Archbishop Tutu, who shared the same fight for justice as Mandela, frequently acknowledged the example of Indian leader Gandhi, and dedicated his life to the non-violent campaign for reconciliation, human rights and the end of racial division.

A statue, commemorating Gandhi's expulsion from a first-class railway carriage in South Africa because he was "coloured", was unveiled near the Pietermaritzburg Railway Station by the Archbishop 100 years to the day after the event. "My active non-violence began from that date," Gandhi, a supporter of the African National Congress from its foundation in 1912, later wrote.

Of Gandhi, whose philosophy of non-violent resistance he was to make his own, Archbishop Tutu later wrote: "God is not upset that Gandhi was not a Christian, because God is not a Christian! All of God's children and their different faiths help us to realise the immensity."

While tolerant to a fault, and humane and compassionate beyond measure, he was not colour-blind; a fact which, when combined with high intelligence and a mischievous wit, produced numerous devastating observations.

Of these, perhaps the most famous was that "when the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray'. We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land."

The Archbishop knew the wealth of the whites and the poverty of the Africans and "coloureds" - formalised with the adoption of apartheid in 1948 - was the result of injustice, dispossession, theft and the segregation of the races.

"Europe became rich because it exploited Africa; the Africans know that," he once said. "Racism, xenophobia and unfair discrimination have spawned slavery when human beings have bought and sold and owned and branded fellow human beings as if they were so many beasts of burden".

Archbishop Tutu, the face of the anti-apartheid movement while Nelson Mandela and other leaders of the African National Congress were imprisoned, became an international figure in the 1970s and 1980s.

The success of his efforts was recognised on the one hand with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, and on the other by the then South African government's decision to revoke his passport in 1990 and 1991.

His greatest service was yet to come, however. After South Africa's first democratic election in 1994, the Archbishop was appointed to head the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a body tasked with investigating excesses committed by both the government and the ANC.

While his compassion and humanity did not sit well with those who sought revenge, he, like Mandela, recognised that without reconciliation and forgiveness the country had no future.

"If you want peace you don't talk to your friends; you talk to your enemies," he said. "Forgiveness says you are given another chance to make a new beginning."

While, as Archbishop Tutu acknowledged before his death, his dream of a "rainbow nation" has yet to be realised, immense strides have been made.

His, and Nelson Mandela's, greatest legacy is that almost two in every three South Africans alive today were born after the end of apartheid.

Their lifelong freedom from oppression and exclusion is the greatest gift of all.

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