The Sunday News
Few researches on Southern African history and the history of liberation movements in Southern Africa have managed to flesh out the African, rather than South African origins of the African National Congress, (ANC).
Contrary to prevalent opinion, in its formation in 1912, the ANC was formed as an Africa wide political and liberation movement, and in attendance was a multiplicity of anti-colonial political and liberation activists. The Natal Native Congress (NNC) that preceded the ANC was equally a thorough African outfit.
The reputation for xenophobic politics and South African exceptionalism that South African politics is gaining now is a particularly recent development. Over years, South African history and South African politics has exhibited admirable disrespect for colonial borders and colonial maps by emphasising Pan-Africanism ahead of South African nationalism. It is for that reason that Chief Albert Mvumbi Luthuli, who was born at Solusi, a few kilometres away from Bulawayo in 1898, in the then Southern Rhodesia that is now Zimbabawe, was later appointed a Chief of KwaDukuza in KwaZulu Natal in the Groutville area. For his formidable leadership and compelling communication skills, Chief Luthuli, a teacher by profession was after James Moroka and before Oliver Reginald Tambo, elected President General of the African National Congress.
For his force of argument and clarity of thought, a fire eating orator, Luthuli was referred to as a “one-man majority.” In 1960, he was to be the first black African to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in recognition of his non-violent political philosophy of liberation. Up to today, in the United States of America, the Episcopal Church every 17 July holds a Feast Day in honour of the legacy of Chief Albert Luthuli.
Roots in Bulawayo
John Bunyan Luthuli, Albert Luthuli’s father arrived in Bulawayo from KwaZulu Natal in 1892 and settled in the Solusi area.
John Bunyan Luthuli was the second son of Ntaba Ntuli who was a Chief of KwaDukuza. The Ntuli clan which later became Luthuli was made out of early Christian converts and some of the few black Africans who received missionary education and enjoyed proximity to whites ahead of other natives. Mtonya, the mother of Albert Luthuli joined John Bunyani Luthuli in Solusi in 1894 to complete the homestead in which Albert Mvumbi Luthuli was to be born in 1898. The name Mvumbi referred to “imvimbi” the continuous rains that pounded Solusi and surrounding areas in those years. John Bunyan Luthuli died in 1907, after one full year, in late 1908, Mtonya decided to trek back to Zululand with the toddler Albert Luthuli, leaving other family members and relatives in Solusi. Up to today the Ntulis and Luthulis are scattered in Matabeleland North, Matabeleland South and Bulawayo. Many more are in South Africa, Botswana and Zambia.
South African Growth
Besides commitment to the Christian Church, upon arrival back in Zululand Albert Luthuli took education so seriously to the extent that he soon qualified to be a teacher, and became a senior teacher in 1920. In 1933, the elders of KwaDukuza approached him, offering him his grandfather’s chieftaincy and he refused. The elders insisted and persisted until Luthuli agreed in 1936. For his dalliance with the ANC and the liberation movement at large, the apartheid regime deposed him from his chieftaincy in 1953. He was to be accused of treason and jailed for a full year until the charges were dropped in 1957.
Albert Luthuli’s political philosophy was much influenced by liberation theology and his critique of apartheid as a work of “poor imagination” achieved worldwide traction. His book, Let My People Go, which carries connotations of Moses’ delivery of Israelites out of Egypt, also achieved a wide readership when it was first published in 1960.
Albert Luthuli was a fanatic of non-violent revolution who believed that the true fall of man from grace was the day whites imagined that they were superior to other races of people. The struggle for liberation in the imagination of Albert Luthuli was necessarily supposed to be non-violent or else it was a struggle for another form of domination. For that reason, in December 1961 when Nelson Mandela and others launched Umkhonto WeSizwe, the armed wing of the ANC, it was against Albert Luthuli’s permission and even knowledge as the president of the ANC.
Curious about Albert Luthuli’s approach to the struggle for liberation and attracted to his political philosophy, the United States government in 1966 dispatched Senator Robert F. Kennedy to visit South Africa and hold conversations with Albert Luthuli on the future of South Africa and its place in the world. In 1967, Chief Albert Luthuli sustained injuries in a car accident that led to his death. He was to be succeeded by Oliver Reginal Tambo who popularised “rendering the country ungovernable” as a protest slogan that still has grip even in the recent student’s protests and demonstration. In South African political and leadership circles, even in the corporate sector there is a tendency for cadres and colleagues to refer to each other as Chief, to escape the bossy formal vocabulary of business decorum and political protocol. Thabo Mbeki, who made famous the “Chief” address, which he even made to junior colleagues and security details, explained it by saying it is a continuous honour to Chief Albert Luthuli, and a celebration of his legacy.
A Heritage of Liberation
Disorder presently accompanies youth and especially student politics in South Africa and beyond in Africa. Chaos and destruction of property replaces struggle and reduces protests to a celebration of violence for its own sake. Mainly that propensity of chaos and anarchy evinces the lack of a clear political philosophy and guiding principles. Youth leagues and students of yesteryear relied on Marxism, Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Black Consciousness as philosophies of liberation that provided guiding principles of struggle and spelt out the utopia and new worlds that the youth aspired and struggled for.
In the present famine of philosophies of liberation and guiding principles of struggles, the legacies of African leaders such as Chief Albert Luthuli must gain new importance in youth leagues and student movements in Africa. Instead of studying figures like Winston Churchill and other European and American leaders who are piloted in the African academy as examples of great leaders, students in Africa have African leaders and heroes such as Albert Luthuli to study and emulate, even to amplify and expand their philosophies of liberation and relate them to the present struggles against global domination. A world that produces fanatics like Donald Trump as leaders requires the production of new thinking in liberation, especially in Africa where domination and exploitation of the masses by a globalised capitalist and colonialist system has been naturalised.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from South Africa: mailto:[email protected].
