South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu dead at 90

JOHANNESBURG — Desmond Tutu, the archbishop who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his fight against apartheid in South Africa, died Sunday, the President’s Office said. He was 90.

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Tutu died in Cape Town, according to a statement from South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa.

“The passing of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu is another chapter of bereavement in our nation’s farewell to a generation of outstanding South Africans who have bequeathed us a liberated South Africa,” Ramaphosa said.

Tutu was “a leader of principle and pragmatism who gave meaning to the biblical insight that faith without works is dead,” Ramaphosa added.

Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his campaign of nonviolent opposition to South Africa’s white minority rule, SkyNews reported.

“If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends,” Tutu once said. “You talk to your enemies.’

Tutu was the Black bishop of Johannesburg and later became the Archbishop of Cape Town, according to The Associated Press.

His death comes just several weeks after that of South Africa’s last apartheid-era president, Frederik Willem Clerk, who died Nov. 11 at the age of 85, the BBC reported.

Desmond Mpilo Tutu was born Oct. 7, 1931, in Klerksdorp, South Africa, according to Britannica.

He became a teacher before entering St. Peter’s Theological College in Rosetenville in 1958, the AP reported. He was ordained three years later, and in 1967 became chaplain at the University of Fort Hare.

Tutu rose to world prominence in May 1976 when he wrote a public letter to South Africa’s prime minister, John Vorster, the Los Angeles Times reported. Tutu wrote that he had a “growing nightmarish fear” that “bloodshed and violence are almost inevitable” if the status quo remained.

Vorster ignored the warning, and Tutu was vilified in the white-run media, the Los Angeles Times reported. In June 1976, riots began in Soweto, South Africa’s largest Black township. The uprising marked the beginning of the end of the apartheid era, although it took 18 more years and tens of thousands of deaths, the newspaper reported.

Tutu coined the term “Rainbow Nation” to describe how South Africa is a country with equal rights for people of all colors, The Associated Press reported on the cleric’s 90th birthday. Tutu made the comment following the official end in 1994 of apartheid, South Africa’s brutal system of racial discrimination against the country’s Black majority that began in 1948, the BBC reported.

Tutu continued to be an outspoken supporter of reconciliation, justice and LGBT rights, according to the AP.

The archbishop also was in favor of same-sex marriages.

“I would not worship a God who is homophobic and that is how deeply I feel about this,” Tutu said in 2013. “I would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven. No, I would say ‘Sorry, I would much rather go to the other place.’”

Tutu was arrested in 1980 for taking part in a protest and later had his passport confiscated, according to the AP. It was returned to him so he could make trips to the United States and Europe, where he held talks with the U.N. secretary-general, the pope and other church leaders.

He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2009.

Tutu withdrew from public life in 2010, the AP reported. He was treated for prostate cancer and was hospitalized several times in 2015 and 2016. He also underwent a surgical procedure to address recurring infections from past cancer treatments.

Tutu’s favorite passage from the Bible was the 139th Psalm, the Times reported in 1984.

‘’The Psalm says that I am nothing but the Lord’s servant,’’ Tutu said. ‘’That I go where He leads me and where He needs me. ‘If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.’ ‘’

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