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The Education of a Zulu Christian

Albert John Mvumbi Luthuli was born around 1898 at the Seventh Day Adventist Solusi mission station in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia. His father, John, was an evangelist, teacher, interpreter, and goods transporter for missionaries and the British South Africa Company, then waging war against Mzilikazi and the Ndebele in what later resistance movements would come to know as the first Chimurenga, the 1896–97 African rebellions against Southern Rhodesian colonialism (the second Chimurenga was the guerrilla war that ended with the establishment of the independent state of Zimbabwe in 1980).¹ His mother, Nozililo Mtonya, had resided as a girl in the royal court of King Cetewayo before British forces conquered Zululand in 1879. The couple had three children, Alfred Nsusana, Mpangwa (who died at birth), and Albert, before John died, possibly during a malaria outbreak, when Albert was only six months old. Tending fifteen acres of land that John had previously bought, Nozililo, Alfred, and Albert remained in Southern Rhodesia until 1908, when they returned to South Africa, moving to the Vryheid district in northern Natal, where Alfred became an interpreter for a Seventh Day Adventist mission. Because there were no schools in Vryheid for Albert to attend, Nozililo sent him to Groutville, Natal, a small community of mostly Christian peasant farmers attached to the local mission station of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABM). The ABM was a Congregationalist enterprise that had begun its work in southern Africa in 1834. ABM missionary Aldin Grout founded the Umvoti mission station (the small town that grew up there was renamed Groutville after his death in 1894), where Albert’s paternal grandparents, Ntaba ka Madunjini and Titisi Mthethwa, were his first Christian converts. Ntaba and Titisi were among the Africans who resisted incorporation into the expansive Zulu state founded by Shaka ka Senzengakhona. In 1860, the Umvoti mission community, known as the abasemakholweni (converted Christians), elected Ntaba as their chief, beginning a type of family tradition, as Ntaba’s brother, son Martin, and grandson Albert also became elected chiefs, together comprising four of their first seven chiefs.²

The 1910 Union of South Africa consolidated white rule, immediately rooted in nineteenth-century land conquests by Dutch-descended whites known as Afrikaners, but particularly by the British, who subdued most Africans, including the large Xhosa and Zulu states, by the 1880s. The 1867 discovery of diamonds in Kimberley, soon controlled by the British Cape Colony, and in 1886, gold in the Transvaal, an Afrikaner-controlled state, led to the institution of the migrant labor system, which exploited Africans. By 1900, South Africa had become the world’s leading producer of these minerals. Segregation laws designed to deny Africans citizenship rights began in the Cape Colony, before the establishment of South Africa, and continued with the 1892 Franchise and Ballot Act, which used financial and educational qualifications to limit the African vote, and the 1894 Glen Grey Act, which assigned areas to segregate Africans from whites. Such legislation began a segregationist onslaught that denied Africans the right to vote; condemned them, by “color-bar” laws, to the lowest-paying jobs; and provided them little judicial recourse to counter their systematic subordination. The British consolidated their political and economic control after they defeated the two Afrikaner republics, Transvaal and the Free State, in the South African War (1899–1902). Despite mutual dislike and distrust between many Afrikaners and British, these whites shared an even deeper disdain for the Africans, who made up about 70 percent of the population. The Union of South Africa became a self-governing dominion within the British Empire; Afrikaners, about 60 percent of the white population, exercised significant domestic political power. Africans were almost completely disenfranchised and were thus powerless to stop segregationist laws that maintained white supremacy. These laws included the Natives Land Act of 1913 and the Native Trust and Land Act of 1936, which limited African landownership to less than 13 percent of South African territory. By restricting their abilities to own sufficient land for housing and to support the cattle holding and agricultural cultivation necessary to maintain economic independence, the laws forced them into labor tenancy and sharecropping on white farms.³ The laws also accelerated African labor migration to urban areas, where migrants became subject to the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923, which segregated them in squalid townships, declared them temporary workers instead of permanent urban residents, and restricted their movements with pass laws.

Nozililo sent Albert back to Groutville for schooling, where he lived in the orderly and deeply Christian household of his uncle Martin and his wife, who were also guardians to many other relatives and children. Martin was Groutville’s first democratically elected chief, translator and interpreter for the Zulu royal house, secretary to the Zulu king Dinizulu, and a cofounder of both the Natal Native Congress in 1901 and the South African Native National Congress (later renamed the African National Congress) in 1912, groups that agitated for greater African political rights and land ownership. Serving until 1921, Martin provided Albert with a model for the Groutville chieftainship and an early exposure to African politics.⁴ Albert also learned Zulu traditions and performed the typical duties of a Zulu child: herding cattle, weeding crops, fetching water, and building nighttime fires to keep the household warm—this last he did so well that Martin fondly recalled Albert’s arrival as heralding the end of the household’s chilly nights. As a herd boy, young Albert presumably would have learned stick fighting, as he carried his cattle switch (for fencing and parrying) in the presence of rivals. As segregationist laws restricted African life, stick fighting became an enduring vestige of precolonial exercise that primed boys for the ideals of manly dignity, indoda enesithunzi. Period ethnographies narrate bouts that adhered to ethical conduct, with opponents pausing to fix shields and withdrawing if an adversary fell (and therefore defaulted to his noncombatant identity). Competitors were exposed to serious injury, even death, which made disciplined restraint, inkuliso, the rule of combat. Boys were taught to prize self-defense and respect life, but also to project aggression to opponents (e.g., “Leli ’gwalana!” [This little coward!]).⁵ These stick-fighting ethics bore some similarity to Luthuli’s later reconciling of his nonviolent principles with the right to self-defense against life-threatening attackers. Luthuli later celebrated this male socialization and its historical accomplishment, Shaka’s fusion of “bickering clans” into the “mightiest military force in Africa.”⁶

When Alfred and Nozililo moved back to Groutville, Albert lived in a house built by his brother on a site where his grandparents had lived. He later praised the loving discipline of his mother, who gave him a “leathering” when he did not follow her instructions. She imparted the “strict” expectations of her Qwabe lineage, an amadlozi-worshiping “clan” with fiercely protective regiments. Albert attended the ABM mission school, Groutville Primary, where he passed Standard Four in 1914. Nozililo paid Albert’s school fees by selling vegetables from her garden and taking in laundry for the white families in the nearby town of Stanger. He then went for two terms to Ohlange Institute, the school established by his admired mentor, the American-educated John Dube, the first SANNC president-general and founding editor of the African newspaper Ilanga lase Natal. After Ohlange, Luthuli attended Edendale, where Albert was one of many boys who briefly left the school as a protest against the disciplinary code requiring boys to carry stones from the river. Albert soon realized that this act of youthful impetuosity could have dire consequences; by leaving Edendale, the boys became subject to South African curfew and pass laws, risking arrest by the dreaded police. Martin promptly sent Albert back, after giving him the public thrashing required for readmission. Despite this brush with school authorities, Albert developed a love of teaching at Edendale, embarking on a two-year teacher-training course that resulted in a teaching certificate in 1917.⁷

After Edendale, he journeyed to the Natal Midlands, becoming the nineteen-year-old principal (and sole staff member) of a small school in Blaauwbosch. There, Luthuli became a Methodist lay minister though after leaving Blaauwbosch he returned to Congregationalism as a lay minister. Luthuli received a government scholarship to take the higher teachers’ training course at Adams College in Amanzimtoti, where he earned his higher teacher’s certificate in 1921.⁸ Adams College was just beginning to employ Africans to train African teachers, and Luthuli, along with Z. K. Matthews, became one of the first African teachers there. Determined to bring education to as many young Africans as possible, Luthuli headed the Teachers’ College at Adams, training future teachers and traveling by motorbike to teach at a number of surrounding schools. With Matthews, he also cofounded the African Teachers Association, a campus-based organization that sought higher wages.⁹ He taught Zulu history, music, and literature, cofounding the Zulu Cultural and Language Society to steep younger generations in Zulu history and culture and to promote isiZulu as a medium for primary education. A passionate lover of music, Luthuli, along with his student Reuben Caluza—soon to win fame as a composer—founded the Adams College school of music in 1935 and led choirs renowned throughout Natal.¹⁰ Luthuli conducted the Sunday church choir, gave well-received sermons, and, as a leader in the Adams branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), interacted with African American YMCA missionary Max Yergan, who praised Luthuli for his role in expanding YMCA work.¹¹ Highly skilled at association football (i.e., soccer), Luthuli attended Adams football practices, coached football teams, and organized football leagues.¹²

Class photo, probably Adams College, c. 1920. Luthuli is seated in the first row, fifth from the right. (Luthuli Museum)

Luthuli courted Nokukhanya ka Maphita ka Bhengu Ndlokolo, the granddaughter of a Zulu chief, who had studied, then taught, at Adams. The two married in 1927, but, since Adams’s regulations barred married female teachers, Nokukhanya then established the Luthuli family home back in Groutville. Thus, like so many Africans, the Luthulis lived apart, with Albert journeying to Groutville on some weekends and holidays. In Groutville, Nokukhanya learned Nozililo’s successful farming methods to cultivate the family’s small vegetable and sugarcane fields, selling enough produce to make her the family’s primary breadwinner throughout their marriage.¹³ The Luthulis had four daughters and three sons, born between 1929 and 1945: Hugh Bunyan Sulenkosi, Albertina, Thandeka Hilda Isabel, S’mangele Eleanor, Thembekile Jane Elizabeth, Christian Madunjini, and Sibusiso Edgar.¹⁴ The family lived in a simple two-bedroom house filled with religious statues, books, and Vladimir Tretchikoff prints. The household was deeply Christian, with regular Bible readings, prayers and hymns, and church attendance as a family. Luthuli was not a stereotypical authoritarian and distant patriarch; he enjoyed an equal partnership with Nokukhhanya and was a loving, attentive, and devoted father. Their eldest daughter, Albertina, recalled, “UBaba never imposed his status as family head upon us. Everybody had an equal opportunity to talk and no one was considered too young to have his views respected.” Not surprisingly, the former teacher prized intellectual development, declaring, “Angivumi!” (I don’t agree with you!) to initiate spirited debate in the household, and encouraged academic excellence, even returning letters written by his college-attending children with “grammar and spelling corrected in red ink.”¹⁵