Albert John Luthuli

Albert John Luthuli (born 1898, near Bulawayo, Rhodesia [now in Zimbabwe]—died July 21, 1967, Stanger, S.Af.) was a Zulu chief, teacher and religious leader, and president of the African National Congress (1952–67) in South Africa. He was the first African to be awarded a Nobel Prize for Peace (1960), in recognition of his nonviolent struggle against racial discrimination.

Albert John Mvumbi (Zulu: “Continuous Rain”) Luthuli was born in Rhodesia, where his father, John Bunyan Luthuli, a missionary interpreter, had gone from Zululand. After his father’s death, the 10-year-old Albert returned to South Africa and learned Zulu traditions and duties in the household of his uncle, the chief of Groutville, a community associated with an American Congregational mission in Natal’s sugar lands. Educated through his mother’s earnings as a washerwoman and by a scholarship, he graduated from the American Board Mission’s teacher-training college at Adams, near Durban, and became one of its first three African instructors. In 1927 Luthuli married Nokukhanya Bhengu, a teacher and granddaughter of a clan chief.

In 1936 Luthuli left teaching to become the elected chief of the community of 5,000 at Groutville. Though confronted by land hunger, poverty, and political voicelessness, he did not yet recognize the need for political action. In those early years he was, variously, secretary of the Natal African Teachers’ Association and of the South African Football Association, founder of the Zulu Language and Cultural Society, and member of the Christian Council Executive, of the Joint Council of Europeans and Africans, and of the Institute of Race Relations in Durban.

Luthuli’s first political step in joining the African National Congress (ANC) in 1945 was motivated by friendship with its Natal leader. Far more significant was his election to the Natives Representative Council (an advisory body of chiefs and intellectuals set up by the government) at the very time in 1946 when troops and police were crushing a strike of African miners at the cost of eight lives and nearly a thousand injured. Luthuli immediately joined his people’s protest against the council’s futility. When he toured the United States in 1948 as a guest of the Congregational Board of Missions, he warned that Christianity faced its severest test in Africa because of racial discrimination. On his return home he found that the Afrikaner Nationalists had newly come to power with their policy of apartheid.

At this crucial time, Luthuli was elected president of the Natal African National Congress. Since its founding in 1912, the ANC’s efforts to achieve human rights by deputation, petition, or mass protests had met with increasing repression. In 1952, stimulated by young black intellectuals, the ANC joined the South African Indian Congress in a countrywide campaign to defy what were deemed unjust laws; 8,500 men and women went voluntarily to prison. As a result of Luthuli’s leadership in Natal, the government demanded that he resign from the ANC or from chieftainship. He refused to do either, stating, “The road to freedom is via the cross.” The government deposed him. Not only did he continue to be affectionately regarded as “chief, ” but his reputation spread. In that same year, 1952, the ANC elected him president general. Henceforth, between repeated bans (under the Suppression of Communism Act), he attended gatherings, visited towns, and toured the country to address mass meetings (despite a serious illness in 1954).

In December 1956 Luthuli and 155 others were dramatically rounded up and charged with high treason. His long trial failed to prove treason, a communist conspiracy, or violence, and in 1957 he was released. During this time Luthuli’s quiet authority and his inspiration to others profoundly impressed distinguished foreign observers, and this led to his nomination for the Nobel Prize. Nonwhite people responded in large numbers to his call for a stay-at-home strike in 1957; later, whites also began attending his mass meetings. In 1959 the government confined him to his rural neighbourhood and banned him from gatherings—this time for five years—for “promoting feelings of hostility” between the races.

In 1960, when police killed or wounded more than 250 Africans demonstrating against the pass laws at Sharpeville, Luthuli called for national mourning, and he himself burned his pass. Too ill to serve the resulting prison sentence, he paid a fine. The government outlawed the ANC and its rival offshoot, the Pan-Africanist Congress.

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In December 1961 Luthuli was allowed to leave Groutville briefly when, with his wife, he flew to Oslo to receive the Nobel Prize. His acceptance address paid tribute to his people’s nonviolence and rejection of racism despite adverse treatment, and he noted how far from freedom they remained despite their long struggle. A week later the ANC’s newly created military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), attacked installations throughout South Africa. The policy of nonviolence had at last been abandoned, and Luthuli, back in enforced isolation, was an honoured elder statesman, dictating his autobiography and receiving only those visitors permitted by the police.

On July 21, 1967, Chief Luthuli was reportedly struck by a train and died, an account that has long been questioned by his family and supporters who suspected the apartheid government had been involved in his death. An inquest held in the months after his death found that he had died from injuries after being hit by a train and that there was no evidence of criminal culpability on the part of South African Railways or anyone else. In May 2024, the inquest into his death was reopened on the basis of a report that said mathematical and scientific principles indicated it was highly unlikely that Luthuli had died because he had been struck by a train.