South Africa’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a clergyman and nationalist who played a significant role in ending Apartheid in South Africa has died at the age of 90. He was awarded the Nobel prize in 1984 for his role in the struggle to abolish the apartheid system.
South AfricanPresident 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 said Archbishop Tutu had helped bequeath “a liberated South Africa”.
Tutu was one of the country’s best-known figures at home and abroad.
A contemporary anti-apartheid icon like former President Nelson Mandela, he 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.