Farewell to an icon of the struggle against apartheid. The Anglican archbishop of South Africa Desmond Tutu, Nobel laureate, has died. He was 90 years old. Tutu had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his campaign of non-violent opposition to the white minority government in South Africa. The news was given by the president, Cyril Ramaphosa. “The passing of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu is another chapter of mourning in our nation’s farewell to a generation of outstanding South Africans who bequeathed a liberated South Africa to us,” he said. He was the first black archbishop of Cape Town. Tutu also played an important role in facilitating the country’s exit from the apartheid regime. He led the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation of the Country. The last to leave of the giants who forged Nelson Mandela’s new South Africa after the defeat of apartheid.
He was not a militant, but a man of the Church, of prayer, who would have liked to be a doctor and, not being able, rather a teacher, and finally chose an ecclesiastical career motivated by faith. But the principle, the ideal, was the same: the one that states that men are all equal. The struggle and the desire to fight it is common, even if being a man of God he always rejected all forms of violence (unlike the politician Mandela) and firmly rejected communism (even on this point unlike Mandela).