Inspirational cleric and anti-apartheid campaigner who played a major role in the process of reconciliation in South Africa.
Desmond Tutu was the smiling South African archbishop whose irrepressible personality won him friends and admirers around the world.
He joined the church and was strongly influenced by many white clergymen in the country, especially another strong opponent of apartheid, Bishop Trevor Huddleston.Tutu with fellow staff members of the Pretoria Bantu Normal College in 1961 Desmond Tutu's enthronement as Archbishop of Cape Town was attended by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Robert Runcie, and the widow of Martin Luther King.
The clergymen pushed through the mob and pulled to safety the bleeding, half-conscious man, just before the petrol-doused tyre around his neck was set alight. Later he angered the Israelis when, during a Christmas pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he compared black South Africans with the Arabs in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
He said the ANC had not done enough to alleviate poverty among the poorest in the country and that too much wealth and power was concentrated in the hands of a new black political elite. He returned to the subject of poverty when he visited Ireland in 2010. He urged Western nations to consider the effect of cuts in overseas aid in the wake of the economic downturn.Tutu formally retired from public life in the same year to, he said, spend more time "drinking red bush tea and watching cricket" than "in airports and hotels".
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