Desmond Tutu

Born in 1931, Desmond Tutu became the first black archbishop of Cape Town in 1986. Nine years later Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first democratically elected president, appointed him chair of the seventeen-member commission charged with investigating human rights violations perpetrated during apartheid and negotiating amnesty agreements with, rather than punishing, the perpetrators. Over the course of its public hearings, the commission received around 22,000 victim statements and 7,000 amnesty applications.