Desmond Tutu Longtime LGBT Ally Who Ended Apartheid Has Died at 90
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South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who helped abolish apartheid, and was a long time LGBT civil rights advocate has died at 90.
RELATED: Desmond Tutu’s Long History of Fighting for Lesbian and Gay Rights
Tutu won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.
The New York Times: Desmond M. Tutu, the cleric who used his pulpit and spirited oratory to help bring down apartheid in South Africa and then became the leading advocate of peaceful reconciliation under Black majority rule, died on Sunday in Cape Town. He was 90.
His death was confirmed by the office of South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who called the archbishop “a leader of principle and pragmatism who gave meaning to the biblical insight that faith without works is dead.”
The cause of death was cancer, the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation said, adding that Archbishop Tutu had died in a care facility. He was first diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1997, and was hospitalized several times in the years since, amid recurring fears that the disease had spread.
As leader of the South African Council of Churches and later as Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, Archbishop Tutu led the church to the forefront of Black South Africans’ decades-long struggle for freedom. His voice was a powerful force for nonviolence in the anti-apartheid movement, earning him a Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.
Robert Jones Jr. wrote on Instagram: Tutu was rare because he understood what peace actually means.
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He knew that it isn’t surrender. He knew that it isn’t ornamental, sentimental, or symbolic.
He knew that it means an end to ALL violence: physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual, economic, and environmental. Which means that he knew that the responsibility of peace falls upon the transgressor, not the transgressed.
He was the first, and perhaps only, Christian I’ve ever encountered who actually took the best, most loving, most freeing parts of the Jesus Christ myth seriously, while never denying the inherent colonial, violent, anti-Black aspects of the religion and its practices.
Which is to say that he knew how to subvert and divert its power for the purposes of REAL liberation, even if that strategy ultimately failed.
While just about every other Christian in the world was building their altars out of the bones of queer and trans people, he proclaimed loudly that the true sin was in the oppression of LGBTQIA+ people.
Peace is not synonymous with foolishness, as Archbishop, now Ancestor, Desmond Tutu articulates in this article he wrote back in 2011: “[H]ealing is a process. How we deal with the truth after its telling defines the success of the process.”
President Barack Obama wrote: Tutu was a mentor, a friend, and a moral compass for me and so many others. A universal spirit, Archbishop Tutu was grounded in the struggle for liberation and justice in his own country, but also concerned with injustice everywhere. He never lost his impish sense of humor and willingness to find humanity in his adversaries, and Michelle and I will miss him dearly.
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