‘A moral giant’: South Africans pay their respects to Archbishop Desmond Tutu

South Africans from all corners of retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s “rainbow nation” filed past his plain pine casket by the hundreds on Friday to pay their respects to his life of activism for equality for all races, creeds and sexual orientations.

“He was a moral giant. He was a moral and spiritual giant loved and revered for fighting for equality for all people,” said the Reverend Michael Lapsley, on the steps of the historic St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town after Tutu’s coffin was carried in amid music, incense and prayers.

Anglican clergy – women and men, black and white, young and old – lined the street to honour the cortege carrying Tutu’s body to the church. Members of the Tutu family accompanied the casket into the cathedral.

People began filing through the lofty cathedral to light candles and view the small, simple coffin with rope handles which Tutu had said he wanted to avoid any ostentation or lavish expenditures. Many sat in the pews to pray and reflect on Tutu’s life.

More than 2,000 people visited the cathedral on the first day of viewing on Thursday and on Friday the line stretched for more than a kilometre (nearly a mile). A requiem mass for Tutu, who died on December 26 at the age of 90, will be held on New Year’s Day before he is cremated and his remains placed in a columbarium in the cathedral.

“His work did not stop with the end of apartheid,” Lapsley said, in reference to South Africa’s regime of racial oppression which Tutu prominently opposed and which ended in 1994 when South Africa held a democratic election.

“Archbishop Tutu bravely championed the equality of all people. He transformed the church by bringing women into the clergy. He championed the LGBT community, for whom he is a hero all over the world,” said Lapsley, Canon of Healing at the cathedral.