LAUREATES Archbishop Desmond Tutu…Nelson R. Mandela …but Do You Know South Africa’s FIRST Nobel Peace Laureate?

ALBERT LUTULI , Nobel Peace Prize Recipient, 1960
I consider Lutuli, grandson of the first Christian converts in the area called Groutville, the Moses of South Africa.

Lutuli’s grasp of Christian praxis was built on that of his grandparents, who had been the first two converts to the American missionaries of which Alvin Grout was member and the one for whom Groutville, in the north coast of then Natal Province, was named. Lutuli was an earnest,s erious but critical-thinking Christian, school teacher and lay preacher; a pioneer in many ways; and more consistently nonviolent than our first African president, Nelson Mandela. Indeed, Lutuli was the head of the party in power today, then simply the African National Congress (ANC) when Mandela and the ANC youth rebelled against the ‘polite war’ then being waged against segregation and aprtheid. Mandela and the radical wing he helped create – Umkhonto We Sizwe, literally “Spear of the Nation” – mounted sabotage and controlled violent attacks on symbols of apartheid.

As a teenager, I, a member of the other minority group under apartheid (called “Asiatics”), learned from my teachers about the achievements of Chief Lutuli. People of color took pride in such achievements even when they were not Christians or indigenous Africans. We quickly adopted the braod nationalism Lutuli espoused: all who live in South Africa are Africans. Indeed, his consistent call for Christian equality and charity toward “people as people” angered the South African authorities. They clearly anticipated Lutuli as an effective ambassador for those wanting true freedom and democracy in the land. In the 1950s Albert Lutuli had just been elected president of the ANC (1952) but because he would not give up this new leadership role when asked by the white authorities, Lutuli was to pay a heavy price. For Lutuli his faith and politics were intertwined, much as Jesus is reported to have lived His uncontradicted life.South Africa under white control placed Lutuli in jail for leading a pass-burning (the pass was a document Africans needed to enter white areas or cities) and Lutuli was often under house arrest or restrictions that prevented him leading church or ANC activities during the 1950s. In all his life, until he was killed — mysteriously perhaps? – by a train near his home in Groutville just a few years after winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1960, he saw the promise and the failings of Christianity. But he never gave in to hate – whether of Asians, Europeans or mixed-race Coloureds of South Africa. In fact, he was part of the Defiance Campaign in 1954 that declared in the FREEDOM CHARTER (a compromise document for white and black subgroups) that South Africa belongs to all who live in it. That document propelled the ANC under Mandela to a broad South African nationalism and negotiations toward a peaceful demise of apartheid in 1993.

Lutuli was grateful to his Church for allowing him two trips outside the country before apartheid tightened the noose against all persons of color and their supporters after the elections of 1948. That very year he was to return from an eye-opening speaking tour (and camp leader) in the United States, where he saw the blessings and the curses of “freedom” and Faith. Ten years earlier he had been a delegate to an International Missionary Conference in Madras, India. In his evocative biography that was published in 1962, the Moses-like figure wrote in LET MY PEOPLE GO,”that poverty in India was worse than in South Africa. Yet he was fair-minded to also see:

“The spectacle in India of the Church seriously tackling poverty (how desperate a poverty!), the Church undertaking agricultural projects, the Church

organising home industries and social services, all made me aware of our sluggish pace in South Africa, I came home an incisive critic of Christianity,

I still am one. It does not diminish my loyalty.”

(Source: Let My People Go, 1962. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company)