Retired archbishop Desmond Tutu has been admitted to a Cape Town hospital for a recurring infection, his South African foundation said on Tuesday. The foundation, which is named after 83-year-old Tutu and his wife Leah, quoted their daughter Mpho as saying the family hopes the Nobel Peace Prize laureate will be able to return home in a "day or two," reports CBS News.
Desmond Mpilo Tutu was born on Oct. 7, 1931 and is a South African social rights activist and retired Anglican bishop who rose to worldwide fame during the 1980s as an opponent of apartheid. He was the first black archbishop of Cape Town and bishop of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa (now the Anglican Church of Southern Africa).
Under apartheid, Tutu campaigned against white minority rule during the years that Nelson Mandela was imprisoned and was awarded the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize for his work. Officially retired, he still speaks out on the world's injustices, and is widely viewed as South Africa's "moral compass," reports The Guardian.
The anti-apartheid icon had cancelled plans to travel to a meeting of Nobel laureates in Rome last December in order to battle prostate cancer which he has lived with for 15 years. In 2011, he was hospitalized for "minor" elective surgery. He was hospitalized again in 2013 for a persistent infection, but tests at that time showed no new malignancy. Tutu survived an illness believed to be polio as a baby and battled tuberculosis as a teenager, according to Al Jazeera.
