KOTA KINABALU: Nearly a month ago, I wrote on the passing of FW de Klerk, the somewhat less internationally known former South African president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. De Klerk was overshadowed primarily because of the larger-than-life personage of his contemporary and co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Nelson Mandela, who became the universal symbol of the struggle for racial equality.

But preceding the ultimate global prominence of both Mandela and de Klerk, there was another heavyweight figure in South Africa's long journey to shedding the morally repugnant apartheid, the extreme form of racial segregation policy. And that was none other than Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the former Anglican primate of South Africa, who passed away during the recent festive season. During the more than quarter century that Mandela was in jail, Tutu was perhaps the most recognizable globetrotting face of the anti-apartheid forces of South Africa. Part eloquent preacher and part tireless freedom fighter, Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize nearly a decade earlier than Mandela and de Klerk. Compared with the tall and lanky Mandela, Tutu had a much smaller stature, but his singing tones and swinging postures, leading multiracial marches in his clerical robes on the streets of South Africa, was then the most vivid depiction of the anti-apartheid efforts on countless television screens across the globe.