Desmond Mpilo Tutu (born 7 October 1931) is a South African cleric and activist who rose to worldwide fame during the 1980s as an opponent of apartheid.
Tutu was elected and ordained the first black
Desmond Mpilo Tutu (born 7 October 1931) is a South African cleric and activist who rose to worldwide fame during the 1980s as an opponent of apartheid.
Tutu was elected and ordained the first black South African Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, and primate of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa (now the Anglican Church of Southern Africa).
He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism, and the Magubela prize for liberty in 1986. He is committed to stopping global AIDS and has served as the honorary chairman for the Global AIDS Alliance. In February 2007 he was awarded Gandhi Peace Prize by Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, president of India.
He was generally credited with coining the term Rainbow Nation as a metaphor for post-apartheid South Africa after 1994 under African National Congress rule. The expression has since entered mainstream consciousness to describe South Africa’s ethnic diversity.
Desmond Mpilo Tutu was born in Klerksdorp, Transvaal on 7 October, 1931, the son of Zacheriah Zililo Tutu. Tutu’s family moved to Johannesburg when he was 12 years old. Although he wanted to become a physician, his family could not afford the training, and he followed his father’s footsteps into teaching. Tutu studied at the Pretoria Bantu Normal College from 1951 through 1953, and went on to teach at Johannesburg Bantu High School and at Munsieville High School in Pietermaritzburg. However, he resigned following the passage of the Bantu Education Act, in protest of the poor educational prospects for African South Africans. He continued his studies, this time in theology, at St Peter’s Theology College in R