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Luthuli Legacy Project

by President Thabo Mbeki

IT IS WITH GREAT PRIDE and pleasure that I address you today in honour of our beloved and revered leader, Chief Albert John Mvumbi Luthuli.

The Luthuli Legacy Project fulfils the dreams and aspirations of the masses of our people that our great African heroes and heroines should be honoured and cherished for all time. This legacy project is part of our government’s programme to ensure that, as South Africans, we capture, remember and celebrate the totality of the South African history, particularly those aspects of our history that were deliberately neglected, falsified, denigrated, ridiculed and presented in a manner that sought to entrench the anti-human ideology of racial superiority and inferiority.

Accordingly, as part of the efforts to liberate ourselves from apartheid and colonialism, both physically and mentally, we have to engage in the process of telling the truth about the history of our country, so that all of our people, armed with this truth, can confidently face the challenges of this day and the next.

This labour of love, of telling the true story of South Africa and Africa, has to be intensified on all fronts, so that as Africans we are able to write, present and interpret our history, our conditions and life circumstances, according to our knowledge and experience.

It is a challenge that confronts all Africans everywhere – on our continent and in the Diaspora – to define ourselves, not in the image of others, or according to the dictates and fancies of people other than ourselves.

We are gathered here today to celebrate the life, the work, the struggle and philosophy of one of the greatest leaders of our country. As we know, Chief Albert Luthuli was an educator, a leader within his church, a traditional leader, a President of the African National Congress and also the first African to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his outstanding efforts for the cause of human freedom, human dignity, non-racialism, democracy and peace.

We would like to thank the Ministry and Department of Arts and Culture for ensuring that through the Luthuli Legacy Project, the ideas and philosophy of this great soldier of the African people are preserved so as to inspire all future generations to work for their full realisation.

Today, many people across the world appreciate the fact that the final stage of our liberation was marked by freedom fighters and oppressors sitting down at the same table to hammer out a settlement that buried the apartheid demon and established a society based on the ideals of equality, non-racialism, non-sexism and democracy. Chief Albert Luthuli had cherished this outcome throughout his lifetime. Undoubtedly it is therefore part of the legacy that he bequeathed to our country and people.

Chief Luthuli’s life was inextricably linked to the striving of our people for democracy. Indeed, the defining moments of Chief Luthuli’s leadership were during the 1950’s, a decade marked by militant mass struggles, including the Defiance Campaign, general strikes, bus boycotts, the potato boycott, mass campaigns against passes for women, the struggles against Bantu Education, workers’ struggles for better wages and better working conditions and many other mass struggles of our people.

The 1950’s also witnessed the historic process of the independence of Africans from colonialism and the rollback of the outcomes produced by the European Scramble for Africa, which resulted in our continent being shared by the imperial powers. The Suez crisis of 1956 was a clear indication that the gunboat diplomacy of a previous era was no longer an option for the Western powers. The independence of Africa gathered momentum, when first Ghana became free in 1957, then Guinea in 1958 and subsequently a number of African countries gained their independence.

It was during this time of mass struggles in our country and the collapse of the colonial system, that the rare gift of the leadership of Albert Luthuli came to the fore. Luthuli was a man of immense dignity and noble bearing. His love of humanity was matched by his intolerance of racial bigotry and oppression.

During an adult life taken up with political activism, and on the basis of his strong Christian convictions, he forged a democratic political outlook that embraced people of all colours, races and creeds as members of the human family.

The indestructible legacy that Chief Luthuli has left for all of us is the unwavering dedication to the total liberation of his people and the indomitable will to undertake seemingly impossible tasks to achieve this objective.

The legacy project we launched today is but perhaps an insufficient tribute to that indomitable spirit to serve the people of South Africa and Africa. All of us are proud and honoured to have participated in the restoration of the church in which he spread the true meaning of the gospel to the masses of our people; the consecration of the family burial plot where he is laid to rest; the opening of the Luthuli Museum in Groutville, and the unveiling of the statue of Chief AJ Luthuli at the KwaDukuza Cultural Precinct.

In a speech to the 22nd Biennial Conference of the South African Indian Congress in 1956, Chief Luthuli quoted one of his favourite poems, “The Psalm of Life” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It is perhaps fitting that, on this day, we should share Longfellow’s words with you, in memory of a great patriot and Nobel Peace Laureate. Longfellow wrote:

Life is real! Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal;

We can make our lives sublime,

And departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,

Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

Seeing, shall take heart again.

After quoting Longfellow, Chief Luthuli issued this challenge to the delegates: “The challenge to you and all of us who love and value liberty is to build a tradition that will be a statue of liberty in the Union of South Africa. We have to do this in the face of strong gales that make the task of building and maintaining this Statue of Freedom a most hazardous undertaking fraught with dangers that are capable of destroying us and the tradition of liberty we would be building. The cause is so worthwhile that any risks and dangers confronting its realization sink into insignificance.”

Indeed, today, as we remember this great African leader, we dare say that the better life that we are building after attaining the freedom that Luthuli and many others fought so hard to achieve, must be real, as the poet said.

I am confident that through our combined efforts, together we can make the lives of our people sublime and magnificent, uplifting particularly those who occupy the lowest rung in our social order. In doing so, and as the poet said, we will emulate AJ Luthuli in leaving behind us the “footprints on the sands of time”.

We are blessed that we have the opportunity to follow on those footprints, because the wise words he uttered in 1956 are still very relevant today. We agree with his call that all of us who value liberty have to build a tradition that will be a statue of liberty in our country.

As we work for the total transformation of our country into a truly non-racial, non-sexist, and prosperous democracy, his prophetic words become more relevant because indeed we are engaged in the task of building a statue of liberty, “in the face of strong gales that make the task of building and maintaining this Statue of Freedom a most hazardous undertaking fraught with dangers that are capable of destroying us and the tradition of liberty we would be building”.

Clearly, Chief Luthuli knew that as he, during his time, confronted strong gales that made the task of achieving freedom difficult, these strong gales would still rage, even if in different forms, to confront those whose task would be to ensure that the freedom that we won after a long and bitter struggle, is entrenched and consolidated.

Accordingly, his words of 1956 were directed both to his audience and to all of us, that we cannot and must not hesitate and falter in the pursuit of the transformation path that will clearly consolidate our freedom because, “the cause is so worthwhile that any risks and dangers confronting its realisation sink into insignificance”.

In the same poem Chief Luthuli quoted, Longfellow says:

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

Is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each to-morrow

Find us farther than to-day.

Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labour and to wait.

We, who are gathered here today, should be able to say to Chief Albert Luthuli that we are working in such a manner that “each tomorrow” will undoubtedly find us “farther than today”; that as we celebrate our decade of freedom we are able to say, confidently and without any contradiction, that the lives of our people are better than they were ten years ago.

Thus we must accelerate the process of transformation such that when we report at the end of the second decade of our freedom, we should be able to say confidently and without any contradiction that the lives of our people are much better than they were in 2004.

In a message to Drum magazine while he was in Oslo, Norway, to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Chief Luthuli said: “My prayer is that the day will soon come when all my people will share in the freedom and the good things of life which are all around me as I write.”

Chief Luthuli did not live to see that day, which came on the 27th April 1994. But those of us who had the privilege to experience that day have a duty not to betray the struggle that defined the life of Chief Luthuli.

As we do all the things that we must do and as we build and maintain the Statue of Freedom that Chief Albert Luthuli referred to, we will like Henry Longfellow say:

Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labour and to wait.

I thank you.

This Presidential Address was first delivered in KwaDukuza on 21 August 2004.