The funeral of Desmond Tutu got under way on Saturday morning in Cape Town in the cathedral that the South African cleric and Nobel laureate turned into a centre of struggle against racial injustice.
As a steady rain lashed the outside of Saint George’s, mourners took their places amid hymns and organ music before the ceremony started at 10am.
Tributes from world leaders poured in after Tutu’s death aged 90 was announced on Sunday, and within South Africa, many have been deeply moved by the passing of the last great hero of the struggle against the repressive, racist apartheid regime.
Church bells have been rung at noon across South Africa every day and flags flown at half mast. There have been dozens of memorial services, South Africa’s cricket team wore black armbands in Tutu’s honour on day one of the first Test against India in South Africa and Cape Town’s Table Mountain was lit up in purple in Tutu’s honour.
Mourners within the cathedral have been restricted to a hundred due to Covid regulations. They included Tutu’s widow, Leah, and his four children, as well as South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who is expected to read a eulogy. The ceremony will be led by Dr Thabo Makgoba, the current archbishop of Cape Town, and a sermon given by Michael Nuttall, the former bishop of Natal who was a close friend and collaborator of Tutu.
On Friday, hundreds queued outside the cathedral, waiting to pay their respects before the plain wooden casket decorated with a single bunch of carnations in accordance with Tutu’s wishes.
Tutu, who requested a funeral without lavish expense or ostentation, will be cremated and his ashes interred beneath the floor of St George’s, “a place that he loved”, church officials said. As Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, the former school teacher preached a powerful message of justice, inter-communal harmony and faith.
During the 1980s Tutu turned St George’s into a refuge for activists who faced brutal repression from the forces of the racist apartheid regime in power in South Africa until 1994.
Though he had largely faded from public life in more recent years, Tutu had continued his lifelong fight for causes he believed in, forcefully supporting LGBT rights, equal access to education and the assisted dying movement.
In remarks earlier this week, Ramaphosa called him a man of “extraordinary intellect, integrity and invincibility against the forces of apartheid”. Others have dubbed Tutu “the moral compass” of South Africa.
A memorial will be held at Westminster Abbey in London in the next three months, at a date to be confirmed by the Abbey and Buckingham Palace, church officials in Cape Town said.
