Tutu Bids Emotional Adieu To Cape Town Congregation

Desmond Tutu, the diminutive priest who loomed large in the fight against apartheid while Nelson Mandela languished in prison, relinquished his pulpit Sunday as the Anglican archbishop of Cape Town.

To words of warmth from kings, presidents and fellow priests, the 64-year-old Tutu was bade an emotional farewell here by his congregation at St. George’s Cathedral. He also received the Order of Meritorious Service, South Africa’s highest honor, from President Mandela, who praised him as “a blessing and inspiration to countless people.”

George Carey, who as archbishop of Canterbury is the chief priest of the Anglican church, described Tutu at a service marking his retirement as a man who helped bring “the horrifying reality of life” under apartheid to the outside world. “You are an extraordinary ambassador for Christ and the people of this land.”

With the exception of Mandela, few people have come to capture the public imagination in South Africa as Tutu, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his campaign against apartheid. A man who lived out his emotions in public - crying at countless funerals for victims of police shootings; screaming with joy at the simple task of voting for the first time, in 1994 at the age of 62 - the archbishop helped define the emerging new South African identity. The nickname he gave to his fellow countrymen and women, “the rainbow people of God,” is the evocative imagery routinely summoned by many South Africans in describing the miracle of their rebirth.

Tutu’s retirement, after 10 years at the helm of the church in southern Africa, was a symbolic as well as a practical change of course. Throughout the 1980s, his figure was to be found at the head of marches against the apartheid regime and in dusty graveyards of black townships.