JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Bishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and outspoken enemy of the white minority government, was named Anglican archbishop of Cape Town and vowed to work for peace and reconciliation.
Also Monday, in the self-governing tribal homeland of Lebowa, police found the bodies of 36 people -- some bearing marks of an ancient ritual torture -- buried in shallow graves.
In Pretoria today, three black men were hanged for murder at dawn at the capital's Central Prison, a spokesman for the Prisons Department said. Some 33 people have been executed in South Africa this year.
Tutu, 54, was elected archbishop by an overwhelming majority of the 500 church leaders who convened in Cape Town to choose a successor to the outgoing Archbishop Phillip Russell.
'I am overwhelmed and deeply shattered by the responsibility that has been placed on my shoulders by God,' Tutu told reporters.
Tutu became known to South Africa's white minority in 1975, when he was appointed Anglican dean of Johannesburg.
The first black ever to hold the position, he rejected the official residence in an elite white Johannesburg suburb, choosing instead to live in Soweto, the sprawling black ghetto on the edge of the city.
He gained further attention in 1984 with his election as Anglican bishop of Johannesburg and, later that year, when he received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Tutu won the nomination for archbishop of Cape Town over white Bishop of Natal, Michael Nuttall. He will begin his task as spiritual leader to South Africa's 2 million Anglicans, 80 percent of whom are black.
The stocky little bishop was elected despite his recent call to Western nations to pressure Pretoria to abolish apartheid, the country's system of legalized racial discrimination, by applying punitive economic sanctions against Pretoria.
He told reporters it was vital to point out there was no real split in the church.
'We didn't have to go to too many ballots,' he said.
'My appointment is not a 'one-man-band' about to explode on the scene, and it would be a very silly archbishop who ignored the advice of his counselors in the diocese,' Tutu said, in an apparent effort to calm fears among white members of the church.
In Lebowa, 200 miles northeast of Johannesburg, police said they found 36 bodies, many bearing marks of ritual killings. The victims were buried in shallow graves that were uncovered by a weekend rainstorm.
A Lebowa police spokesman said 67 people were detained for questioning in the case and one man had died of 'natural causes' while in police custody.
