Cape Town – South Africa bids farewell on Saturday to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the last great hero in its struggle against apartheid, in a funeral set to be stripped of pomp but freighted with tears and smiles.
Tutu died last Sunday at the age of 90, triggering grief among South Africans and tributes from world leaders for a life spent fighting injustice.
Famous for his modesty, Tutu gave instructions for a simple, no-frills ceremony, with a cheap coffin, donations for charity instead of floral tributes and an eco-friendly cremation.
The requiem mass will start at 10:00 (0800 GMT) at Cape Town’s St. George’s Cathedral where, for years, Tutu used the pulpit to rail against a brutal white minority regime.
The eulogy will be delivered by President Cyril Ramaphosa, who will then hand South Africa’s multicoloured flag to Tutu’s widow, Leah – a reminder of her husband’s description of the post-apartheid country as the “Rainbow Nation”.
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South Africa has been marking a week of mourning, culminating with two days of lying in state.
Several thousand people, some of whom had travelled across the country, filed past a diminutive rope-handled casket made of pine, adorned simply by a bunch of carnations.
Mourners are expected to include close friends and family, clergy and a few guests, including former Irish president Mary Robinson, who is to read a prayer, and King Letsie III of South Africa’s neighbour Lesotho.
Tutu’s longtime friend, retired bishop Michael Nuttall, who was Anglican Church dean when Tutu was the archbishop of Cape Town, will deliver the sermon.
The two forged a strong relationship, illustrating for many how a white leader could work for a black leader. Nuttall went on write a memoir titled “Tutu’s Number Two” about their friendship.
“They had a very close bond. Particularly in the 1980s, to have a black man and a white man in a collaborative loving intention in association, was in itself a very remarkable testimony,” commented the current dean at the cathedral Michael Weeder.
Fighter
Under apartheid, South Africa’s white minority cemented its grip with a panoply of laws based on the notion of race and racial segregation, and the police ruthlessly hunted down opponents, killing or jailing them.
With Nelson Mandela and other leaders sentenced to decades in prison, Tutu in the 1970s became the emblem of the struggle.
The purple-gowned figure campaigned relentlessly abroad, administering public lashings to the United States, Britain and Germany and other countries for failing to slap sanctions on the apartheid regime.
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At home, from his pulpit, he slammed police violence against blacks, including the gunning down of school students during the 1976 Soweto uprising. Only his robes saved him from prison.
Cabinet minister and anti-apartheid activist Patricia De Lille recalled the many protest marches Tutu led.
His presence, she said, was like an invisible shield.
“We knew that when the archbishop is leading the march, the chances of us being teargassed or shot by the police was very reduced, because (police) were afraid of him,” she said.
Humour
After apartheid was dismantled and South Africa ushered in its first free elections in 1994, Tutu chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which exposed the horrors of the past in grim detail.
He would later speak out fearlessly against the ruling African National Congress (ANC) for corruption, leadership incompetence and failures to tackle the country’s AIDS epidemic.
Tutu’s moral firmness and passion went hand-in-hand with self-deprecatory humour and a famously cackling laugh.
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“One day I was in San Francisco, minding my own business, as I always do, when a lady came up gushing,” he recalled in a speech in 2008.
“Oh, she was so warm and she was greeting me and she said, ‘Hello, Archbishop Mandela!’ Sort of getting two for the price of one.”
For his funeral, Tutu picked as a guiding quote the scripture from the New Testament’s Gospel of St. John where Jesus addresses his disciples after their last supper.
It reads: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”
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Picture: Getty Images
Source: AFP
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