Mandela was a close associate of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and they lived together on the same street in the towns of Soweto and Vilakazi, the only two streets in the world to host two Nobel peace prize winners. It was Tutu who coined and popularised the term “Rainbow Nation” to describe South Africa when Nelson Mandela became the country’s first black president.

In 1990, Tutu was diagnosed with prostate cancer and in recent years he was hospitalized on several occasions where he received treatments.

Truly, the world today had lost a great emancipator of the black race, a promoter of African culture and traditions.