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Let My People Go. Albert Luthuli
Читать онлайн.Название Let My People Go
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780795708411
Автор произведения Albert Luthuli
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Like Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders, Albert Luthuli called for negotiations. In his testimony during the Treason Trial, he invited negotiations, observing that “one really can’t anticipate and say what will happen at negotiation”, but proposing that the ANC “would be very, very happy if the government would take up the attitude of saying, come let us discuss”. When the court insisted that there was “very little hope of negotiation”, Luthuli responded, “There were no signs, my lords, in that direction … [but] hope is always there.”13 Even under the most hopeless conditions, therefore, Albert Luthuli held out hope for a peaceful resolution through negotiations.
Clearly, Albert Luthuli favoured non-violent means of struggle against apartheid. For example, he advocated economic sanctions against the apartheid regime as a way to advance a “relatively peaceful transition”. Yet he was not a pacifist. He once observed that anyone who thought he was a pacifist should try to steal his chickens. I believe that he came to appreciate – under the pressure of events – that some measure of force was inevitable, but he felt that any use of force should be done through a military formation that was separate from the political movement of the ANC. I know that the plans for an armed struggle, under the auspices of a new military formation, were submitted to Chief Luthuli for his approval. Just days after Albert Luthuli received the Nobel Peace Prize, on 16 December 1961, the military wing of the ANC, Umkhonto weSizwe, engaged in its first use of force to sabotage a government installation. In the hope of peace, the armed struggle had begun.
A few months before his death in 1967, Albert Luthuli welcomed to his home the Africanist researcher and bookseller Donal Brody, who reported that the Chief was still actively engaged in imagining a political future for South Africa. As Brody recalls, Luthuli said, “I will not live to see everything that I and my friends have fought so hard for, but I think you will.” In prophetic terms, according to Brody, Albert Luthuli observed:
There will be enormous, peaceful change in South Africa before the end of this century. People of all races will eventually live together in harmony because no one, white, black or brown, wants to destroy this beautiful land of ours. Women must play an increasingly important role in all areas of the life of the future. They were and remain the most loyal supporters in all our struggles. The big powers will eventually turn away from all of Africa, so we must dedicate ourselves to solving our own problems.14
Certainly, these reported observations by Chief Luthuli seem to anticipate a unified, democratic, non-racial and non-sexist South Africa, a new South Africa working out its own destiny in the continent of Africa and the larger world. But they are also in keeping with his consistent vision of South Africa’s past and future.
“Our interest in freedom is not confined to ourselves only,” Luthuli said in his ANC presidential address of 1953. “We are interested in the liberation of all oppressed people in the whole of Africa and in the world as a whole.”15 Clearly, Albert Luthuli’s vision of freedom in South Africa was advanced in solidarity with the struggle for freedom throughout Africa, because he and his movement were internationalists. Looking to the future in his autobiography, Luthuli affirmed the principle of non-racialism, which was clearly identified in concrete terms in the Freedom Charter and eventually enshrined in the Constitution of a democratic South Africa. “The task is not finished,” he wrote. “South Africa is not yet home for all her sons and daughters. Such a home we wish to ensure.” As he imagined such a home for all, he faced and embraced this challenge: “There remains before us the building of a new land, a home for men [and women] who are black, white, brown, from the ruins of the old narrow groups, a synthesis of the rich cultural strains we have inherited.” This new land, this new South Africa, he foresaw, “will not necessarily be all black; but it will be African”.16 In such an inclusive, expansive vision of what it means to be African in South Africa, Albert Luthuli imagined this new land as a home for all.
Although he imagined that new land for all of us, and gave so many of us the imaginative capacity to share that vision, Albert Luthuli did not live to see the realisation of his vision in a democratic South Africa. Killed by a train in 1967, he died while his vision was still embattled, underground, in prison, or in exile.
In our gratitude and love, Albert Luthuli lives. The central offices of the African National Congress in Johannesburg, which are located in Luthuli House, keep his memory alive. The government has decided that the watermark on our South African passports must bear his image, so wherever we travel, anywhere in the world, we carry Albert Luthuli with us. Further afield in Africa, the University of Jos in Nigeria has established the Albert Luthuli Professor-at-Large, a position held by the great scholar, Ali Mazrui, to keep his memory alive.
For those of us who live in a unified, non-racial, non-sexist and democratic South Africa, we keep his memory alive because we live in the home that was designed and built by Albert Luthuli.
An earlier version of this foreword appeared in South Africa’s Nobel Laureates: Peace, Literature, Science. Used here with kind permission of Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Preface
THIS BOOK IS THE OUTCOME, after long hesitation on my part, of the urging of a number of my friends. It is true that in the last thirty years I have been increasingly identified with the movement of resistance against oppression by white supremacy in South Africa, until now I find myself at its head. Nevertheless, I regard my life as one among many, and my role in the resistance as one among many. If I have anything to say, it is not because of any particular distinction, but because I am identified with those who love South Africa, and will resist with them the attempt to smash a noble land with base and ignoble doctrines, and sub-human practices.
Among the many friends who have encouraged me to write this book – and had they not implanted the idea, it would not have been written – it fell to Charles and Sheila Hooper to deliver the final blow to my reluctance. When they approached me for material for a biography which they intended to write, I asked them to undertake what has probably proved a far harder task. I asked them to become my amanuenses. They willingly agreed to this, and they have persisted with it in spite of the fact that my unforeseen five months in detention protracted the term of their labour.
Our manner of writing was this: Each of the Hoopers made independent records as I dictated to them what I had to say. Out of these records they compiled a first draft of the book, arranged – I fear it was not thus dictated – chronologically. To this draft I added my afterthoughts, occasional corrections, and this preface.
I record here my gratitude and indebtedness to them both. Before I met them I had heard of them, in connection with the upheavals over passes for African women in the Zeerust district. I met them long before the possibility of this book was broached, and out of our first meeting there has grown up a deep and abiding friendship, born of a common outlook in facing the tragedy threatening our common homeland, and a common belief in the relevance of the Christian Faith to our problems and needs, however complex.
It may be noticed that names, which might have been expected in a book of this type, do not appear. The reason for this is not churlishness on my part, or lack of the desire to give honour where it is due. But the roll of men and women who fight valiantly in the cause of freedom and justice is a long one; and in a book addressed to readers outside as well as in South Africa, it has been necessary at times to deal briefly with matters predominantly domestic in their interest. If I have done injustice to any, I ask pardon, and I point out that this book is in part dedicated to them. But the last impression I wish to create is that their role is minor, while mine is major. Indeed, the reverse is true. As I look back I accuse myself of having contributed too little.
May God’s Will, holy and perfect, be done in South Africa, the dearly-loved land whose children we all are.
ALBERT