•Albert Luthuli

Albert Luthuli (Chief Luthuli) 

Alert Luthuli was the president general of the ANC from 1952 up until his death in 1967. He was born in 1898 with a Seventh-Day Advent minister as a father. Therefore he was educated in a mission school in his ancestral home in Natal. He later became a teacher and believed that education was a key part in advancement for Africans. Both his Christian and educational background played a significant role in his non-violent and moral strategies of opposing the apartheid system.

Luthuli joined the Natal Native Teachers’ Union and was involved in the school boycotts. 1935 he was elected chieftaincy of Groutville ( a natives reserve area —> Natives Land Act). During this time his radical outlook started to grow because of the 1936 Representation of Natives Act, a law which removed black from the common voters’ roll in the Cape.

In 1944 he joined the ANC and was only a year later elected Native Representative Council. He used his position to oppose the cruel response by the government to the 1946 miners’ strike which caused the government to disband the council. After this he became the provincial president of the ANC in Natal.

Because of his Christian background he was an ideal anti-apartheid protestor—through his non-violent and high moral values—and he was an important organiser of the Defiance Campaign. The government gave him the ultimatum that to keep his chieftaincy position he had to leave the ANC but he refused and was dismissed as chief if the Groutville reserve.

Luthuli strongly believed in the non-violent strategy of opposing apartheid which became very prominent when he wrote ”The Road to Freedom is via the Cross”, a public statement that was a response to his decision to stay with the ANC. He stated that the apartheid system would eventually collapse when the non-violent and peaceful resistance from the Africans made the white people realise the fundamental injustice of it.

In December 1952 Luthuli was elected president general in the ANC. He succeeded James Moroka who had pleaded not-guilty in a Defiance Campaign trial which forced him to resign his position as the point of the Defiance Campaign was to plead guilty and to overcrowd the prisons. Luthuli played an important role in proving that the ANC was still a non-violent organisation and to restore their dignity. However the government saw the potential in him and was almost immediately slapped with a two year ban under the Suppression of Communism Act.

Despite being banned several times Albert still managed to play a significant part in forming the ANC’s strategy. He also tried to mediate between the two factions of the ANC that emerged in the mid 50’s; the Africanists and the Chartists (lefties; favoured collaboration with the SACP). The Africanists however felt he was siding with the the leftists and this is one of the reasons Robert Sobukwe decided to create the PAC.

In 1956 Luthuli was arrested and imprisoned for over a year as a defendant in the Treason Trial. In the late 50’s he enjoyed a time of freedom but he had little involvement in the major protests—like Alexandra Bus Boycott—instead new and more prominent people like Nelson Mandel, Walter Sisulu and Robert Sobukwe took a lead.

Luthuli was arrested again in 1960 and found guilty under the government’s new emergency powers. He escaped the prison sentence due to ill health and from this point we can see Luthuli’s political influence fade. He was by then 62 years old had had to leave room for the younger generation. Recent studies show that he might not even have been consulted when the final decision to create the MK was made, a move he had opposed for the major part of the last decade.

When the ANC was banned Luthuli remained as a symbolic figure for the movement. In 1961 was allowed to travel to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Price he had won the previous year. He suffered from very ill health the years following this and was in 1967 run over at a railway crossing.