Transforming the enemy through love
July marked the 50th anniversary of the death of Albert Luthuli, head of the ANC from 1951 to 1967. Sadly, it did not get the attention it deserved.
Luthuli was the first African Nobel peace laureate in 1960. The award was an attempt to highlight apartheid brutalities. He titled his autobiography Let My People Go, borrowed from an American civil rights-era spiritual: “Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt’s land; tell old Pharaoh let my people go!”
Appropriately linking the anti-apartheid and civil rights struggles, Luthuli and 1964 Nobel peace laureate Martin Luther King Jnr, issued a joint declaration against apartheid in 1962. Both Gandhian prophets shared an undying belief in nonviolent struggle, as well as in the ultimate triumph of the human spirit over oppression.
Luthuli was a traditional chief from KwaZulu-Natal who was able to bridge the divide between the urban and rural masses of Africa’s oldest liberation movement. He was involved in the Defiance Campaign of 1952 and led acts of civil disobedience, for which he was jailed and banned. However, he stuck to his principles of Gandhian nonviolent passive resistance (though he noted that he was not a pacifist), advocated economic sanctions against the apartheid regime and pushed for the inclusion of all racial groups in the liberation struggle.
For Luthuli, who was steeped in Christian beliefs, the road to freedom lay through the cross; sacrifices and suffering would be required to translate Jesus’ love ethic into concrete achievements. Like Mahatma Gandhi, the point of the struggle for Luthuli was to transform the enemy’s hatred through love and human dignity.
Luthuli’s Nobel speech in Oslo in December 1961 was entitled Africa and Freedom. The lyrical speech was almost poetic in parts. Wearing a leopard-skin hat, the chief gave an elegant, dignified and defiant speech that exposed the criminality of apartheid.
He bemoaned the shooting of black protesters, oppressive pass laws, bannings, imprisonment, forced labour, penal whippings, farm prisons and land dispossession. He condemned this dictatorship as representing the “trappings of medieval backwardness and cruelty”.
Luthuli described apartheid as a “museum piece in our time, a hangover from the dark past of mankind, a relic of an age which everywhere is dead or dying”. He was effectively depicting his homeland as a giant Jurassic Park of massive injustice full of political dinosaurs who would eventually become extinct. Luthuli’s magnanimity towards his oppressors, his calls for reconciliation and his building of bridges with progressive white South Africans, were the torch that his fellow ANC chieftain and Nobel laureate, Nelson Mandela, would take up four decades later in liberating his country from the bondage of apartheid’s pharaohs.
Luthuli’s Nobel speech was also the cri de coeur of a committed pan-African prophet linking Africa’s independence struggle to that of apartheid SA and calling for a united continent to abandon its oppressive past and build democratic societies based on humane values.
He demonstrated that his Christian faith was the foundation for all his political actions, employing evocative biblical allusions and calling for churches across the globe to join the anti-apartheid struggle. Luthuli appealed to his European audience to see the world as one humanity in the spirit of ubuntu – the gift of discovering our shared humanity.
Today, Luthuli’s memory is preserved in his family home in Groutville, which has been transformed into a museum in which his voice booms over a loudspeaker as his Nobel speech is played. In the words of one of his favourite poets, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — quoted in Luthuli’s Nobel speech — the ANC stalwart certainly left his “footprints on the sands of time”.