A funeral will be held for one of the great symbols of the fight against Apartheid and the Nobel Peace Prize winner, who died last Sunday at the age of 90.
South Africa says goodbye this Saturday, January 1, to Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, one of the great symbols of the fight against Apartheid and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who died last Sunday at the age of 90.
Tutu’s remains arrived on December 30 at St. George’s Cathedral in Cape Town, where his burning chapel was installed. His funeral will be held in that same church this Saturday, scheduled for 10:00 local time (8:00 GMT).
The archbishop’s ashes will be buried in the cathedral’s mausoleum, according to the DPA agency. South African state television will broadcast Tutu’s funeral and burial.
National mourning
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced on Monday that the country would mourn until January 1, the date of the funeral of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu.
Ramaphosa noted that Tutu “was one of the best patriots in the nation” and “a man of unshakable courage, principled convictions, and whose life was dedicated to the service of others.”
The South African president was in charge of announcing the death of Tutu, which he described as “another episode of national mourning during the farewell to a generation” that delivered “a liberated South Africa”, as noted in the official statement collected by News24.
Tutu had been hospitalized earlier this month due to an infection.
The former archbishop of Cape Town retired from public life in 2010, although he has since continued to address various issues, including corruption in the African country’s political elite.
Tutu’s name is linked by importance to that of the great leader of the Civil Rights struggle in South Africa, Nelson Mandela, united despite their differences in the fight against Apartheid in South Africa; a policy of racial segregation “by nature evil, immoral and absolutely irreconcilable with the word of God”, declared in his day the Anglican priest, born in 1931 in Klerksdorp, in the old republic of the Transvaal, during what was known at that time like the Union of South Africa.
His figure began to gain prominence in 1978, as director of the South African Ecclesiastical Council, spearheading its campaign against segregation. Six years later, Tutu would receive the Nobel Peace Prize, before being elected as Archbishop of Cape Town in 1986, one of the most violent years of the Apartheid era.
Fight for reconciliation
At that time, Tutu redoubled his efforts to get sanctions against the government, led protest marches and used his pulpit to challenge state repression. With Nelson Mandela’s victory as the first president of the Republic of South Africa in 1994, Tutu assumed a new role as chairman of the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The commission investigated the atrocities of Apartheid, and Tutu went on to adopt a unifying role between whites and blacks in the country, while taking a critical stance against successive governments of the historic African National Congress, Mandela’s party, which he ugly for years. his corruption scandals, the biggest obstacle to achieving the utopia of the “rainbow nation” he hoped the country would become.
From 2007 to 2013, already in his last years of public life, Tutu chaired the organization Los Ancianos, an independent group of veteran world leaders who worked together for peace and Human Rights.
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