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 and their postwar aspirations. It declared, among other things, the right of all people to self-determination and the restoration of self-government. But Churchill and South African prime minister Jan Smuts claimed that self-determination applied only to countries occupied by fascist powers, not to European colonial possessions and South Africa. Thus, Luthuli and other Africans felt that support for Smuts’s South Africa in the wider war against Hitler’s Germany represented no more than a choice between white supremacist regimes, a “local master race versus the foreign one.”10 In 1943, accordingly, the ANC published African Claims, demanding for African self-determination, including a bill of rights, racial equality, universal suffrage, and nonracial citizenship for blacks in southern Africa.11
In 1946, Luthuli assumed councilor duties in the Native Representative Council (NRC), an advisory body to the government. Luthuli reiterated the demands made in African Claims and continued his longstanding complaints about inadequate African land, comments that enraged the white NRC chairman. With the support of other councilors, Luthuli protested the state’s use of coercive force to suppress a massive African mineworkers’ strike, condemning “the reactionary character of the Union Native Policy,” which exposed the “government’s post war continuation of a policy of fascism which is the antithesis of the letter and the spirit of the Atlantic Charter and the United Nations Charter.” The government, he continued, was “impenetrably deaf” to African groans of pain in response to oppressive segregationist measures.12 Luthuli would say later that the NRC was a “toy telephone” requiring him to “shout a little louder” to no one, and African councilors then adjourned in protest. The NRC never met again, and the government formally dissolved it in 1952.13
In 1947, Dr. Xuma and South African Indian Congress (SAIC) leaders Dr. Yusuf Dadoo and Dr. G. M. Naicker signed the “Doctors Pact,” pledging to fight together against South Africa’s racial policies, including at the newly founded United Nations (UN). Ironically, as Nazi-inspired apartheid leaders would soon rule South Africa, the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights exemplified an international human rights discourse that included racial equality, a partial reaction to the genocidal policies of Nazi Germany. Tellingly, South Africa abstained from the vote that approved the Human Rights Declaration. Gandhi, whose satyagraha campaigns while he was in South Africa between 1893 and 1914 set the course for his later successes in India, warned South Africa of its dangerous path: “the future is surely not with the so-called white races if they keep themselves in purdah. The attitude of unreason will mean a third war which sane people should avoid. Political cooperation among all the exploited races in South Africa can only result in mutual goodwill, if it is wisely directed and based on truth and non-violence.”14
The unexpected victory of the National Party in May 1948 made apartheid official state policy until 1994. Founded in 1933 by Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) minister and newspaper editor Daniel François Malan, the National Party was the political beneficiary of a resurgent Afrikaner ethno-nationalism that sought economic advancement, cultural autonomy, and explicit political measures to ensure Afrikaner power and identity to counter British political and economic dominance and African numerical superiority. Many pro-Nazi Afrikaners, including future apartheid prime ministers Johannes Strydom and John Vorster, had opposed South African military and economic contributions to the Allied cause against Hitler’s Germany, engaging in seditious activities that resulted in their detention during the war. As Africans and poor Afrikaners competed with each other for living space and jobs in a rapidly expanding manufacturing sector producing war materiel, Afrikaner nationalists complained of “swamping” by an African urban population that had doubled to 1.4 million in the interwar years. By 1946, there were 2.2 million urban-based Africans living in cities supposedly reserved for white permanent residence, and their growing militancy was exemplified in strikes, boycotts, and demands for better living and working conditions. Also, the close proximity of working-class Africans and Afrikaners renewed fears of racial mixing and prompted calls for policies that would ensure Afrikaner racial separation and preservation. Increasingly, Afrikaner intellectuals posited apartheid as a permanent solution for “the purity of our blood and . . . our unadulterated European racial survival.”15 The governing United Party of Prime Minister Jan Smuts, South Africa’s most prominent political figure, who also helped found the League of Nations and its successor the UN, had trounced the Nationalists in the previous 1943 election. In 1948, the United Party won the popular vote again, but because of greater electoral weight given to rural districts, which voted disproportionately for the Nationalists, and an alliance with a smaller Afrikaner-based Party, the Nationalists squeezed out an improbable victory. The surprised Malan, now faced with the unexpected task of converting apartheid from electoral slogan to concrete government policy, nevertheless hastened to hail the victory as divinely ordained.16
The Global Color Line
South Africa was part of the global hegemony of powerful white states and individuals exemplified by European colonialism in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean and continuing racial subordination in the United States. In June 1948, Luthuli traveled to the United States for seven months, during which he addressed churches, civic groups, youth groups, and others about the progress of Natal American Board missions, African rural development, and racial reconciliation.17 This was not his first overseas trip; in 1938, the chief had traveled to Madras, India, as part of an interracial Christian delegation to an international missionary conference. Despite the fact that South African segregation traveled outside its borders—white delegates traveled first class and the four Africans second class—Luthuli toured India and Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), met Indian, Japanese, Chinese, and African Christian leaders, and returned “with wider sympathies and wider horizons.”18 Luthuli’s tour of the United States took place during the 1948 presidential election, when President Harry Truman put forth a mild but virtually unprecedented civil rights agenda that sparked the “Dixiecrat” revolt of
