(Cape Town) South Africans gathered in front of the remains of Bishop Desmond Tutu on Thursday, arriving at Saint George’s Cathedral in Cape Town, from where he long slammed the racist apartheid regime, for a fiery chapel planned over two days.
The light pine coffin – he had asked for “the cheapest possible” -, simply decorated with a bouquet of white carnations, was carried in the choir by six priests in chasubles, noted AFP journalists.
The current Archbishop of Cape Town, Thabo Makgoba, said a prayer as others poured incense around the coffin of the tireless human rights defender. Several members of his family, including his widow, whom the country affectionately calls “Mama Leah” and whom he married in 1955, followed him to church.
Tutu died peacefully at age 90 on Sunday. After the planetary tribute paid by the great of this world, from his friend the Dalai Lama to Pope Francis through many heads of state, it is the turn of ordinary citizens.
Of all ages and all colors, they each stopped for a few seconds in front of the body. Many cross themselves, others like this woman in the purple hijab bow their heads or join their hands in a kiss.
Among them, Joan Coulson insisted on being among the first to arrive: “I met him when I was fifteen, I’m 70 now,” she said, comparing the prelate to a rock star “like Elvis” .
Evoking his outspokenness and his humor, she bet that he is already stirring up Heaven. “Saint-Pierre is going to tell him, ‘Hey, calm down! ””, She jokes.
Originally scheduled for Thursday alone, the Burning Chapel was extended to Friday, “for fear of a scramble,” Reverend Gilmore Fry said outside the cathedral. Because many want to greet the icon before his funeral on Saturday.
PHOTO TSVANGIRAYI MUKWAZHI, AP
Since Sunday, hundreds of people have flocked to Saint George’s Cathedral in Cape Town to drop messages and bouquets of flowers.
Without ostentation
After a private cremation, the ashes of Bishop Tutu will be buried in the cathedral, of which he was archbishop for ten years until 1996.
Since Sunday, hundreds of people have flocked there to drop off messages and bouquets of flowers. His bells ring every day at noon, for ten minutes, to call passers-by to think of him.
Flags are at half mast across the country and Table Mountain, which overlooks the port city, is lit up purple nightly in homage to “The Arch”.
Desmond Tutu “fought the good battles, he has now finished his race”, greeted during a ceremony in Johannesburg the Reverend Frank Chikane, who fought apartheid alongside the archbishop.
Later in the afternoon, friends and relatives of the deceased gathered at the headquarters of his foundation in Cape Town. In the sunny garden, a few words were spoken, music was played. Former President of Ireland Mary Robinson, human rights activist and widow of Nelson Mandale, Graca Machel, were notably present, as was Mandela’s eldest grandchild, Mandla Mandela.
Many ceremonies, mainly religious, punctuated the week and will continue until the funeral. That day, neither ostentatious ceremony nor lavish expenditure, the prelate had left strict instructions. Besides the bouquet offered by the family, no other flowers. Assistance should be limited to a hundred people, COVID-19 requires.
The religious ceremony will also be an official ceremony. But the soldiers had to limit, according to the wishes of the archbishop again, their intervention to the delivery of a South African flag to his widow.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner retired from public life, weakened by cancer. After the election in 1994 of his friend Nelson Mandela, the first post-apartheid president, it was he who found the formula of “rainbow nation”.
Desmond Tutu had chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) which he hoped, thanks to the confrontation of the executioners and the victims, that it would allow turning the page on racial hatred.