Desmond Tutu, infatigable voice of oppressed

Former teacher and priest throughout his life led many fights for human dignity, forgiveness and reconciliation. This close to Nelson Mandela, died on December 26, 2021, had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.

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Desmond Mpilo Tutu, whose death at the age of 90 was announced Sunday, December 26, did not leave anything. No slippage, no abuse, no violation of human rights unloaded its wrath. His life during, under the apartheid as under the black governments who followed each other after the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994, this little devil of man in purple dress has ceased, in the name of Justice and the Court. Equity, to import the established powers, to take over the rulers, to torment the powerful.

Energetic, voluble, malicious, comedian to wish, he never failed to tang the politicians from wherever they come. During the multiple and epic fights he has led for human dignity, forgiveness and reconciliation, he had become “the caring” benevolent reference of a nation in reconstruction, “the moral conscience of a sporadic country. to the demons of the past.

For Senator Edward Kennedy, visiting Pretoria in the 1990s, Desmond Tutu was nothing less than “Martin Luther King South Africa”. The comparison had pleased him. He too had “made a dream,” the same, with little close, that of the murdered pastor. He too, like the old ancient American, was at his time hunted, oppressed, vilified and regularly threatened by the worst by the supporters of what he called “the most vicious system ever invented from Nazism”, namely “development” separated from the breeds “(apartheid).

Long, Desmond Tutu was, for members of the Afrikaner white minority (in power from 1948 to 1994), “the even incarnation of evil”. For a long time, until in recent months, it was, for many black ministers, “the patented emmerger”, the immemaster of enriching in circles, the tireless title of all that was not going in the “nation Rainbow “.

than risks and sacrifices

His courage, his skill, his sagacity, his effervescent personality, enveloping his laughs in cascade, his tears public, his devastating humor and his obvious benevolence at the place of everything that belonged to the human will have finished by disarm the most excited of his criticisms. “The Archbishop of the People”, as his friend Nelson Mandela had baptized, left no one indifferent. But what work done, assumed risks and sacrifices made to get there!

DESMOND MPILO TUTU is born on October 7, 1931 in a small African village, now disappeared, two hours from Johannesburg. His father is a teacher in schools reserved for black and open, before the invention of apartheid in 1948, by Christian missions. The Tutu family is poor “without being miserable,” he liked to clarify. It prevents. At the age of 4, the Chétif Petit Desmond is the victim of poliomyelitis. He will keep his whole life a discomfort in the left arm.

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/Media reports.