Let My People Go. Albert Luthuli
the students left Albert Luthuli, as De Klerk imagined, “despondent about the possibility that Afrikaners would ever accept his message”.3
Chief Luthuli, however, possessed a remarkable generosity of spirit, although he was never tolerant of injustice. He was a Christian, with very deeply held beliefs, but his Christianity was the kind that looked to the model of Jesus throwing the moneylenders out of the temple. Throughout his active political life, Chief Luthuli was a committed and disciplined member of the ANC. He articulated the movement’s non-racial policies with the same deep conviction he vested in his religion.
In a speech in Johannesburg in 1958, Albert Luthuli challenged any assumption that South Africa, with its diversity of race, colour, creed and culture, could not develop into a democracy. “I personally believe,” he declared, “that here in South Africa, with all our diversities of colour and race, we will show the world a new pattern of democracy. I think there is a challenge to us in South Africa to set a new example for the world. We can build a homogeneous South Africa on the basis not of colour but of human values.”4
In that same speech in 1958, Albert Luthuli called for an international boycott of South African products. His call for international pressure on the apartheid regime was heard in London, where I was studying in 1959, and inspired the boycott movement that developed into the British Anti-Apartheid Movement. Despite the attempts by the apartheid regime to silence him, Albert Luthuli announced the ANC’s human and humanising values of non-racialism, freedom and democracy in such resonating tones that his words reached all over the world and all the way to the Nobel Committee.
Albert Luthuli was nominated in February 1961 by the Social Democrats of the Swedish Parliament for the delayed 1960 Nobel Peace Prize. At the time, he was still entangled in the five-year Treason Trial, which finally resulted in his acquittal on 29 March 1961. Under renewed banning orders that restricted his freedom of speech and movement, limiting him to the Lower Tugela magisterial area, Luthuli was confined to his home in Groutville when he learned on 12 October 1961 that he was being awarded the Peace Prize. In a public statement, he thanked the Nobel Committee, but suggested that the award was being given, not only to himself, “but also to my country and its people – especially those who have fought and suffered in the struggle to achieve the emancipation of all South Africans from the bonds of fear and injustice”.5
The apartheid regime reacted with outrage at the prize. John Vorster, then Minister of Justice, grudgingly allowed him to travel to Norway, “notwithstanding the fact that the government fully realises that the award was not made on merit”. Die Burger, the media mouthpiece for the apartheid government, said the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Albert Luthuli was a “remarkably immature, poorly considered and fundamentally un-Western decision”.6 With characteristic humility and humour, Chief Luthuli observed that this was the first time he had ever agreed with the apartheid government, since he also thought that he was not worthy of such a great honour.
Although the government was prepared to let him go to Norway, it would not grant permission for him to attend the celebrations that were held in nearby Stanger. Buses were prevented from transporting people to the event. Nevertheless, a celebration was held. Fatima Meer spoke. Alan Paton read out his “Praise Song for Luthuli”:
You there, Luthuli, they thought your world was small
They thought you lived in Groutville
Now they discover
It is the world you live in.
You there, Luthuli, they thought your name was small
Luthuli of Groutville
Now they discover
Your name is everywhere.
You there, Luthuli, they thought that you were chained
Like a backyard dog Now they discover
They are in prison, but you are free.
You there, Luthuli, they took your name of Chief
You were not worthy
Now they discover You are more
Chief than ever.
Go well, Luthuli, may your days be long
Your country cannot spare you
Win for us also, Luthuli
The prize of Peace.7
The praise singer, Percy Yengwa, received the biggest response from the gathering for his poetry celebrating the great bull that our enemies had tried to enclose in a kraal, the great bull who had broken the strong fence to wander far – as far as Oslo! Yengwa concluded by praising Albert Luthuli as “Nkosi yase Groutville! Nkosi yase Afrika! Noksi yase world! (Chief of Groutville, Chief of Africa, Chief of the world!).”
Albert and Nokukhanya Luthuli flew to Oslo, via London, where I caught such a brief glimpse of them. Albert Luthuli had been outside the country before, visiting India in 1938 and the United States in 1948, on both trips feeling what he called a “reprieve from the tense complexity of my homeland”. Chief Luthuli received the Nobel Peace Prize on 10 December 1961, a significant day declared by the United Nations as International Human Rights Day. He made a brief acceptance speech. The next day he delivered his lecture, “Africa and Freedom”. Wearing his traditional Zulu headdress, he was very much the Chief. But he surprised the Nobel audience by singing the national anthem, Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, demonstrating that he was also the political leader and president of the ANC.
Albert Luthuli made a tremendous impression by bringing Africa to Europe. As a Norwegian newspaper reported on Luthuli’s Nobel lecture, “We have suddenly begun to feel Africa’s nearness and greatness. In the millions of huts of corrugated iron, mud and straw lives a force which can make the world richer … Luthuli, the Zulu chieftain and schoolteacher, is an exceptional man. But in his words, his voice, his smile, his strength, his spontaneity a whole continent speaks.” Although his words and voice could be heard in Norway, they still could not legally be heard in South Africa. “Albert Luthuli must now return to his people in chains, to his guards in exile,” this Norwegian report concluded. “We have never seen a freer man!”8
Returning home, Albert Luthuli was again confined to Groutville. With the Nobel Prize money, Chief Luthuli bought farms in Swaziland. He hoped that these farms would provide a safe haven for ANC refugees from the increasingly violent repression of the movement in South Africa. Any profits from the farms, he hoped, would go towards supporting the ANC in exile. Since Albert Luthuli was restricted to Groutville, the responsibility for overseeing the farms fell upon his wife. Arranging the purchase of two farms in Swaziland, Nokukhanya travelled every spring to spend six months sowing and reaping in the fields. Enduring tremendous hardship, Nokukhanya Luthuli demonstrated why she was held in such high regard as a force in her own right, affectionately known as the Mother of Light.9
In 1963 the American journalist, interviewer and oral historian, Studs Terkel, was visiting South Africa. In Johannesburg he met the author Nadine Gordimer, who would receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. She told Terkel that he had to meet her friend, the Chief. In his interview with Albert Luthuli, Studs Terkel was impressed with the Chief’s extraordinary generosity of spirit. Although blacks had suffered greatly under apartheid, Luthuli said, “The white is hit harder by apartheid than we are. It narrows his life. In not regarding us as humans he becomes less than human. I do pity him.”10 Luthuli’s vision for the future, a non-racial democracy, was the only hope for an expansion of the human spirit, for all South Africans, black and white.
Apartheid, as Albert Luthuli saw so clearly, was a tragic failure of imagination. As he observed in his autobiography, Let My People Go, “We Africans are depersonalised by the whites, our humanity and dignity reduced in their imagination to a minimum.”11 Such a reduction of human dignity, beginning in the imagination, had produced tragic consequences for everyone in South Africa.
Recovering human dignity required imagination and courage “uniting all resisters to white supremacy, regardless of race”. Non-violent resistance, as Luthuli often observed, was his preferred strategy. He came from a neighbourhood in KwaZulu-Natal in which there was remarkable interchange