South Africa anti-apartheid hero, Desmond Tutu dies aged 90

BoomRadioNG | December 26, 2021

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace prize laureate who helped end apartheid in South Africa, has died aged 90.

President Cyril Ramaphosa said the churchman’s death marked “another chapter of bereavement in our nation’s farewell to a generation of outstanding South Africans”.

He added; Archbishop Tutu had helped bequeath “a liberated South Africa,”

Tutu was one of the country’s best known figures at home and abroad.

Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu
photo credit: Elke Wetzig (Elya), CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

A contemporary of anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela, he was 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.

He was awarded the Nobel prize in 1984 for his role in the struggle to abolish the apartheid system.

Tutu’s death comes just weeks after that of South Africa’s last apartheid-era president, FW de Clerk, who died at the age of 85.

Paul Ayorinde