When Mandela and his fellow anti-apartheid leaders were two decades into their imprisonment on Robben Island, Arch came to increasing prominence as an opponent of racist tyranny, speaking at rallies and funerals, leading protests, his voice heard across the world.

Apartheid’s brutal police state had assassinated, tortured, jailed and silenced critics, but they couldn’t really do that to the Archbishop of Cape Town, with his multi-racial congregation and his increasingly prominent global Christian platform.

Arch’s initial joyous engagements with Nelson Mandela in February 1990, after Mandela had finally been freed, epitomised the triumph of good over evil, these two great figures heralding the onset of the new “rainbow nation”. “Mandela,” he memorably pronounced, “became the icon, the moral giant so revered by the world, because he had demonstrated that former enemies could become friends.”

Tutu also epitomised integrity. So when Winnie Mandela appeared before him at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established by President Mandela, Arch was firm about her tragic descent from brave fighter for justice and victim of police oppression, into criminal complicity in murder.

He was also firm with former President de Klerk, who had released Mandela and negotiated his transition to the Presidency, but refused to apologise for apartheid crimes committed on his watch. De Klerk stormed out of the Commission in high dudgeon after it had heard evidence of awful, bloodcurdling atrocities by apartheid security agents.

Even after his close friend Mandela became President, he was not silent. MPs were under fire for accepting big salary increases, and Tutu quipped: “The government stopped the gravy train long enough to get on it”. A few months later, Mandela announced a cut in the salaries of MPs and of the president.