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by Mphuthumi Ntabeni

G21 Columnist

kabuki theatre of the mind

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DAY ONE - ALBERT LUTHULI:THE CHIEF: MPHUTHUMI NTABENI provides a paean on the first President of the African National Congress in South Africa.

Mphuthumi Ntabeni

East London, SOUTH AFRICA - It is very easy to forget the real heroes of our struggle who actually smoothed the path for a democratic takeover in our country. There's also an irritating tendency with South Africa when it comes to political heroes, to discuss their sufferings and feelings at the expense of their ideas. Hence it is so easy to disregard what drove the thought and action of people like chief Albert Luthuli, the first president of the African National Congress, and led him to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

Ideas are the passion of truth. This is how Luthuli, in his autobiography, Let My People Go, saw the role of the church in the South African struggle for liberation:

Obviously we do not expect to see the church organising political movements. But it must be with people, in their lives. I have no admiration for political predikant. But I know something of the thirst of my people for spiritual guidance in the sutiation which confronts us now and will continue to be our lot for some time yet. The Church must be in among us all. If it stands on the outskirts, we cannot expect our religion to survive and be respected - we are untrue to our mission and that is suicide. Too often the flock has been left to its own devices in pressing matters of the moment.

Chief Albert Luthuli was born into a second-generation Christian family round about 1898 in the then Rhodesia. His father died when he was six moths old, leaving him to be raised by his mother. Luthuli was a grandson of a Zulu chief, Ntaba, who was among the first converts at Groutville Missionary station near the Umvoti River.

After finishing standard four, he went to study at Ohlange Institute whose principal was Dr. Dube, and then transferred to Edandale for his higher education. He proceeded to the Adams College of Teachers, where he qualified as a teacher and eventually became a schoolmaster. He left that post to be a local chief at Groutville, a position that directly involved him in politics and led to his imprisonment when he was the president of the African National Congress.

Chief Luthuli was a religious man, with a democratic bias full of liberal attitudes though he shared the common experience of his people. He came at the time when even liberation struggle leaders could maintain their self-conscious and relaxed independence; when philistinism had not yet engulfed everything political; when politics came as a result of struggles with one's moral earnestness first and were concerned with an ideal of man. Hence he fraternised with men like Bishop Reeves.

Chief Luthuli spent most of his days in Groutville. He frequented the squashed houses and garbage-strewn fields of Cato Manor, where the insides of houses were open to the streets. Cato Manor was the gutted area, like Sophiatown, where hundreds of people lived in rotting bunkers at the far end of Durban city. This is how he sums up the spirit of the area:

... Cato Manor is a slum... It began as an "Emergency Camp" after the 1949 Afro-Indian riots in Durban, and it has remained an emergency camp ever since, squalid, the breeding ground of disease both physical and social, and a place with no future.

Chief Luthuli entered South African politics when black people still had no intellectual convictions of their own to challenge the oppressive imperialist culture. It was a time when black crowds were still a hushed, shaken, unorganised motley. His likes led black people with warm hearts, imagination and eloquence, as the beginnings of 'The Freedom Charter' testifies. They laid the breastfeeding patterns of the struggle.

Even Nelson Mandela in his treason trial speech took his tone from chief Luthuli's book. Take his famous Rivonia Trial speech:

I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die...

Compare that with what Chief Luthuli said:

I have embraced the non-Violent Passive Resistance technique in fighting for freedom because I'm convinced it is the only non-revolutionary , legitimate and humane way that could be used by people denied, as we are, constitutional means to further aspirations... ¹

The struggle will go on. I speak humbly without levity when I say that, God giving me strength and courage enough, I shall die, if need be, for this cause. But I do not want to die until I've seen the building begun. Mayibuye iAfrica! Come, Africa, come!²

Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom is a brilliant demonstration of his courage. Luthuli goes further in his autobiography. His is a moving narrative of uninvented hope. From it you're not only seduced by Luthuli's subtle intelligence, you encounter humanity and hope grounded gracefully on faith; faith coming in confrontation with hypocrisy, mounting cruelty, and desperate ideology. It is the painful sincerity and moral urgency of nobility expressing itself in a desperate emphasis on the value of life. It is grace under pressure expressing the indomitability of a human spirit. The book convinces by marshalling evidence without partisanship.

The studied bleakness of Wole Sorote's book, To Every Birth its Blood, with all its marvellous impostures, tries to portray the violence black people lived under during the apartheid years. Its major fault is a taste for unnecessarily gruesome detail; the macabre portrayal of violence without an underlining spiritual redeeming factor. As a result, Sorote's book is imprisoned in sensibility; it is armed and rants from the belly.

Luthuli narrates events similar to those of Sorote; the difference is in subtle wit, steadiness and ease of tone, chilling simplicity, sharpness of critical asides, an Olympian sense of irony and gaiety under grave pressure. Let My People Go is incomparable in the literature of the South African struggle for liberation. Such remarkably intense commitment to order must have been the major factor that convinced the Swedish Academy to award to Albert Luthuli the Nobel Peace Prize for 1961.

1 The Road to Freedom is Via the Cross (A public statement made by Albert Luthuli when he was dismissed from his position as the chief by the government in 1952)
2 Luthuli ended his autobiography, Let My People Go thus.

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