Johannesburg: South African anti-apartheid icon and Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu breathed his last in Cape Town on Sunday at the age of 90.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa offered his condolences, saying the Archbishop was “patriot without equal”.
“The passing of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu is another chapter in our nation’s farewell to the generation of outstanding South Africans who have given us a free South Africa,” Ramaphosa said in a tweet.
“Desmond Tutu was a patriot without equals; a leader of doctrine and pragmatism who gave meaning to the biblical insight that faith without works is dead. We pray that Archbishop Tutu’s soul rests in peace, but his soul is the soul of our country.” The sentry will remain for the foreseeable future,” he wrote on the micro-blogging platform.
Diagnosed with prostate cancer in the late 1990s, Tutu had been hospitalized on several occasions in recent years to treat infections associated with his cancer treatment.
“Finally, at the age of 90, he passed away peacefully this morning at the Oasis Friel Care Center in Cape Town,” said Dr Ramphela Mumphale, Executive Chairman of Archbishop Desmond Tutu IP Trust and Coordinator of the Archbishop’s Office. In a statement on behalf of the Tutu family, Reuters reported.
One of the country’s best-known figures at home and abroad, Tutu won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his nonviolent opposition to apartheid.
He was widely popular among South Africa’s black majority and was praised internationally for his anti-apartheid activism.
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