Let My People Go. Albert Luthuli
Chief Luthuli knew that as he, during his time, confronted strong gales that made the task of achieving freedom difficult, these strong gales would still rage, even if in different forms, to confront those whose task would be to ensure that the freedom that we won after a long and bitter struggle, is entrenched and consolidated.
Accordingly, his words of 1956 were directed both to his audience and to all of us, that we cannot and must not hesitate and falter in the pursuit of the transformation path that will clearly consolidate our freedom because, “the cause is so worthwhile that any risks and dangers confronting its realisation sink into insignificance”.
In the same poem Chief Luthuli quoted, Longfellow says:
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labour and to wait.
We, who are gathered here today, should be able to say to Chief Albert Luthuli that we are working in such a manner that “each tomorrow” will undoubtedly find us “farther than today”; that as we celebrate our decade of freedom we are able to say, confidently and without any contradiction, that the lives of our people are better than they were ten years ago.
Thus we must accelerate the process of transformation such that when we report at the end of the second decade of our freedom, we should be able to say confidently and without any contradiction that the lives of our people are much better than they were in 2004.
In a message to Drum magazine while he was in Oslo, Norway, to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Chief Luthuli said: “My prayer is that the day will soon come when all my people will share in the freedom and the good things of life which are all around me as I write.”
Chief Luthuli did not live to see that day, which came on the 27th April 1994. But those of us who had the privilege to experience that day have a duty not to betray the struggle that defined the life of Chief Luthuli.
As we do all the things that we must do and as we build and maintain the Statue of Freedom that Chief Albert Luthuli referred to, we will like Henry Longfellow say:
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labour and to wait.
I thank you.
This Presidential Address was first delivered in KwaDukuza on 21 August 2004.
Introduction
by Kader Asmal
THE LAST TIME I saw Chief Albert Luthuli was at Heathrow Airport in London on a dark December night in 1961, when he was on his way to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
A small group of South African exiles, students and anti-apartheid campaigners had assembled in the hope of greeting him and his wife, Nokukhanya, but we could only wave our placards and ANC flags from the other side of the wire fence. The South African regime had given him a passport on condition that he did not engage in any political activities. Accordingly, he was forced to pass on without speaking to us, only casting a wistful look in our direction, while we were left with an exultant feeling of elation that after so many years we had at least had a view of our Chief.
I had grown up in Stanger next to Chief Luthuli’s home village of Groutville. As a youngster and as a teacher, I was deeply influenced by him and by his views. He, too, had been a teacher. First encountering him when I was 14, I learned from Albert Luthuli that we could aspire to a better world. He gave me a vision of how we could be South African in a country beset by racial divisions, religious intolerance, and fear. He enabled me to see the possibilities that we could achieve in a South Africa freed from racism. It was electrifying.
I have always regarded Albert Luthuli as my mentor, a teacher by example rather than by prescription. I met him on a number of occasions in the late 1940s and early 1950s when he knocked on doors in my home town of Stanger looking for support. His non-racialism and his commitment to freedom and democracy made an indelible impression on me. Albert Luthuli was one of the most important influences leading me into the politics of liberation.
Although he resigned from the teaching profession when he was democratically elected as Chief of the Umvoti Mission Reserve in 1936, Luthuli continued to be a role model for many. Through his experience of the problems of his community, he became convinced of the need for militant action. In the 1940s he became actively involved in the African National Congress. He was an eloquent speaker, with a commanding presence and a formidable intellect. His qualities of leadership were recognised when he was elected in 1951 to the Presidency of the Natal ANC.
This new political role precipitated a crisis when the apartheid regime demanded that he choose between his chieftainship and his political activities. Refusing to resign from either, he was deposed as chief by the government, although throughout his life his friends and followers continued to address him by that traditional title, indicating that Albert Luthuli could not be defined by the apartheid regime. Luthuli’s statement in response to the government’s denial of his traditional authority was a resounding assertion of his moral authority:
Who will deny that thirty years of my life have been spent knocking in vain, patiently, moderately and modestly at a closed and barred door? …
As for myself, with a full sense of responsibility and a clear conviction, I decided to remain in the struggle for extending democratic rights and responsibilities to all sections of the South African community. I have embraced the non-violent passive resistance technique in fighting for freedom because I am convinced it is the only non-revolutionary, legitimate and humane way that could be used by people denied, as we are, effective constitutional means to further aspirations …
It is inevitable that in working for Freedom some individuals and some families must take the lead and suffer: The Road to Freedom is via the Cross.1
Soon after this event, Albert Luthuli was elected President-General of the African National Congress, a post he held until his death in 1967.
During the 1950s, as dramatised in Alan Paton’s novel Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful, the apartheid government considered it a criminal act of subversion to address Albert Luthuli as Chief. In their interrogation of a leader of the National Union of South African Students, which had congratulated Chief Luthuli on his election to the presidency of the ANC, the police in Paton’s novel insist that it is “subversive for a students’ organisation to continue to give a man a title which has been taken away from him by a Minister who ultimately derives his power from Parliament. It is in fact contempt of Parliament, which is a serious offence indeed. The penalties are heavy, and could be crippling for you and your organisation.”2
Ironically, during the same era, the leader of a student organisation supporting the apartheid regime, FW de Klerk, caused trouble for his organisation, the Afrikaanse Studentebond, by inviting Albert Luthuli to speak at Potchefstroom University. Although he regarded the ANC as dangerous because of its cooperation with communists and its proposals for a universal franchise in South Africa, De Klerk was interested in Albert Luthuli because “we respected his position as a Zulu chief”. Seemingly unaware that the National Party government he supported had deposed Luthuli as chief, or that addressing him as “Chief” might be a criminal offence, De Klerk proceeded to invite Chief Luthuli, over the objections of his university, to address the Afrikaanse Studentebond at a meeting held off campus. “It was a strange experience,” De Klerk relates in his autobiography, “for young Afrikaners at the time to converse with black South Africans on an equal basis.” These students might have respected the Chief, but De Klerk reports that “his message that all South Africans should have the right to one-man one-vote in an undivided South Africa was at the time utterly alien to us.” Insisting that Afrikaners had the right