Robert Trent Vinson - Albert Luthuli

This series of Ohio Short Histories of Africa is meant for those who are looking for a brief but lively introduction to a wide range of topics in African history, politics, and biography, written by some of the leading experts in their fields.

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by Roy Doron and Toyin Falola

by Douglas H. Johnson

by Paul Bjerk

by Adekeye Adebajo

by Sue Onslow and Martin Plaut

by Robert Trent Vinson

Albert Luthuli

Robert Trent Vinson

OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS

ATHENS

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

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Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8214-2328-8

Electronic ISBN: 978-0-8214-4642-3

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Many, many people contributed to his project. I first thank Gillian Berchowitz for her initial invitation to write about Albert Luthuli and for her expert and encouraging editorial guidance. Peter Alegi, Jean Allman, Phil Bonner, Benedict Carton, Robert Edgar, Michael Kirkwood, Dingane Mthethwa, Jon Soske, Raymond Suttner, Tyler Thomson, and Wendy Urban-Mead read all or portions of this work, though I remain solely responsible for any errors. I also thank Joel Cabrita, Benedict Carton, Robert Edgar, Natasha Erlank, Abosede George, Michael Gomez, Elizabeth Gunner, Robert Houle, Paul Landau, Peter Limb, E. S. Reddy, Jabulani Sithole, Karin Shapiro, Jon Soske, and Raymond Suttner for stimulating conversations about Luthuli. I also thank the participants at the 2015 Northeastern Workshop on South African History, the African History seminar at Duke University, the African Diaspora seminar at New York University, the African Christianities Conference at Cambridge University, and the Armed Struggle Conference at the University of the Witwatersrand for commenting on earlier iterations of this work. Generous funding from the College of William and Mary made possible research trips to South Africa and the United Kingdom and throughout the United States. I am very grateful to Diana Lachatenere and Steven Fullwood III at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and especially to Ms. Thandi Luthuli-Gcabashe for making available to me the Albert Luthuli papers deposited there. I am also indebted to Peter Limb for making available the Mary-Louise Hooper papers while they were still being processed. Of course, nothing is possible without the support and eternal love of the Vinson, McClendon, and Harvey families. This book is dedicated to my grandmother, Josephine Vinson, for loving me unconditionally and to my cousin Jean, who was there when I most needed her and whom I miss every single day.

When Albert Luthuli, president of the African National Congress (ANC), South Africas leading antiapartheid organization, became the first African-born recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1961, the world celebrated his advocacy of nonviolent civil disobedience. The prize signaled international recognition for his Gandhian strategy to end apartheid, South Africas disastrous white supremacist political policy of racial subordination and separation, and connected South Africas antiapartheid struggle to the growing global human rights campaigns exemplified by the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. It propelled Luthuli to global celebrity and raised the profile of the ANC, which he had led since 1952. The ANC would survive lethal state repression in the 1960s and throughout two ensuing decades. As a mass organization, it articulated a broad, inclusive African nationalism and led the Congress Alliance, a multiracial, multi-ideological antiapartheid coalition that shared Luthulis vision of a nonracial, democratic, equitable South Africa.

Luthulis admirers regarded him as a global icon of peace and reconciliation, similar to Mahatma Gandhi

How did Albert Luthulis many life experiencesas a Zulu, an African, an educator, a Christian, a government chief, a doting family man, and a sportsmanshape him as a person and a political leader? On the night of December 15, 1961, as Luthuli and his wife returned to South Africa five days after his Nobel acceptance, ANC members of a new military wing known as Umkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation, or MK) set off the explosive charges that marked the start of their armed struggle.Nobel recipient Nelson Mandela, who wanted Luthulis approval before destroying installations and training saboteurs? What relevance do his life and times have for todays South Africa and for the contemporary world? This biography aims to recover Luthuli from historical obscurity and highlight his key leadership of the ANC as it transformed into a mass antiapartheid movement and his revolutionary belief that apartheid South Africa could become one of the worlds first truly multiracial democracies. Far from being a moderate, Luthuli was a revolutionary for his deep conviction that South Africa, founded on the bedrock of racial subordination and racial separation, could be a global model for a radical new form of multiracial democracy.

Albert John Mvumbi Luthuli was born around 1898 at the Seventh Day Adventist Solusi mission station in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia. His father, John, was an evangelist, teacher, interpreter, and goods transporter for missionaries and the British South Africa Company, then waging war against Mzilikazi and the Ndebele in what later resistance movements would come to know as the first Chimurenga, the 189697 African rebellions against Southern Rhodesian colonialism (the second Chimurenga was the guerrilla war that ended with the establishment of the independent state of Zimbabwe in 1980).