Desmond Tutu

In my mind, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu were a double act of apartheid resistance with Mandela the political power and Tutu the public face and while Mandela spent 27 years in prison, Tutu's position in the Church meant he was an uncomfortable opponent to the country's white supremacist Government but as untouchable as a black man in South Africa could be.
It is right that following his death from prostate cancer yesterday he is receiving the plaudits for his work but it wasn't his religious work that i applaud him for, it was his commitment to calling out inequality, corruption and human rights abuses wherever he found them, regardless of whether it was friend or foe committing them.
Despite his religious beliefs, he railed against homophobia in the Church, saying that he would rather go to the other place than go to sit beside a homophobic God and castigated Israel for 'inflicting such suffering on the Palestinians'.
Despite suffering decades of racism in South Africa, post-apartheid he made a point of telling blacks and whites that they should not see colour and see South Africa as a rainbow nation, and when Mandela and the African National Congress swept into power, he criticised their violent behaviour during the fight against Apartheid, including Mandela and his wife, and castigated the leadership of not doing enough to alleviate poverty with too much wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a new black political elite.
He went after Robert Mugabe, Britain and America for their high black prison populations, Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi for the ethnic cleansing of the Muslim minority and anyone who didn't support: 'a society that's compassionate, that really makes people feel they mattered. Where people don't go to bed hungry'.
A man of principle and a voice acting as a much needed moral compass in the current times when they are woefully lacking.