the so called Ghetto Act, which disenfranchised Indians and restricted their land ownership.1 Luthuli endorsed Gandhi’s satyagraha as an “active non-violence” that he felt had the power to change individual lives, mobilize the masses, and end apartheid. “We have declared to the world that we do not mean to use violence in furtherance of our cause. We will always follow the path of peace and nonviolence in our legitimate demands for freedom.”2 In April 1952, he gathered Natal ANC members to reaffirm their commitment to the Defiance Campaign, a pivotal moment that his close friend M. B. Yengwa remembered reflected his unprecedented willingness to defy government laws despite being a government-paid chief.3
Luthuli’s role as a staff officer was not to be arrested and go to jail, but to tour Natal to organize the campaign. With his rich baritone voice, he led crowds singing freedom songs. The Natal Campaign began in August 1952 as a joint ANC-SAIC endeavor, marking the first large-scale cooperation between Africans, Indians, and other racial groups in the province. Luthuli rallied thousands of people as Africans and Indians defied segregation practices in public facilities and Africans defied curfew laws in Durban.4 Over nine thousand people of all races went to jail for defying apartheid laws, and the prisons resounded with their freedom songs. The Defiance Campaign lived up to its name, but it was never going to bring the walls—or the laws—of apartheid tumbling down. Instead, the government used brute force to eliminate all “subversive” activity, soon to be defined yet more comprehensively.5 Nevertheless, the Defiance Campaign led to a dramatic increase in ANC membership (from an estimated twenty-five thousand in 1951 to one hundred thousand at the end of the campaign). It also facilitated the Congress Alliance, a broad antiapartheid front of independent multiracial, multi-ideological organizations that sought to end apartheid. If the Defiance Campaign did not end apartheid, it prepared its downfall by transforming the character and nature of the antiapartheid struggle.
Luthuli signing up volunteers for the Defiance Campaign, 1952. (Luthuli Museum)
This was particularly significant in Natal, where memories of the Durban riots reinforced mutual suspicion and hostility between Indians and Africans. Even Gandhi had exhibited racial antagonism toward Africans, and his son, Manilal, who had remained in Natal, had previously referred to Africans’ “savage instinct” and doubted their ability to attain and maintain the spiritual and personal discipline to utilize satyagraha techniques.6 But Luthuli’s inclusive leadership style, open admiration for Gandhi’s satyagraha methods, and close relationships with Indian leaders, including Manilal, facilitated unprecedented levels of cooperation between Africans and Indians.7 Luthuli was a crucial influence on future Indian Congressites such as the antiapartheid activist Kader Asmal, who remembered, “I met him on a number of occasions in the late 1940s and early 1950s when he knocked on doors in my home town of Stanger looking for support. His non-racialism and his commitment to freedom and democracy made an indelible impression on me. Albert Luthuli was one of the most important influences leading me into the politics of liberation.”8 Luthuli’s multiracial stance allayed the suspicions of Indians and whites harbored by ANC activists like Dorothy Nyembe, who remembered how “Chief Luthuli taught us that every person born in this country had a right to stay and be free, whether he is Indian, African or white. We fought side by side.”9
From Government Chief to ANC President
By August 1952, government officials had concluded—not surprisingly—that Luthuli’s Defiance Campaign activity conflicted with his chiefly duties to administer and enforce government laws. Summoning Luthuli to Pretoria, Secretary of Native Affairs Dr. W. W. M. Eiselen ordered Luthuli to resign from either the ANC or the chieftaincy. When, after two months, Luthuli refused to choose, the government stripped him of his chieftainship, which included benefits such as paid school fees for his children. But Luthuli insisted, “a chief is primarily a servant of his people . . . not a local agent of the Government. . . . Why shouldn’t [Africans] assist this organization which fights for the welfare of the black man?”10 Luthuli lamented,
who will deny that thirty years of my life have been spent knocking in vain, patiently, moderately at a closed and barred door? What have been the fruits of my many years of moderation? . . .
. . . Has there been any reciprocal tolerance or moderation from the Government, be it Nationalist or United Party? No! No! On the contrary, the past 30 years have seen the greatest number of laws restricting our rights and progress until today, we have reached a stage where we have almost no rights at all: no adequate land for our occupation; our only asset, cattle, dwindling; no security of home ownership; no decent and remunerative employment; more restriction of freedom of movement by the pass laws, curfew regulations, influx control measures; in short we have witnessed in these years an intensification of our subjection to ensure and protect white supremacy.11
Luthuli fought apartheid on political and theological grounds, regarding Christianity as a stirring social gospel of justice, freedom, and equality and Jesus as the champion of the dispossessed who had died on the cross for all of humanity, not just whites. Luthuli argued that all Christians should fight for social justice, his politics reflecting his own understanding of Christianity: “I am in Congress precisely because I am a Christian. My Christian belief about human society must find expression here and now. . . . My own urge, because I am a Christian, is to get into the thick of the struggle with other Christians, taking my Christianity with me and praying that it may be used to influence for good the character of the resistance.”12 Thus, he criticized the many whites, especially within the Afrikaner Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), who used Christianity to justify white supremacy, relying on the Calvinist doctrine of an “elect” in claiming divine sanction to rule South Africa as a supreme and separate population over blacks.13 DRC religious leaders championed apartheid as a divinely ordained, comprehensive social engineering program that would create societal harmony through rigorous political, socioeconomic, and physical separation, thereby eliminating the supposed evils of racial egalitarianism.14 Despite the Christian principle of an “equality of believers” regardless of race, proapartheid self-professed “Christians” argued that in racial matters “all earthly distinctions remain.”15 For Luthuli, apartheid was a violation of God’s law, “contrary to the plan and purpose of God our Creator, who created all men equal.”16
At the ANC annual conference in December 1952, ANC delegates including Walter Sisulu, impressed by Luthuli’s “defiance of the government,” elected him president over Moroka, who had hired his own lawyer and disavowed Congress policies in court after being arrested for Defiance Campaign involvement.17 Taking the mantle of an organization that had just had fifty-two leaders banned, twenty leaders, including Moroka, and over eight thousand volunteers convicted for Defiance Campaign activities, Luthuli immediately visited national ANC branches countrywide. In the Eastern Cape’s Port Elizabeth, twenty-five thousand people came to hear him demand, “Vula Malan thina siya qonqotha” (Open the door, Malan, we are knocking!”), and sang, “Malan o tshohilole ‘muso oa hae. Luthuli phakisa onke’muso!” (Malan has taken fright, make haste, Luthuli, and form a new government!).18 At home, Nokukhanya vetted Albert’s speeches as they hosted visiting ANC members and friends such as Nelson Mandela, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, and other visitors, who, showing customary Zulu respect before entering someone’s home, addressed Luthuli by his clan name: “O! Madlanduna, Mashisha Sikhulekile Ekhaya.”19
The Violence of the Apartheid State
In response to the Defiance Campaign, apartheid South Africa evolved further toward a police state, with bans that forced Eastern Cape ANC branches underground and police raids of homes and workplaces of campaign leaders, including Luthuli, to confiscate Defiance Campaign documents, membership cards, organizational papers, and files. With the introduction of the Public Safety Act and the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1953, the state could proclaim
