Desmond Tutu: South Africa anti-apartheid hero dies aged 90
President Cyril Ramaphosa said the churchman's death marked "another chapter of bereavement in our nation's farewell to a generation of outstanding South Africans".
Archbishop Tutu had helped bequeath "a liberated South Africa," he added.
Tutu was one of the country's best-known figures at home and abroad.
A contemporary anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela was one of the driving forces behind the movement to end the policy of racial segregation and discrimination enforced by the white minority government against the black majority in South Africa from 1948 until 1991.
He was awarded the Nobel prize in 1984 for his role in the struggle to abolish the apartheid system.
Tutu's death comes just weeks after South Africa's last apartheid-era president, FW de Clerk, died at the age of 85.
President Ramaphosa said Tutu was "an iconic spiritual leader, anti-apartheid activist and global human rights campaigner".
He described him as "a patriot without equal; a leader of principle and pragmatism who gave meaning to the biblical insight that faith without works is dead.
The Nelson Mandela Foundation was among those paying tributes, saying Tutu's "contributions to struggles against injustice, locally and globally, are matched only by the depth of his thinking about the making of liberatory futures for human societies.
"He was an extraordinary human being. A thinker. A leader. A shepherd."
It is impossible to imagine South Africa's long and tortuous journey to freedom - and beyond - without Archbishop Desmond Tutu. While other struggle leaders were killed or forced into exile or prison, the diminutive, defiant Anglican priest was there at every stage, exposing the hypocrisy of the apartheid state, comforting its victims, holding the liberation movement to account. Daring Western governments to do more to isolate a white-minority government that he compared, unequivocally, to the Nazis.
When democracy arrived, Tutu used his moral authority to oversee the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that sought to expose the crimes of the white-minority government. Later he turned that same fierce gaze on the failings, in government, of South Africa's former liberation movement, the ANC.
Today, many South Africans will remember Tutu's courage and the clarity of his moral fury. But as those who knew him best have so often reminded us, Tutu was always, indeed, the voice of hope. And it is that hope that optimism accompanied, so often, by his trademark giggles and cackles, that seems likely to shape the way the world remembers and celebrates Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Elizabeth Swan
Senior Staff Reporter
0 Comment