Johannesburg: South African anti-apartheid icon and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu breathed his last aged 90 in Cape Town on Sunday.
Expressing his condolences, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said the Archbishop “was a patriot without equal”.
“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 in a tweet.
“Desmond Tutu was a patriot without equal; a leader of principle and pragmatism who gave meaning to the biblical insight that faith without works is dead. We pray that Archbishop Tutu’s soul will rest in peace but that his spirit will stand sentry over the future of our nation,” he wrote on the micro-blogging platform.
Diagnosed with prostate cancer in the late 1990s, Tutu was in recent years hospitalized on several occasions to treat infections associated with his cancer treatment.
“Ultimately, at the age of 90, he died peacefully at the Oasis Frail Care Centre in Cape Town this morning,” Dr Ramphela Mamphele, acting chairperson of the Archbishop Desmond Tutu IP Trust and Co-ordinator of the Office of the Archbishop, said in a statement on behalf of the Tutu family, Reuters reported.
Tutu, one of the country's best known figures at home and abroad, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his non-violent opposition to apartheid.
He was widely popular among South Africa's black majority and was internationally praised for his anti-apartheid activism.