Desmond Tutu, South African equality activist, dies at 90
Desmond Tutu, South Africa’s Nobel
Peace Prize-winning activist for racial justice and LGBT rights and retired
Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, has died, South African President Cyril
Ramaphosa announced Sunday. He was 90.
An uncompromising foe of apartheid,
South Africa’s brutal regime of oppression again the Black
majority, Tutu worked tirelessly, though non-violently, for its downfall.
The buoyant, blunt-spoken clergyman
used his pulpit as the first Black bishop of Johannesburg and later Archbishop
of Cape Town as well as frequent public demonstrations to galvanize public
opinion against racial inequity both at home and globally.
Desmond Mpilo Tutu was born Oct. 7,
1931, in Klerksdorp, a town west of Johannesburg, and became a teacher before
entering St. Peter’s Theological College in
Rosetenville in 1958 for training as a priest.
He was ordained in 1961 and six
years later became chaplain at the University of Fort Hare.
Moves to the tiny southern African
kingdom of Lesotho and again to Britain followed, with Tutu returning home in
1975.
He became bishop of Lesotho,
chairman of the South African Council of Churches and, in 1986, the first black
Anglican archbishop of Cape Town.
Tutu was arrested in 1980 for taking
part in a protest and later had his passport confiscated for the first time.
He got it back for trips to the
United States and Europe, where he held talks with the U.N. secretary-general,
the pope and other church leaders.