LITMIR.BIZ

      New ANC president Luthuli gives the “Africa” sign to delegates at the December 1953 ANC national conference in Queenstown. Luthuli attended this conference despite his banning orders. (Bailey’s African History Archives, photograph by Bob Gosani)

      In May 1953, the regime banned Luthuli, claiming that his political activities promoted “feelings of hostility in the Union of South Africa between the European inhabitants and the non-European section of the inhabitants of the Union.”²⁹ The ban confined Luthuli to Groutville and the surrounding Stanger district and prohibited him from entering major South African cities, attending political meetings or public gatherings (defined as five or more people together in the same space), making speeches, and visiting ANC branches. With Special Branch police increasing their raids of Luthuli’s house in search of “subversive” documents, Minister of Native Affairs Hendrik Verwoerd denounced him in Parliament as a dangerous radical championing equal rights, and Prime Minister Malan called the ANC a terrorist group “on the pattern of the Mau Mau” in Kenya.³⁰ South African authorities lamented that Luthuli, previously regarded as a “good Native[,] . . . had now been bought by the Indians and was definitely under Communist influence.”³¹

      Escalating state and popular violence marked the 1950s. Luthuli and others advocating Gandhian nonviolent civil disobedience clashed with younger militants willing to consider armed self-defense in debates that surged to the fore during the Defiance Campaign. On November 9, 1952, the lay minister Luthuli delivered a sermon titled “Christian Life: A Constant Venture,” the basis for his manifesto “The Road to Freedom Is Via the Cross,” which compared apartheid South Africa to Nazi Germany and affirmed nonviolent struggle.³² Luthuli could not know that this very day would become known as Black Sunday, when police fired on ANC supporters praying with Defiance Campaigners in East London’s Duncan Village. Africans responded by burning government facilities; in the chaos, a few whites died, but militarized police killed two hundred–plus Duncan Villagers, according to estimates.³³ The carnage raised doubts within the ANC about the efficacy of civil disobedience. The Criminal Law Amendment and Public Safety Act expanded government powers to crush antiapartheid dissent. Mandela, Sisulu, Mda, and the ANC Executive discussed armed self-defense and critiqued what seemed to be a “useless” nonviolent strategy, but for the time being they decided “it was politically wise” to maintain a nonviolent posture.³⁴ Pivotal ANC leader Govan Mbeki encountered Mpondoland Africans who argued to him that whites’ superior firepower had facilitated their nineteenth-century conquests over Africans, who would not regain their independence until they had sufficient arms. Thus, the Defiance Campaign’s nonviolent tactics would not overthrow the state, but only “tickle the beard of the Boers.”³⁵ In 1953, Sisulu embarked on a months-long tour of Romania, the Soviet Union, and China, whose armed struggle was inspirational to some South Africans, raising the possibility of armed self-defense with Chinese and Soviet officials.³⁶ Sisulu later told Luthuli of other “revolutionary” stirrings, prompting the president-general to later admit that “non-Whites” appeared “ready at any time to change the non-violent aspect of our movement, to violence.”³⁷ Luthuli made public assurances that “we do not mean to use violence in furtherance of our cause.”³⁸ But beyond the public glare, he was also articulating militant thoughts. In a 1953 letter to his friend ANC leader Z. K. Matthews, Luthuli confided that he hankered to “fight for freedom” as American abolitionists once did, evoking the 1859 revolt of John Brown (and his black freedom fighters), who in killing slaveholders on the eve of the U.S. Civil War advanced the Law of the Israelites (Hebrews 9:22): “without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.”³⁹