Desmond Tutu was a South African clergyman, civil rights activist, and Nobel laureate. Born in Klerksdorp, in what is now North-West Province, Tutu was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1960. He was named dean of Johannesburg in 1975 and bishop of Lesotho in 1977;the following year, he became the first black general secretary of the South African Council of Churches. In 1984 Bishop Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of "the courage and heroism shown by black South Africans in their use of peaceful methods in the struggle against apartheid." Apartheid, South Africa's system of racial separatism has since then no longer been seen. Tutu was elected bishop of Johannesburg on November 13, 1984; in 1986 he was made archbishop of Cape Town and titular head of the Anglican Church in South Africa. In November 1995 Nelson Mandela, president of South Africa, selected Archbishop Tutu to serve as head of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a panel established to inv!
estigate crimes committed during the apartheid era. In June 1996 Tutu retired from his position as head of the Anglican Church in South Africa so that he could devote himself to his role on the commission. One of Tutu's main struggles was with apartheid, which is a policy of racial segregation formerly followed in South Africa. The word apartheid means separateness in the Afrikaans language and it described the rigid racial division between the governing white minority population and the nonwhite majority population. The National Party introduced apartheid as part of their campaign in the 1948 elections, and with the National Party victory, apartheid became the governing political policy for South Africa until the early 1990s. In 1962 the South African government established the first of the Bantustans, the Transkei, as the homeland of the Xhosa people, and granted it limited self-government in 1963, later becoming independent. B
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