Читать книгу Let My People Go - Albert Luthuli - Страница 5

by Kader Asmal

THE LAST TIME I saw Chief Albert Luthuli was at Heathrow Airport in London on a dark December night in 1961, when he was on his way to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

A small group of South African exiles, students and anti-apartheid campaigners had assembled in the hope of greeting him and his wife, Nokukhanya, but we could only wave our placards and ANC flags from the other side of the wire fence. The South African regime had given him a passport on condition that he did not engage in any political activities. Accordingly, he was forced to pass on without speaking to us, only casting a wistful look in our direction, while we were left with an exultant feeling of elation that after so many years we had at least had a view of our Chief.

I had grown up in Stanger next to Chief Luthuli’s home village of Groutville. As a youngster and as a teacher, I was deeply influenced by him and by his views. He, too, had been a teacher. First encountering him when I was 14, I learned from Albert Luthuli that we could aspire to a better world. He gave me a vision of how we could be South African in a country beset by racial divisions, religious intolerance, and fear. He enabled me to see the possibilities that we could achieve in a South Africa freed from racism. It was electrifying.

I have always regarded Albert Luthuli as my mentor, a teacher by example rather than by prescription. 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.

Although he resigned from the teaching profession when he was democratically elected as Chief of the Umvoti Mission Reserve in 1936, Luthuli continued to be a role model for many. Through his experience of the problems of his community, he became convinced of the need for militant action. In the 1940s he became actively involved in the African National Congress. He was an eloquent speaker, with a commanding presence and a formidable intellect. His qualities of leadership were recognised when he was elected in 1951 to the Presidency of the Natal ANC.

This new political role precipitated a crisis when the apartheid regime demanded that he choose between his chieftainship and his political activities. Refusing to resign from either, he was deposed as chief by the government, although throughout his life his friends and followers continued to address him by that traditional title, indicating that Albert Luthuli could not be defined by the apartheid regime. Luthuli’s statement in response to the government’s denial of his traditional authority was a resounding assertion of his moral authority:

Who will deny that thirty years of my life have been spent knocking in vain, patiently, moderately and modestly at a closed and barred door? …

As for myself, with a full sense of responsibility and a clear conviction, I decided to remain in the struggle for extending democratic rights and responsibilities to all sections of the South African community. I have embraced the non-violent passive resistance technique in fighting for freedom because I am convinced it is the only non-revolutionary, legitimate and humane way that could be used by people denied, as we are, effective constitutional means to further aspirations …

It is inevitable that in working for Freedom some individuals and some families must take the lead and suffer: The Road to Freedom is via the Cross.1

Soon after this event, Albert Luthuli was elected President-General of the African National Congress, a post he held until his death in 1967.

During the 1950s, as dramatised in Alan Paton’s novel Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful, the apartheid government considered it a criminal act of subversion to address Albert Luthuli as Chief. In their interrogation of a leader of the National Union of South African Students, which had congratulated Chief Luthuli on his election to the presidency of the ANC, the police in Paton’s novel insist that it is “subversive for a students’ organisation to continue to give a man a title which has been taken away from him by a Minister who ultimately derives his power from Parliament. It is in fact contempt of Parliament, which is a serious offence indeed. The penalties are heavy, and could be crippling for you and your organisation.”2

Ironically, during the same era, the leader of a student organisation supporting the apartheid regime, FW de Klerk, caused trouble for his organisation, the Afrikaanse Studentebond, by inviting Albert Luthuli to speak at Potchefstroom University. Although he regarded the ANC as dangerous because of its cooperation with communists and its proposals for a universal franchise in South Africa, De Klerk was interested in Albert Luthuli because “we respected his position as a Zulu chief”. Seemingly unaware that the National Party government he supported had deposed Luthuli as chief, or that addressing him as “Chief” might be a criminal offence, De Klerk proceeded to invite Chief Luthuli, over the objections of his university, to address the Afrikaanse Studentebond at a meeting held off campus. “It was a strange experience,” De Klerk relates in his autobiography, “for young Afrikaners at the time to converse with black South Africans on an equal basis.” These students might have respected the Chief, but De Klerk reports that “his message that all South Africans should have the right to one-man one-vote in an undivided South Africa was at the time utterly alien to us.” Insisting that Afrikaners had the right to rule themselves, while Zulus and other Africans should be relegated to homelands, the students left Albert Luthuli, as De Klerk imagined, “despondent about the possibility that Afrikaners would ever accept his message”.3

Chief Luthuli, however, possessed a remarkable generosity of spirit, although he was never tolerant of injustice. He was a Christian, with very deeply held beliefs, but his Christianity was the kind that looked to the model of Jesus throwing the moneylenders out of the temple. Throughout his active political life, Chief Luthuli was a committed and disciplined member of the ANC. He articulated the movement’s non-racial policies with the same deep conviction he vested in his religion.

In a speech in Johannesburg in 1958, Albert Luthuli challenged any assumption that South Africa, with its diversity of race, colour, creed and culture, could not develop into a democracy. “I personally believe,” he declared, “that here in South Africa, with all our diversities of colour and race, we will show the world a new pattern of democracy. I think there is a challenge to us in South Africa to set a new example for the world. We can build a homogeneous South Africa on the basis not of colour but of human values.”4

In that same speech in 1958, Albert Luthuli called for an international boycott of South African products. His call for international pressure on the apartheid regime was heard in London, where I was studying in 1959, and inspired the boycott movement that developed into the British Anti-Apartheid Movement. Despite the attempts by the apartheid regime to silence him, Albert Luthuli announced the ANC’s human and humanising values of non-racialism, freedom and democracy in such resonating tones that his words reached all over the world and all the way to the Nobel Committee.

Albert Luthuli was nominated in February 1961 by the Social Democrats of the Swedish Parliament for the delayed 1960 Nobel Peace Prize. At the time, he was still entangled in the five-year Treason Trial, which finally resulted in his acquittal on 29 March 1961. Under renewed banning orders that restricted his freedom of speech and movement, limiting him to the Lower Tugela magisterial area, Luthuli was confined to his home in Groutville when he learned on 12 October 1961 that he was being awarded the Peace Prize. In a public statement, he thanked the Nobel Committee, but suggested that the award was being given, not only to himself, “but also to my country and its people – especially those who have fought and suffered in the struggle to achieve the emancipation of all South Africans from the bonds of fear and injustice”.5

The apartheid regime reacted with outrage at the prize. John Vorster, then Minister of Justice, grudgingly allowed him to travel to Norway, “notwithstanding the fact that the government fully realises that the award was not made on merit”. Die Burger, the media mouthpiece for the apartheid government, said the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Albert Luthuli was a “remarkably immature, poorly considered and fundamentally un-Western decision”.6 With characteristic humility and humour, Chief Luthuli observed that this was the first time he had ever agreed with the apartheid government, since he also thought that he was not worthy of such a great honour.

Although the government was prepared to let him go to Norway, it would not grant permission for him to attend the celebrations that were held in nearby Stanger. Buses were prevented from transporting people to the event. Nevertheless, a celebration was held. Fatima Meer spoke. Alan Paton read out his “Praise Song for Luthuli”:

You there, Luthuli, they thought your world was small

They thought you lived in Groutville

Now they discover

It is the world you live in.

You there, Luthuli, they thought your name was small

Luthuli of Groutville

Now they discover

Your name is everywhere.

You there, Luthuli, they thought that you were chained

Like a backyard dog Now they discover

They are in prison, but you are free.

You there, Luthuli, they took your name of Chief

You were not worthy

Now they discover You are more

Chief than ever.

Go well, Luthuli, may your days be long

Your country cannot spare you

Win for us also, Luthuli

The prize of Peace.7

The praise singer, Percy Yengwa, received the biggest response from the gathering for his poetry celebrating the great bull that our enemies had tried to enclose in a kraal, the great bull who had broken the strong fence to wander far – as far as Oslo! Yengwa concluded by praising Albert Luthuli as “Nkosi yase Groutville! Nkosi yase Afrika! Noksi yase world! (Chief of Groutville, Chief of Africa, Chief of the world!).”

Albert and Nokukhanya Luthuli flew to Oslo, via London, where I caught such a brief glimpse of them. Albert Luthuli had been outside the country before, visiting India in 1938 and the United States in 1948, on both trips feeling what he called a “reprieve from the tense complexity of my homeland”. Chief Luthuli received the Nobel Peace Prize on 10 December 1961, a significant day declared by the United Nations as International Human Rights Day. He made a brief acceptance speech. The next day he delivered his lecture, “Africa and Freedom”. Wearing his traditional Zulu headdress, he was very much the Chief. But he surprised the Nobel audience by singing the national anthem, Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, demonstrating that he was also the political leader and president of the ANC.

Albert Luthuli made a tremendous impression by bringing Africa to Europe. As a Norwegian newspaper reported on Luthuli’s Nobel lecture, “We have suddenly begun to feel Africa’s nearness and greatness. In the millions of huts of corrugated iron, mud and straw lives a force which can make the world richer … Luthuli, the Zulu chieftain and schoolteacher, is an exceptional man. But in his words, his voice, his smile, his strength, his spontaneity a whole continent speaks.” Although his words and voice could be heard in Norway, they still could not legally be heard in South Africa. “Albert Luthuli must now return to his people in chains, to his guards in exile,” this Norwegian report concluded. “We have never seen a freer man!”8

Returning home, Albert Luthuli was again confined to Groutville. With the Nobel Prize money, Chief Luthuli bought farms in Swaziland. He hoped that these farms would provide a safe haven for ANC refugees from the increasingly violent repression of the movement in South Africa. Any profits from the farms, he hoped, would go towards supporting the ANC in exile. Since Albert Luthuli was restricted to Groutville, the responsibility for overseeing the farms fell upon his wife. Arranging the purchase of two farms in Swaziland, Nokukhanya travelled every spring to spend six months sowing and reaping in the fields. Enduring tremendous hardship, Nokukhanya Luthuli demonstrated why she was held in such high regard as a force in her own right, affectionately known as the Mother of Light.9

In 1963 the American journalist, interviewer and oral historian, Studs Terkel, was visiting South Africa. In Johannesburg he met the author Nadine Gordimer, who would receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. She told Terkel that he had to meet her friend, the Chief. In his interview with Albert Luthuli, Studs Terkel was impressed with the Chief’s extraordinary generosity of spirit. Although blacks had suffered greatly under apartheid, Luthuli said, “The white is hit harder by apartheid than we are. It narrows his life. In not regarding us as humans he becomes less than human. I do pity him.”10 Luthuli’s vision for the future, a non-racial democracy, was the only hope for an expansion of the human spirit, for all South Africans, black and white.

Apartheid, as Albert Luthuli saw so clearly, was a tragic failure of imagination. As he observed in his autobiography, Let My People Go, “We Africans are depersonalised by the whites, our humanity and dignity reduced in their imagination to a minimum.”11 Such a reduction of human dignity, beginning in the imagination, had produced tragic consequences for everyone in South Africa.

Recovering human dignity required imagination and courage “uniting all resisters to white supremacy, regardless of race”. Non-violent resistance, as Luthuli often observed, was his preferred strategy. He came from a neighbourhood in KwaZulu-Natal in which there was remarkable interchange among innovators in non-violence. The Indian activist Mohandas Gandhi was developing his principles of satyagraha, the “truth force” of non-violent resistance to oppression. Gandhi’s followers met with the Christian visionary Isaiah Shembe, who was establishing his Nazarite community.12 Shembe’s biography was written by the ANC leader John Dube, the close friend of Albert Luthuli, who brought him into the movement in 1945. Luthuli advanced this non-racial, multi-religious tradition of non-violent resistance in the Defiance Campaign of 1952 and subsequent political work.

Like Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders, Albert Luthuli called for negotiations. In his testimony during the Treason Trial, he invited negotiations, observing that “one really can’t anticipate and say what will happen at negotiation”, but proposing that the ANC “would be very, very happy if the government would take up the attitude of saying, come let us discuss”. When the court insisted that there was “very little hope of negotiation”, Luthuli responded, “There were no signs, my lords, in that direction … [but] hope is always there.”13 Even under the most hopeless conditions, therefore, Albert Luthuli held out hope for a peaceful resolution through negotiations.

Clearly, Albert Luthuli favoured non-violent means of struggle against apartheid. For example, he advocated economic sanctions against the apartheid regime as a way to advance a “relatively peaceful transition”. Yet he was not a pacifist. He once observed that anyone who thought he was a pacifist should try to steal his chickens. I believe that he came to appreciate – under the pressure of events – that some measure of force was inevitable, but he felt that any use of force should be done through a military formation that was separate from the political movement of the ANC. I know that the plans for an armed struggle, under the auspices of a new military formation, were submitted to Chief Luthuli for his approval. Just days after Albert Luthuli received the Nobel Peace Prize, on 16 December 1961, the military wing of the ANC, Umkhonto weSizwe, engaged in its first use of force to sabotage a government installation. In the hope of peace, the armed struggle had begun.

A few months before his death in 1967, Albert Luthuli welcomed to his home the Africanist researcher and bookseller Donal Brody, who reported that the Chief was still actively engaged in imagining a political future for South Africa. As Brody recalls, Luthuli said, “I will not live to see everything that I and my friends have fought so hard for, but I think you will.” In prophetic terms, according to Brody, Albert Luthuli observed:

There will be enormous, peaceful change in South Africa before the end of this century. People of all races will eventually live together in harmony because no one, white, black or brown, wants to destroy this beautiful land of ours. Women must play an increasingly important role in all areas of the life of the future. They were and remain the most loyal supporters in all our struggles. The big powers will eventually turn away from all of Africa, so we must dedicate ourselves to solving our own problems.14

Certainly, these reported observations by Chief Luthuli seem to anticipate a unified, democratic, non-racial and non-sexist South Africa, a new South Africa working out its own destiny in the continent of Africa and the larger world. But they are also in keeping with his consistent vision of South Africa’s past and future.

“Our interest in freedom is not confined to ourselves only,” Luthuli said in his ANC presidential address of 1953. “We are interested in the liberation of all oppressed people in the whole of Africa and in the world as a whole.”15 Clearly, Albert Luthuli’s vision of freedom in South Africa was advanced in solidarity with the struggle for freedom throughout Africa, because he and his movement were internationalists. Looking to the future in his autobiography, Luthuli affirmed the principle of non-racialism, which was clearly identified in concrete terms in the Freedom Charter and eventually enshrined in the Constitution of a democratic South Africa. “The task is not finished,” he wrote. “South Africa is not yet home for all her sons and daughters. Such a home we wish to ensure.” As he imagined such a home for all, he faced and embraced this challenge: “There remains before us the building of a new land, a home for men [and women] who are black, white, brown, from the ruins of the old narrow groups, a synthesis of the rich cultural strains we have inherited.” This new land, this new South Africa, he foresaw, “will not necessarily be all black; but it will be African”.16 In such an inclusive, expansive vision of what it means to be African in South Africa, Albert Luthuli imagined this new land as a home for all.

Although he imagined that new land for all of us, and gave so many of us the imaginative capacity to share that vision, Albert Luthuli did not live to see the realisation of his vision in a democratic South Africa. Killed by a train in 1967, he died while his vision was still embattled, underground, in prison, or in exile.

In our gratitude and love, Albert Luthuli lives. The central offices of the African National Congress in Johannesburg, which are located in Luthuli House, keep his memory alive. The government has decided that the watermark on our South African passports must bear his image, so wherever we travel, anywhere in the world, we carry Albert Luthuli with us. Further afield in Africa, the University of Jos in Nigeria has established the Albert Luthuli Professor-at-Large, a position held by the great scholar, Ali Mazrui, to keep his memory alive.

For those of us who live in a unified, non-racial, non-sexist and democratic South Africa, we keep his memory alive because we live in the home that was designed and built by Albert Luthuli.

An earlier version of this foreword appeared in South Africa’s Nobel Laureates: Peace, Literature, Science. Used here with kind permission of Jonathan Ball Publishers.