South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu has died at the age of 90

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who helped end apartheid in South Africa, has died at the age of 90.

President Cyril Ramaphosa said the death of the clergyman marked “another part of our nation’s farewell to a generation of prominent South Africans.”

He said Archbishop Tutu had helped to bequeath “a liberated South Africa”.

Tutu was one of the most popular characters in the country at home and abroad.

A contemporary of Nelson Mandela’s anti-apartheid icon, he was one of the proponents of the movement to end the policy of racial segregation and discrimination imposed by the white minority government against the black majority in South Africa from 1948 to 1991.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1984 for his role in the abolition of the apartheid system.

Tutu’s death comes a few weeks after he died at the age of 85, the last president of apartheid in South Africa, FW de Clerk.

President Ramaphosa said Tutu was “an iconic spiritual leader, an anti-apartheid activist and a global campaign for human rights.”

“He described himself as an unparalleled patriot; a leader of principle and pragmatism, he gave meaning to a biblical view that faith without works is dead.

“A man of intelligence, integrity and invincibility against the forces of apartheid, he was also tender and vulnerable in the time of apartheid in pity for those who suffered oppression, injustice and violence and oppression and oppression around the world.”