Cape Town — South Africa's presidency has announced that Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu died in the early hours of Sunday, December 26.
Minister in the presidency Mondli Gungubele said President Cyril Ramaphosa "expresses, on behalf of all South Africans, his profound sadness at the passing today, Sunday 26 December 2021, of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Mpilo Tutu".
"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 in his statement.
The Most Revd Dr Thabo Makgoba, Archbishop of Cape Town and Metropolitan of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa released a statement, saying that as we mourn Tutu's death, "as Christians and people of faith we must also celebrate the life of a deeply spiritual person whose alpha and omega – his starting point and his ending point – was his relationship with our Creator.
"He took God, God's purpose and God's creation deadly seriously. Prayer, the Scriptures and his ministry to the people God entrusted to his care were at the heart of his life. He believed totally that each one of us is made in the image of God and ought to be treated as such by others. This belief was not reached through celebral contemplation; it arose from his faith and was held with a deeply-felt passion. He wanted every human being on earth to experience the freedom, the peace and the joy that all of us could enjoy if we truly respected one another as people created in the image of God," Makgoba said.
Nelson Mandela described Archbishop Desmond Tutu as "public enemy number one" to the apartheid regime, and on his passing John Allen, former managing editor of AllAfrica, who covered Tutu as a journalist for 45 years and acted as his press secretary for 13, the author of the definitive Tutu biography, Rabble-Rouser for Peace, and the compiler and editor of three volumes of key Tutu texts, writes: "Desmond Tutu lived his life with passion, courage, faith and deep insight, but it was a life lived against the odds. Sickly at birth, as an infant he survived polio, which left him with a permanently weakened right hand. As a teenager he suffered tuberculosis, which left adhesions on his lungs.
"Later in the 1980s, when he became, in Nelson Mandela's words "public enemy number one" to the apartheid regime, he survived a number of assassination attempts. And for the last 25 years of his life, he lived with recurrent bouts of prostate cancer. But unlike two other iconic 20th century campaigners against structural injustice, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., he lived to see the first fruits of his radical but peaceful promotion of fundamental change in his own society..."
The Nelson Mandela Foundation released a statement saying Mandela and the Archbishop Emeritus first met at a debating competition in the early 1950s.
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"It would be four decades later before they met again, on the day that Mandela was released from prison. His first night as a free man was spent at the home of the Tutus in Bishopscourt, Cape Town. On that occasion before everyone retired for the night, Tutu offered a prayer of thanksgiving and led a singing of Reverend Tiyo Soga's famous hymn in isiXhosa, 'Lizalis'idinga lakho' – 'Let your will be done'," it read.
"The Arch meant everything to me," said Foundation Chief Executive Sello Hatang. "I first met him during the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and was privileged to work with him on a number of projects over the years. He was a friend to Madiba and to the Foundation."
More details to follow ...
