Albert Luthuli

Abstract

Albert Luthuli, president of the African National Congress (ANC), South Africa’s leading anti-apartheid organization, became the first African-born recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1961. During Luthuli’s presidency (1952–1967), the ANC became a mass organization, articulating a broad, inclusive African nationalism and leading the Congress Alliance, a multiracial, multi-ideological anti-apartheid coalition that shared Luthuli’s vision of a democratic, equitable South Africa. The Prize recognized Luthuli’s Gandhian strategy to end South African apartheid, state-sanctioned laws and policies designed particularly to ensure White supremacist racial domination over the African majority, who were approximately 75 percent of the country’s population. The Nobel also reflected Luthuli’s success in portraying apartheid as a crime against humanity that violated the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and to contextualize South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle as central to expanding global human-rights campaigns. The Nobel Peace Prize cemented Luthuli’s enduring image as an uncompromising advocate of nonviolence who—during intense debates in 1960 and 1961 within the anti-apartheid movement about the relative efficacy of violent and nonviolent tactics against an increasingly violent apartheid state—remained implacably opposed to Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), which eventually became the ANC’s armed wing. But recently available archival documents, along with autobiographical accounts and oral interviews reveal that Luthuli accepted and authorized MK while insisting that the ANC maintain its official nonviolent position. In retrospect, the Nobel Prize was the apogee of Luthuli’s global renown, as increasingly restrictive state bans limited his ability to participate in political activity. Despite Luthuli’s tragic and still-controversial 1967 death, the ANC survived lethal state repression to become in 1994 the first democratically elected governing party in South African history. But Africa’s first Nobel Peace Prize winner eventually became overshadowed by younger ANC leaders Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela. This article aims to recover Luthuli from relative historical obscurity and highlight his key leadership of the ANC as it transformed into a mass anti-apartheid movement and his revolutionary belief that apartheid South Africa could become one of the world’s first truly multiracial democracies.