Albert Lutuli
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| Albert Lutuli | |
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| In office 1952 – 1967 |
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| Preceded by | J. S. Moroka |
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| Succeeded by | Oliver Tambo |
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| Born | c. 1898 Bulawayo, Rhodesia |
| Died | July 21, 1967 Stanger, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa |
| Political party | African National Congress |
| Spouse | Nokukhanya Bhengu |
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Albert John Lutuli (commonly spelled Luthuli),[1] also known by his Zulu, name "Mvumbi" (c. 1898 – 21 July 1967), was a South African teacher and politician. Lutuli was elected president of the African National Congress (ANC), at the time an umbrella organisation that led opposition to the white minority government in South Africa. He was awarded the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the non-violent struggle against apartheid.
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[edit] Early life
The third son of Seventh-day Adventist missionary John Bunyan Lutuli and Mtonya Gumede, Albert Lutuli was born near Bulawayo in what was then called Rhodesia, around 1898. His father died, and he and his mother returned to her ancestral home of Groutville in KwaDukuza (Stanger), Natal, South Africa. He stayed with his uncle, Martin Lutuli, who was at that time the elected chief of the Christian Zulus inhabiting the Umzinyathi District Municipality mission Reserve.
[edit] Teaching
On completing a teaching course at Edendale, near Pietermaritzburg, Lutuli took up the running of a small primary school in the Natal uplands. He was confirmed in the Methodist church and became a lay preacher. In 1920 he received a government bursary to attend a higher teachers' training course at Adams College, and subsequently joined the training college staff, teaching alongside Z.K. Mathews, who was then head of the Adams College High School. To provide financial support for his mother, he declined a scholarship to University of Fort Hare.
In 1928 he became secretary of the African Teacher's Association and in 1933 its president. He was also active in missionary work.
[edit] Tribal chief
In 1933 the tribal elders asked Lutuli to become chief of the tribe. For two years he hesitated, but accepted the call in early 1936 and became chieftain, until removed from this office by the government in 1952.
[edit] Anti-Apartheid activist
In 1936 the government disenfranchised the only Africans who had had voting rights — those in Cape Province; in 1948 the Nationalist Party, in control of the government, adopted the policy of apartheid, or "total apartness"; in the 1950s the laws known as the Pass Laws were tightened.
In 1944 Lutuli joined the African National Congress (ANC). In 1945 he was elected to the Committee of the KwaZulu Province Provincial Division of ANC and in 1951 to the presidency of the Division. The next year he joined with other ANC leaders in organizing nonviolent campaigns to defy discriminatory laws.
The government, charging Lutuli with a conflict of interest, demanded that he withdraw his membership in ANC or forfeit his office as tribal chief. Refusing to do either voluntarily, he was dismissed from his chieftainship.
A month later Lutuli was elected president-general of ANC, formally nominated by the future Pan Africanist Congress leader Potlako Leballo. Responding immediately, the government imposed a succession of bans on his movement, the first for two years, the second also for two years. When this second ban expired, he attended an ANC conference in 1956, only to be arrested and charged with treason a few months later, along with 155 others. After being held in custody for about a year during the preliminary hearings, he was released in December, 1957, and the charges against him and 64 others were dropped.
[edit] Bans
Another five year ban confined him to a fifteen-mile radius of his home. The ban was temporarily lifted while he testified at the continuing treason trials. It was lifted again in March 1960, to permit his arrest for publicly burning his pass following the Sharpeville massacre. In the ensuing state of emergency he was arrested, found guilty, fined, given a suspended jail sentence and returned to Groutville. One final time the ban was lifted, this time for ten days in early December of 1961 to permit Lutuli and his wife to attend the Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies in Oslo, an award described by Die Transvaler as "an inexplicable pathological phenomenon".
[edit] ANC
Lutuli's leadership of the ANC covered the period of violent disputes between the party's "Africanist" and "Charterist" wings. Africanist critics claim Lutuli was peripherialized in Natal and the Transvaal ANC Provincial branch and its Communist Party (CPSA officially dissolved 1950 but secretly reconstituted 1953 as SACP) allies took advantage of this situation. Lutuli did not see the Freedom Charter before it was adopted by acclaim at Kliptown in 1955. After reading the document and realising the ANC, despite its numerical superiority, had been subordinated to one vote in a five member multiracial and trade union "Congress Alliance", Lutuli rejected the Charter but then later accepted it partly to counter the more radical Africanist wing whom he likened to black nazis. In 1959 the Africanists split from the ANC over the issue of the Freedom Charter and Oliver Tambo's 1958 rewriting of the ANC Constitution. The PAC posed a serious challenge to the ANC until its military wing was destroyed at Itumbi camp, Chunya, Tanzania in March 1980.
[edit] Umkhonto we Sizwe
In December 1961, without Lutuli's sanction, Nelson Mandela of the Provincial ANC publicly launched Umkhonto we Sizwe at the All In Conference, where delegates from several movements had convened to discuss cooperation. Mandela's charisma and the global publicity surrounding his trial and imprisonment upstaged Lutuli, who grew increasingly despondent in isolation. (In Mandela's autobiography, he insists that Lutuli was consulted and consented before the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe.)
In 1962 he was elected Rector of the University of Glasgow by the students, serving until 1965. Since he was banned from travelling to Glasgow the Luthuli Scholarship Fund was setup by the Student Representative Council to enable a black South African student to study at Glasgow University.
A fourth ban to run for five years confining Lutuli to the immediate vicinity of his home was issued in May 1964, to run concurrently with the third ban.
In July 1967, at the age of 69, he was fatally injured in an accident near his home in Stanger.
In 2004 he was voted 41st in the SABC3's Great South Africans.
[edit] References
- ^ South African History Online, biography of Chief Albert John Luthuli: "Note about names: Luthuli's surname is very often spelled Luthuli, as it is in his autobiography, which was prepared for publication by non-vernacular-speaking friends. But Luthuli himself preferred another spelling and signed his name without an h."
[edit] External links
| Academic offices | ||
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| Preceded by Viscount Hailsham |
Rector of the University of Glasgow 1962–1965 |
Succeeded by Baron Reith |
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