Tutu Awarded Top German Prize

South African cleric Desmond Tutu was on Sunday awarded one of Germany's most prestigious honours, the Marion Doenhoff Prize for International Reconciliation and Understanding.

The retired Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town has become "a symbol for peace and justice in the world", German Economic Assistance Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul said.

The renowned prize was awarded by the influential weekly newspaper Die Zeit together with the Zeit foundation Ebelin.

Doenhoff was a leading German journalist and intellectual who was co-publisher of Die Zeit until her death at the age of 92 in March 2002.

Bishop Desmond Tutu was born in 1931 in Klerksdorp, Transvaal[now known as Gauteng Province]. His father was a teacher, and he himself was educated at Johannesburg Bantu High School.
[...]
Tutu has formulated his objective as "a democratic and just society
without racial divisions", and has set forward the following points as
minimum demands:

1. equal civil rights for all
2. the abolition of South Africa's passport laws
3. a common system of education
4. the cessation of forced deportation from South Africa to the so-called "homelands"

Tutu was just one of many voices in South Africa and abroad that called for sanctions, but his support for them helped legitimize what some considered a radical form of protest. The sanctions, eventually supported by much of the world, had a strong effect on South Africa. By the 1980s, the country’s economy was stagnant due to a critical shortage of investment capital, and diplomatic pressure led to the dismantling of apartheid. In 1982, Tutu’s isolation became a worldwide embarrassment for South Africa, when Columbia University’s president travelled to South Africa to present Tutu with an honorary degree. It was only the third time this precedent had been broken in the famed university’s 244-year history.

On April 27, 1994 South Africans elected a new president, the country’s most prominent black man, Nelson Mandela, and apartheid was finally over. But Tutu’s job continued. In 1995, he was appointed chair of the South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a group that investigates apartheid-era crimes.