LITMIR.BIZ

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       Chief of the People

      Since 1933, Groutville residents had lobbied Luthuli to stand for election as their chief and oust the unpopular Chief Josiah Mqwebu, who had replaced Martin Luthuli in 1921. Initially, Albert was very reluctant, for he loved teaching and a chief’s salary was only 20 percent of his Adams earnings. Some peers also rejected the notion that Luthuli, one of the very first African teachers at Adams, would abandon this high-status profession that ostensibly prepared young Africans for modern society to accept a putatively backward “traditional” chieftainship controlled and manipulated by the state.¹ But by December 1935, he and Nokukhanya finally answered the call, believing that “the voice of the people comes from God.”

      While rejoicing that they could now live together while raising their children, the couple knew that government chiefs like Luthuli were in a difficult, contradictory position, charged simultaneously with representing the interests of their people and administering unjust and unpopular government policies. Some chiefs used state backing to rule as tyrants while enriching themselves by laying claim to land, charging dubious fees, and accepting bribes for settling disputes. After winning Groutville’s democratic elections for the chieftainship in December 1935 and being installed as chief in January 1936, Chief Luthuli, though now earning considerably less money, scorned such extortionist measures—though his children periodically complained about their spartan lifestyle. Practicing Ubuntu, a concept that recognized the humanity and interdependence of all people, he governed with an inclusive democratic spirit, personal warmth, integrity, empathy, and judicious wisdom. Luthuli understood Zulu traditional governance as democratic, with chiefs legally bound to rule according to traditional customs, remaining responsive to the needs and desires of their people.

      Though Groutville was a largely Christian community, Africans there respected the Zulu royal house, proclaiming, “Our doors face in the direction of Zululand!” Accordingly, Luthuli made obligatory visits to the Zulu royal capital in Ulundi, meeting with other chiefs and prominent elders and reveling in Zulu and court rituals that confirmed for him that he was no “Black Englishman,” since Zulu-ness was “in my blood.”² His Congregationalist upbringing enhanced this democratic ethos as Luthuli worked with his induna—childhood friend and best man Robbins Guma—and a council of amakholwa (another term for converted Christians) and amabhinca (traditionalist) elders on judicial matters, reveling in the hard work of finding reconciliation and compromise with oppositional parties.³ He also included women, regarded as legal and social minors, in democratic consultations and facilitated their economic advancement by disregarding government prohibitions on their beer brewing and selling and their operation of unlicensed bars known as shebeens.⁴ Luthuli was a chief of and by, not above, his people, prominently leading the festive dancing and singing at community feasts. One community member remembered Luthuli as a “man of the people [who] had a very strong influence over the community. He was a people’s chief.”⁵

      Congregationalist minister Posselt Gumede (left) and first ANC president John Dube (right) with Albert Luthuli (center) at Inanda Seminary, 1936. (Mwelela Cele, Campbell Collections of the University of KwaZulu-Natal)

      Chief Luthuli nurtured the ideal of community to mitigate against the 1913 and 1936 Land Acts, which entrenched black dislocation and impoverishment. The Land Acts were part of the structural violence of segregation nationwide, further eviscerating African landownership and increasing grinding poverty in overcrowded reserves while forcing extensive labor migration to urban areas, which separated families and furthered social disintegration and dislocation. Luthuli later noted the disparity of whites claiming to need 375 acres per person to live comfortably while African families had only 6 acres, leading to soil exhaustion, lack of adequate grazing ground for cattle, and little heritable land for grown African children to economically sustain themselves and their families. He railed against the “land rehabilitation” schemes, which forced Africans to sell “surplus” cattle at reduced rates to white farmers who had comparatively plentiful land to absorb additional cattle and accrue more wealth. “Your solution is to take our cattle away today because you took our land yesterday,” Luthuli charged, telling unmoved state officials that cattle were cherished possessions and a meaningful source of wealth for Africans; forcing them to sell cattle represented a deep economic and psychic violence against his people.⁶ Particularly in Natal, the government’s 1936 Sugar Act, in attempting to keep sugar prices high by limiting production, disproportionately hurt African sugar-cane planters, who, in careful estimates Luthuli presented, lived substantially below the poverty line. Unlike white sugarcane farmers, African farmers held insufficient land, without legal title, and thus by law could not use their land as security on short-term loans to buy adequate machinery and fertilizer, thus offsetting the costs of planting, harvesting, and transporting sugar to the mills. As African migrant laborers left impoverished rural areas for work in the cities, some could not find work and became “redundant” urban workers, who then found themselves “deported” back to these same rural areas they had been forced to leave: a never-ending shuttle.

      But state officials, including arrogant, culturally ignorant, and ineffective “agricultural demonstrators,” insisted that African poverty was due not to inadequate land but to supposedly inefficient African agricultural techniques. Luthuli’s chieftainship uniquely positioned him to observe the fallacy of state logic and the deepening poverty of the once-prosperous Groutville community and the tangible negative effects of African disfranchisement, onerous taxation without representation, land scarcity, and economic insecurity.⁷ He immediately revived the Groutville Bantu Cane Growers’ Association, a group of about two hundred small-scale cane growers (including himself) that successfully lobbied the millers to advance monies that would allow African farmers to meet upfront production costs. He also chaired the Natal and Zululand Bantu Cane Growers’ Association, bringing nearly all African sugarcane producers into one union. His tour of America in 1948 enabled him to procure a tractor that helped boost agricultural production by local farmers, some of whom thus increased their margins enough to educate their children.⁸ The African intellectual Jordan Ngubane, who studied at Adams when Luthuli taught there and later became Luthuli’s personal secretary and political ally, credited the chief with promoting economic development, increasing agricultural efficiency, sending more youth to schools and universities, and inspiring an optimism that belied the increasing hardships caused by government land policies.⁹

       Into Politics

      Luthuli joined the ANC in 1944, partially out of respect for the recently deceased Natal ANC president John Dube. ANC president Dr. Alfred Xuma had reinvigorated an organization virtually dead in the 1930s. He used his own resources to pay prior debts and finance new initiatives, established new branches, and facilitated the formation of the ANC Women’s League (1943) and the ANC Youth League (1944). Former Luthuli student Anton Lembede was the most influential Youth League leader. Before his untimely death in 1947, he influenced a young cadre of future national leaders including Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela, A. P. Mda, and Oliver Tambo to adopt a more confrontational posture toward white supremacy. The Atlantic Charter, issued in August 1941 by U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill, defined British and American aims during World War II

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