South Africans continued Friday to pay homage to Bishop Desmond Tutu, on the second and last day of a fiery chapel at Saint George’s Cathedral in Cape Town, from where he has long slammed the racist apartheid regime.
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“He is a legendary hero. Tutu has played an important role in my life, as in that of all Africans, ”Libane Serenji, painter, told AFP. Antonia Appels, secretary in Pretoria, has come to salute a “remarkable” journey.
Already Thursday, nearly 2,000 people, of all ages and colors, had marched to recollect for a few seconds, with a sign of the cross or a nod, in front of the remains of Bishop Tutu.
An orchestra of faithful, including a child on the trumpet, greeted in music the procession which brought back for the second day the modest pine coffin containing the body of “The Arch”, celebrated for his role in the reconciliation of the “arch nation. -in-ciel ”after the fall of the racist regime.
The current Archbishop of Cape Town, Mgr Thabo Makgoba, spread incense around the coffin carried, like the day before, by six priests. Members of the family, including two of Bishop Tutu’s daughters, their heads wrapped in brightly colored fabrics, embraced and consoled themselves in front of the cathedral when the coffin arrived.
The body of the Nobel Peace Prize winner, who died on Sunday at the age of 90, will be reduced to dust by aquamation, an ecological alternative to water-based cremation, the dean of the cathedral, Father Michael, told AFP. Weeder.
His ashes are then buried, “probably Sunday”, in the cathedral, he said.
Flags have been at half mast across the country since Monday and Table Mountain, which overlooks the port city, is lit purple every evening in homage to Bishop Tutu. The cathedral bells have been ringing all week at noon, for ten minutes, calling passersby to think of him.
For his funeral, neither ostentatious ceremony nor lavish expenses, the prelate had left strict instructions. Attendance at mass should be limited to a hundred people, Covid requires.
Archbishop of Cape Town until 1996, Tutu led peaceful marches, calling for international sanctions against the white government in Pretoria, whose unprecedented violence he denounced. Little by little, he becomes the voice of Nelson Mandela, in prison on Robben Island, the police and the army threaten him but his dress spares him the prison.
After the election of Mandela in 1994, the prelate was charged with chairing 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.
Desmond Mpilo (which means “life” in Zulu) Tutu leaves behind his widow, married in 1955 and whom the country affectionately nicknames “Mama Leah”, and their four children.