Albert Lutuli

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(b. near Bulawayo 1898; d. 21 July 1967) South African; President African National Congress 1952 – 67 Born in Rhodesia into a Zulu chiefly family who moved to Natal (South Africa) when he was a young boy he was educated in mission schools and qualified as a teacher. In 1935 he inherited a minor Zulu chiefship but was subsequently deposed by the government for political activities. In 1945 he joined the ANC, becoming president of the Natal branch shortly afterwards. Following the defiance campaign in 1952 he was elected national President. From then on his active role within the organization was severely limited due to almost constant restrictions, banning, and imprisonment by the government. His role was predominantly one of symbolic and moral leadership whilst other leaders such as Nelson Mandela were responsible for day-to-day co-ordination.

Throughout his life he remained committed to the goal of a non-racial South Africa and was a staunch believer in non-violent passive resistance to apartheid. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1960. In 1962 he published his autobiography, Let My People Go, which vainly called for a peaceful solution to South Africa's conflicts. In 1967 he was killed by a train whilst crossing a railway track in what are regarded by many as suspicious circumstances.

Albert John Luthuli (1898-1967) was a South African statesman and the first African to win the Nobel Prize for peace. His leadership of black resistance to apartheid helped to focus world opinion on South Africa's race policies.

Albert Luthuli was born in Solusi mission station, Rhodesia, where his father served American missionaries as an interpreter. The Luthulis had originally come from Groutville, a Zulu mission station about 40 miles to the north of Durban. Young Albert attended school in Groutville and trained as a teacher at Adams College, where he later taught. It was while he was teaching at Adams that the Groutville community requested him to become its chief. Sugarcane production, which was the reservation's main source of income, had run into difficulties. Luthuli accepted the invitation and saved the community's economy from collapse.

Luthuli's thinking was influenced as much by the Zulu's view of life as by his Christian background and by race segregation. These made his regard for the sacredness of the person and his commitment to nonviolence and the creation of a nonracial democracy in South Africa the dominant features of his leadership.

Luthuli regarded the traditional evaluation of the person as transcending all barriers of race because the infinite consciousness has no color. Black and white are bound together by the common humanity they have. He believed that Christian values can unite black and white in a democratic coalition. Apartheid's preoccupation with color and the particular experience of the Afrikaner outraged him because it gives a meaning to Christian values which uses race to fix the person's position in society and sets a ceiling beyond which the African cannot develop his full potential as a human being. In this setting the black man (or any other person of color) is punished for being the child of his parents. Luthuli rejected violence not only because it militates against the coalition he had in mind but also because it offends the Golden Rule.

For holding these views Luthuli was later to be deposed, banned, and brought to trial for treason. The law under which he was charged (1956) was the Suppression of Communism Act. South African law recognizes two forms of communism: the Marxist-Leninist and the statutory. Whoever opposes apartheid with determination or advocates race equality seriously is a statutory Communist.

Luthuli was interested in the human experience as a totality. He translated his beliefs into action by supporting the nonracial Christian Council of South Africa, which sent him to the conference of the International Missionary Council held in India in 1938. Ten years later he was in the United States representing his Congregational Church at the synod of the North American Missionary Conference.

In the meantime Luthuli had involved himself directly in his people's political struggle and, in 1946, had been elected to the Natives Representative Council, a body set up by James Munnik Hertzog to advise the government on African affairs. Luthuli became president of the Natal section of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1951. In this capacity he led the 1951-1952 campaign for the deflance of six discriminatory laws. For doing this he was deposed as chief. In a statement issued after his dismissal he said, "I have joined my people in the spirit that revolts openly and boldly against injustice and expresses itself in a determined and nonviolent manner."

The Africans replied to the dismissal by electing him president general of the ANC. The government countered with a ban which confined him to Groutville for two years. A second ban restricted his movements when the first expired in 1954. Two years later a charge of treason, which collapsed in court after a year's trial, was brought against him and some of his colleagues. Three years later he was banned for five years under the Suppression of Communism Act.

By 1959 Luthuli was coming under criticism from the militants for both his insistence on nonviolence and his form of collaboration with non-Africans. The final split came when Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe broke away from the ANC and formed the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). On March 21, 1960, Sobukwe called the Africans out in a national demonstration against the Pass Laws. The police opened fire on the demonstrators in Sharpeville, Cape Town, Clermont Township near Pinetown, and Durban. Luthuli proclaimed a day of mourning and was subsequently arrested during the state of emergency which followed the shootings.

The Swedish Parliament nominated Luthuli for the Nobel Peace Prize, which he received at Oslo University on Dec. 10, 1961. In his acceptance speech he stressed the element of continuity in his people's struggle and reaffirmed his hopes for Africa. "I did not initiate the struggle to extend the area of human freedom in South Africa; other African patriots - devoted men - did so before me." He continued, "Our goal is a united Africa in which the standards of life and liberty are constantly expandin…. a nonracial democratic South Africa which upholds the rights of all who live in our country." He invited "Africa to cast her eyes beyond the past and to some extent the present" to the "recognition and preservation of the rights of man and the establishment of a truly free world."

The United States offered Luthuli sanctuary if he decided not to return to South Africa. He did not accept the offer. He was involved in a train accident and died in Stanger on July 21, 1967.

Further Reading

In his autobiography, Let My People Go (1962), Luthuli describes the influences that shaped his thinking. Edward Callan, Albert John Luthuli and the South African Race Conflict (1962), is an informative monograph on Luthuli's public life. For further background consult Anthony Sampson, The Treason Cage: The Opposition on Trial in South Africa (1958); Gwendolen M. Carter, The Politics of Inequality: South Africa since 1948 (1958); and two works by Mary Benson, Chief Albert Luthuli of South Africa (1963) and The African Patriots: The Story of the African National Congress (1963). A chapter on Luthuli is in Melville Harcourt, Portraits of Destiny (1966).

antiapartheid activist

Personal Information

Born Albert John Mvumbi Luthuli, c. 1898, on a Congregationalist mission near Bulawayo, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe); died, 1967; son of John Bunyan Luthuli (an interpreter and evangelist) and Mtonya (maiden name Gumede) Luthuli; married Nokukhanya Behengu (a teacher), 1927; seven children.
Education: Edendale (a Methodist teacher-training institute), graduated 1917; attended Adams Mission Station College, 1920-21.

Career

Adams Mission Station College, teacher, 1921-35; Abasemakholweni Zulu tribal chief, 1936-53; African National Congress, president- general, 1953-67. Apartheid resistance leader, member of African National Congress.

Life's Work

"South Africa is large enough to accommodate all people if they have large enough hearts." That is how Albert Luthuli once summed up his political vision for his country. As one of the leading fighters against South Africa's system of racial separation, Luthuli brought a message of hope and perseverance to the nation's oppressed black majority. Although he advocated bold defiance of his country's discriminatory apartheid laws, he was committed to the principle of nonviolence; and he envisioned a color-blind South Africa in which black and white citizens could live side-by-side peacefully as equals. In 1960 Luthuli became the first black African to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in recognition of his many years at the forefront of the struggle for racial justice in South Africa.

Albert John Luthuli was born in about 1898--exact records were not kept--in a Congregationalist mission in Rhodesia, where his father worked as an interpreter. Both of his parents had been born in South Africa, and the family had a prominent history in the Zulu community. When Luthuli was a young child, his father died. His mother then moved the family back to South Africa, settling on a farm run by Christian missionaries in the Natal Province. She sent Albert to live with his uncle, Martin Luthuli, the reigning chief of the Abasemakholweni Zulus in Groutville, north of Durban. At Groutville, Luthuli began attending school. In 1915 he entered Edendale, a Methodist teachers' college. After graduating from Edendale, Luthuli served for a short time as principal and sole faculty member of a small school in the Natal Province.

In 1920 Luthuli was awarded a scholarship for further study at Adams Mission Station College. After two years as a student there, he accepted a teaching position at the college. He remained on the Adams faculty for the next 13 years. In 1935 Luthuli was asked by a group of tribal leaders to run for the democratically elected position of chief of the Umvoti Mission Reserve, the same Groutville-based post formerly held by his uncle. Upon winning the election, he resigned from his teaching job and undertook the task of administering the affairs of the reserve's 5,000 tribal members.

Over the next 17 years, Luthuli reigned as chief of the Groutville Zulus. During his first several years as chief, he succeeded in organizing sugarcane farmers and also in gaining a handful of other minor government concessions for his people. He was also active in a number of religious organizations. In 1938 he represented the Christian Council of South Africa at the International Missionary Council in India. He also served as chairman of the Congregational Churches of the American Board, and president of the Natal Mission Conference.

Developments during and after World War II led to Luthuli's gradual disenchantment with South Africa's white government and his subsequent politicization. Nonwhites had been led to believe that their loyalty to the government during the war would be rewarded with greater civil rights; however, the government initiated its apartheid system instead. Blacks were required to carry passes and were stripped of their voting rights. In 1946, as protest among blacks simmered, Luthuli joined the African National Congress (ANC), an organization formed in 1912 to promote voting rights for blacks and to unite the various tribes. He became an outspoken critic of apartheid, and by the early 1950s he was president of the ANC's Natal Provincial Division. In 1952 Luthuli helped organized a nationwide "Defiance Campaign" that included massive violations of laws governing curfews, segregation, and passes.

As Luthuli's political activity escalated, the government began to take notice. In 1953 he was asked to give up either his job as chief of the reserve or his presidency of the Natal ANC branch. Luthuli ignored the government's demand, declaring that his duty as a Zulu chief was primarily to his people rather than to the government. When he refused to quit either position, he was dismissed as chief in Groutville. He continued to increase his political involvement while supporting his family by working a small farm. Within a month, Luthuli was named president-general of the entire ANC.

As head of the ANC, Luthuli traveled the country speaking out against the pass laws, the abolition of mission schools, and other unjust policies. He called for an ongoing program of nonviolent protest. The government responded by banning Luthuli from appearing at large gatherings or in major cities for two years. When the period of the ban was over, he picked up right where he had left off, leading protests and spurring crowds to action wherever he went. This time, the government's reply was to restrict Luthuli to the Groutville area for two more years. In 1955 he was elected to another term as president-general of the ANC.

Luthuli resumed his activities once again upon the expiration of his second ban. Just five months later, he was arrested, along with 155 others, for the capital crime of treason. Luthuli remained in a Johannesburg prison for about a year before the charges against him were finally dropped. By this time, Luthuli was recognized both nationally and internationally as one of the leading crusaders for racial justice in South Africa. Again, he resumed his speaking and organizing activities as soon as he was allowed. In 1959 the government used the new Suppression of Communism Act to confine Luthuli to his small farm for five years, and he was banned from attending any meetings whatsoever. Even from prison and from his farm, Luthuli was able to play a major role in organizing nonviolent protests, particularly a string of "stay-at-homes" in which large numbers of workers did not report for their jobs.

In 1960, some 250 unarmed blacks were shot--about 70 of them fatally--by police during a peaceful demonstration against pass laws in the town of Sharpeville. After the Sharpeville massacre, Luthuli burned his own pass in public, and urged others to follow suit. Amid widespread protest, the government declared a state of emergency. The ANC was outlawed, and thousands of arrests were made. For his role in the protests, Luthuli was sentenced to six months in prison. Because he was suffering from high blood pressure and other ailments by this time, however, Luthuli was released from prison and sent back into exile at Groutville.

In 1961 Luthuli was named as winner of the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize, making him the first black African to be so honored. In announcing the award, the Nobel committee pointed to Luthuli's refusal to resort to violence throughout his career as a liberation leader. While the announcement was celebrated throughout most of the world, inside South Africa the news was received badly by the white government, which portrayed Luthuli as a traitor and a menace to society. After initial refusals, he was eventually granted permission to travel to Oslo, Norway, to receive the award. In his acceptance speech, Luthuli noted the irony of his presence there. "How great is the paradox and how much greater the honor that an award in support of peace and the brotherhood of man should come to one who is a citizen of a country where the brotherhood of man is an illegal doctrine," he said. Upon his return to South Africa, Luthuli was prevented from addressing the huge, adoring crowd that had gathered to greet him.

Luthuli again returned to confinement in Groutville. There he wrote his autobiography, Let My People Go, which, to nobody's surprise, was immediately banned in South Africa. During the last few years of his life, Luthuli's health began to fail. He was nevertheless still barred from speaking in public, and it was illegal for others to publish or quote his words. He lived a quiet life on his farm, resuming his political work whenever it was feasible. In 1967, with both his hearing and eyesight deteriorating, Luthuli was hit by a train while crossing a railroad bridge.

Despite the South African government's repeated attempts to silence him, Luthuli's was clearly one of the most important voices in the collective cry for equality during his lifetime. As white minority rule in South Africa was dismantled in the 1990s, the echoes of that voice remained audible.

Awards

Nobel Peace Prize, 1960.

Further Reading

Books

• Benson, Mary, Chief Albert Luthuli of South Africa, Oxford University Press, 1963.
• Callan, Edward, Albert John Luthuli and the South African Race Conflict, Institute of International and Area Studies, Western Michigan University, 1965.
• Luthuli, Albert, Let My People Go, Collins, 1962.

• Atlantic, April 1959, pp. 34-39.
• Crisis, December 1974, pp. 334-337.
• New York Times, July 22, 1967, p. 1.

— Robert R. Jacobson

Albert Lutuli
President of the African National Congress
In office 1952 – 1967
Preceded by	James Moroka
Succeeded by	Oliver Tambo
Born	c. 1898 Bulawayo, Rhodesia
Died	July 21, 1967 Stanger, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Political party	African National Congress
Spouse(s)	Nokukhanya Bhengu

Statue of Albert Lutuli at Nobel Square at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town.

Albert John Lutuli (commonly spelled Luthuli),^[1] also known by his Zulu name "Mvumbi" (c. 1898 – 21 July 1967), was a South African teacher and politician. Lutuli was elected president of the African National Congress (ANC), at the time an umbrella organisation that led opposition to the white minority government in South Africa. He was awarded the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the non-violent struggle against apartheid.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Teaching 3 Tribal chief 4 Anti-Apartheid activist 5 Bans 6 ANC 7 Umkhonto we Sizwe 8 See also 9 References 10 External links

Early life

The third son of Seventh-day Adventist missionary John Bunyan Lutuli and Mtonya Gumede, Albert Lutuli was born near Bulawayo in what was then called Rhodesia, around 1898. His father died, and he and his mother returned to her ancestral home of Groutville in KwaDukuza (Stanger), Natal, South Africa. He stayed with his uncle, Martin Lutuli, who was at that time the elected chief of the Christian Zulus inhabiting the Umzinyathi District Municipality mission Reserve.

Teaching

On completing a teaching course at Edendale, near Pietermaritzburg, Lutuli took up the running of a small primary school in the Natal uplands. He was confirmed in the Methodist church and became a lay preacher. In 1920 he received a government bursary to attend a higher teachers' training course at Adams College, and subsequently joined the training college staff, teaching alongside Z.K. Mathews, who was then head of the Adams College High School. To provide financial support for his mother, he declined a scholarship to University of Fort Hare.

In 1928 he became secretary of the African Teacher's Association and in 1933 its president. He was also active in missionary work.

Tribal chief

In 1933 the tribal elders asked Lutuli to become chief of the tribe. For two years he hesitated, but accepted the call in early 1936 and became chieftain, until removed from this office by the government in 1952.

Anti-Apartheid activist

In 1936 the government disenfranchised the only Africans who had had voting rights — those in Cape Province; in 1948 the Nationalist Party, in control of the government, adopted the policy of apartheid ( apartness); in the 1950s the laws known as the Pass Laws were tightened.

In 1944 Lutuli joined the African National Congress (ANC). In 1945 he was elected to the Committee of the KwaZulu Province Provincial Division of ANC and in 1951 to the presidency of the Division. The next year he joined with other ANC leaders in organizing nonviolent campaigns to defy discriminatory laws.

The government, charging Lutuli with a conflict of interest, demanded that he withdraw his membership in ANC or forfeit his office as tribal chief. Refusing to do either voluntarily, he was dismissed from his chieftainship.

A month later Lutuli was elected president-general of ANC, formally nominated by the future Pan Africanist Congress leader Potlako Leballo. Responding immediately, the government imposed a succession of bans on his movement, the first for two years, the second also for two years. When this second ban expired, he attended an ANC conference in 1956, only to be arrested and charged with treason a few months later, along with 155 others. After being held in custody for about a year during the preliminary hearings, he was released in December, 1957, and the charges against him and 64 others were dropped.

Bans

Another five year ban confined him to a fifteen-mile radius of his home. The ban was temporarily lifted while he testified at the continuing treason trials. It was lifted again in March 1960, to permit his arrest for publicly burning his pass following the Sharpeville massacre. In the ensuing state of emergency he was arrested, found guilty, fined, given a suspended jail sentence and returned to Groutville. One final time the ban was lifted, this time for ten days in early December 1961 to permit Lutuli and his wife to attend the Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies in Oslo, an award described by Die Transvaler as "an inexplicable pathological phenomenon".

ANC

Lutuli's leadership of the ANC covered the period of violent disputes between the party's "Africanist" and "Charterist" wings. Africanist critics claim Lutuli was peripherialized in Natal and the Transvaal ANC Provincial branch and its Communist Party (CPSA officially dissolved 1950 but secretly reconstituted 1953 as SACP) allies took advantage of this situation. Lutuli did not see the Freedom Charter before it was adopted by acclaim at Kliptown in 1955. After reading the document and realising the ANC, despite its numerical superiority, had been subordinated to one vote in a five member multiracial and trade union "Congress Alliance", Lutuli rejected the Charter but then later accepted it partly to counter the more radical Africanist wing whom he likened to black nazis. In 1959 the Africanists split from the ANC over the issue of the Freedom Charter and Oliver Tambo's 1958 rewriting of the ANC Constitution, founding the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). The PAC posed a serious challenge to the ANC until its military wing was destroyed at Itumbi camp, Chunya, Tanzania in March 1980.

Umkhonto we Sizwe

In December 1961, without Lutuli's sanction, Nelson Mandela of the Provincial ANC publicly launched Umkhonto we Sizwe at the All In Conference, where delegates from several movements had convened to discuss cooperation. Mandela's charisma and the global publicity surrounding his trial and imprisonment upstaged Lutuli, who grew increasingly despondent in isolation. (In Mandela's autobiography, he insists that Lutuli was consulted and consented before the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe.)

In 1962 he was elected Rector of the University of Glasgow by the students, serving until 1965. Since he was banned from travelling to Glasgow the Luthuli Scholarship Fund was setup by the Student Representative Council to enable a black South African student to study at Glasgow University.

A fourth ban to run for five years confining Lutuli to the immediate vicinity of his home was issued in May 1964, to run concurrently with the third ban.

In 1966, he was visited by United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was visiting the South Africa at the time. The two discussed the ANC's struggle. Senator Kennedy's visit to the country, and his meeting with Lutuli in particular, caused an increase of world awareness of the plight of black South Africans.

In July 1967, at the age of 69, he was fatally injured in an accident near his home in Stanger.

In 2004 he was voted 41st in the SABC3's Great South Africans.

See also

• Black Nobel Prize laureates

References

1. ^ South African History Online, biography of Chief Albert John Luthuli: "Note about names: Luthuli's surname is very often spelled Luthuli, as it is in his autobiography, which was prepared for publication by non-vernacular-speaking friends. But Luthuli himself preferred another spelling and signed his name without an h."

External links

• ANC's Lutuli Page
• Nobel Committee information on Lutuli

Academic offices
Preceded by Viscount Hailsham	Rector of the University of Glasgow 1962–1965	Succeeded by Baron Reith

v • d • e Nobel Peace Prize laureates Léon Jouhaux (1951) · Albert Schweitzer (1952) · George Marshall (1953) · United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (1954) · Lester B. Pearson (1957) · Georges Pire (1958) · Philip Noel-Baker (1959) · Albert Lutuli (1960) · Dag Hammarskjöld (1961) · Linus Pauling (1962) · International Committee of the Red Cross / League of Red Cross Societies (1963) · Martin Luther King, Jr. (1964) · UNICEF (1965) · René Cassin (1968) · International Labour Organization (1969) · Norman Borlaug (1970) · Willy Brandt (1971) · Henry Kissinger / Le Duc Tho (declined award) (1973) · Seán MacBride / Eisaku Satō (1974) · Andrei Sakharov (1975) Complete roster · 1901–1925 · 1926–1950 · 1951–1975 · 1976–2000 · 2001–present

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