Robert Trent Vinson

Albert Luthuli

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levels of cooperation between Africans and Indians.7 Luthuli was a crucial influence on future Indian Congressites such as the antiapartheid activist Kader Asmal, who remembered, “I met him on a number of occasions in the late 1940s and early 1950s when he knocked on doors in my home town of Stanger looking for support. His non-racialism and his commitment to freedom and democracy made an indelible impression on me. Albert Luthuli was one of the most important influences leading me into the politics of liberation.”8 Luthuli’s multiracial stance allayed the suspicions of Indians and whites harbored by ANC activists like Dorothy Nyembe, who remembered how “Chief Luthuli taught us that every person born in this country had a right to stay and be free, whether he is Indian, African or white. We fought side by side.”9

       From Government Chief to ANC President

      By August 1952, government officials had concluded—not surprisingly—that Luthuli’s Defiance Campaign activity conflicted with his chiefly duties to administer and enforce government laws. Summoning Luthuli to Pretoria, Secretary of Native Affairs Dr. W. W. M. Eiselen ordered Luthuli to resign from either the ANC or the chieftaincy. When, after two months, Luthuli refused to choose, the government stripped him of his chieftainship, which included benefits such as paid school fees for his children. But Luthuli insisted, “a chief is primarily a servant of his people . . . not a local agent of the Government. . . . Why shouldn’t [Africans] assist this organization which fights for the welfare of the black man?”10 Luthuli lamented,

      who will deny that thirty years of my life have been spent knocking in vain, patiently, moderately at a closed and barred door? What have been the fruits of my many years of moderation? . . .

      . . . Has there been any reciprocal tolerance or moderation from the Government, be it Nationalist or United Party? No! No! On the contrary, the past 30 years have seen the greatest number of laws restricting our rights and progress until today, we have reached a stage where we have almost no rights at all: no adequate land for our occupation; our only asset, cattle, dwindling; no security of home ownership; no decent and remunerative employment; more restriction of freedom of movement by the pass laws, curfew regulations, influx control measures; in short we have witnessed in these years an intensification of our subjection to ensure and protect white supremacy.11

      Luthuli fought apartheid on political and theological grounds, regarding Christianity as a stirring social gospel of justice, freedom, and equality and Jesus as the champion of the dispossessed who had died on the cross for all of humanity, not just whites. Luthuli argued that all Christians should fight for social justice, his politics reflecting his own understanding of Christianity: “I am in Congress precisely because I am a Christian. My Christian belief about human society must find expression here and now. . . . My own urge, because I am a Christian, is to get into the thick of the struggle with other Christians, taking my Christianity with me and praying that it may be used to influence for good the character of the resistance.”12 Thus, he criticized the many whites, especially within the Afrikaner Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), who used Christianity to justify white supremacy, relying on the Calvinist doctrine of an “elect” in claiming divine sanction to rule South Africa as a supreme and separate population over blacks.13 DRC religious leaders championed apartheid as a divinely ordained, comprehensive social engineering program that would create societal harmony through rigorous political, socioeconomic, and physical separation, thereby eliminating the supposed evils of racial egalitarianism.14 Despite the Christian principle of an “equality of believers” regardless of race, proapartheid self-professed “Christians” argued that in racial matters “all earthly distinctions remain.”15 For Luthuli, apartheid was a violation of God’s law, “contrary to the plan and purpose of God our Creator, who created all men equal.”16

      At the ANC annual conference in December 1952, ANC delegates including Walter Sisulu, impressed by Luthuli’s “defiance of the government,” elected him president over Moroka, who had hired his own lawyer and disavowed Congress policies in court after being arrested for Defiance Campaign involvement.17 Taking the mantle of an organization that had just had fifty-two leaders banned, twenty leaders, including Moroka, and over eight thousand volunteers convicted for Defiance Campaign activities, Luthuli immediately visited national ANC branches countrywide. In the Eastern Cape’s Port Elizabeth, twenty-five thousand people came to hear him demand, “Vula Malan thina siya qonqotha” (Open the door, Malan, we are knocking!”), and sang, “Malan o tshohilole ‘muso oa hae. Luthuli phakisa onke’muso!” (Malan has taken fright, make haste, Luthuli, and form a new government!).18 At home, Nokukhanya vetted Albert’s speeches as they hosted visiting ANC members and friends such as Nelson Mandela, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, and other visitors, who, showing customary Zulu respect before entering someone’s home, addressed Luthuli by his clan name: “O! Madlanduna, Mashisha Sikhulekile Ekhaya.”19

       The Violence of the Apartheid State

      In response to the Defiance Campaign, apartheid South Africa evolved further toward a police state, with bans that forced Eastern Cape ANC branches underground and police raids of homes and workplaces of campaign leaders, including Luthuli, to confiscate Defiance Campaign documents, membership cards, organizational papers, and files. With the introduction of the Public Safety Act and the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1953, the state could proclaim states of emergency; suspend the rule of law; expand its arrest powers; place restrictions on freedoms of assembly, speech, and movement; and ban the words and images of activists. The white electorate seemingly approved of these repressive tactics, as the Nationalists gained twenty-four parliamentary seats in the April 1953 elections. The judiciary was another instrument of domination; in addition to the December 1952 convictions of ANC leaders, the state convicted fifteen Defiance Campaign leaders in Port Elizabeth in 1953 of contravening the Suppression of Communism Act.20

      Luthuli condemned the National Party’s “fascist dictatorship” and the “anti-Defiance Acts,” which evoked the “unfortunate Medieval Dark Ages.” Lamenting the apartheid “chain of bondage” that left Africans “prisoners in their own castle,” he nevertheless celebrated the significant domestic and international support for the Defiance Campaign’s fight for democracy and the “fundamental human rights of freedom of speech, association and movement,” which would achieve “racial harmony in the Union,” bringing South Africa into modern civilization.21 He felt that only an inclusive African nationalism, expressed by a broad ANC-led multiracial coalition, could defeat apartheid and create a postapartheid, inclusive, egalitarian, equitable, and democratic South Africa. In sharp contrast to National Party leaders, who cast apartheid as the solution to the supposed problem of multiracial societies and an international model for other racially mixed countries, Luthuli reconciled the seemingly oppositional political claims of national unity and racial diversity. “I personally believe that here in South Africa, with all our diversities of color and race, we will show the world a new pattern of democracy. . . . We can build a homogeneous South Africa on the basis not of colour but of human values.”22 His inclusive nationalism asserted the primacy of African claims based on their indigenous status, their numerical majority, and the longevity of their struggle. But unlike the Lembedist exclusive African nationalism of the 1940s, Luthuli did not present whites and other racial groups as foreigners, but as permanently settled South Africans.

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