Honouring legends

The voice of Stephen Hawking was beamed into space with a message of peace and hope on June 15, as the British physicist was laid to rest during a service at London’s Westminster Abbey. The wheelchair-bound scientist died on March 13, at age 76, after a lifetime spent probing the origins of the universe. Hawking suffered from motor neurone disease, which forced him to use an electronic voice synthesiser.

Thousands of South Africans paid tribute to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela at a memorial service on April 11 in Soweto. Madikizela-Mandela, an active anti-apartheid campaigner during her husband Nelson.

The ‘Queen of Soul’ Aretha Franklin passed away on Aug 16 at age of 76. Franklin, who won 18 Grammys and had some 25 gold records, died at her home in Detroit. She was suffering from pancreatic cancer.

Former United Nations (UN) secretary-general and Nobel peace laureate Kofi Annan Kofi Annan died on Aug 18 in a hospital in Bern, Switzerland – at age 80. The Ghanaian national served two terms as UN secretarygeneral in New York from 1997 to 2006, and retired to live in a Swiss village in the Geneva countryside.

Microsoft Corp co-founder Paul Allen, the man who persuaded school-friend Bill Gates to drop out of Harvard to start what became the world’s biggest software company, died on Oct 15 at age 65.

Stan Lee, who dreamed up Spider-Man, Iron Man, Incredible Hulk, Black Panther and a cavalcade of other Marvel Comics superheroes that became mythic figures in pop culture with soaring success at the movie box office, died on Nov 12 at age 95. As a writer and editor, Lee was key to the ascension of Marvel into a comic book titan in the 1960s when, in collaboration with artists such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, he created superheroes who would enthral generations of young readers.

Former US president George HW Bush died on Nov 30 at the age of 94. Bush, the 41st US president who served in the office from 1989 to 1993, was the father of former president George W Bush, who served two terms in the White House in the 2000s, and former governor of Florida, Jeb Bush. Bush Senior’s death came seven months after that of his wife, Barbara Bush, to whom he was married for 73 years.

She was 92.