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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2014
Seek ye the political kingdom and all shall be yours.
No minority tyranny in history ever survived the opposition of the majority. Nor will it survive in South Africa. The end of white tyranny is near.
In their Portraits of Nobel Laureates in Peace, Wintterle and Cramer wrote that “the odds against the baby born at the Seventh-Day Adventist Mission near Bulawayo in Rhodesia in 1898 becoming a Nobel Prize winner were so astronomical as to defy calculation. He was the son of a proud people, the descendant of Zulu chieftains and warriors. But pride of birth is no substitute for status rendered inferior by force of circumstance, and in Luthuli's early years, the native African was definitely considered inferior by the white man. If his skin was black, that could be considered conclusive proof that he would never achieve anything; white men would see to that. However, in Luthuli's case they made a profound mistake--they allowed him to have an education.”
If there is an extra-royal gentry in Zulu society, then it was into this class that Albert John Luthuli was born. Among the Zulus, chieftainship is hereditary only for the Paramount Chief; all regional chiefs are elected. The Luthuli family though, at least through the 1950s, monopolized the chieftainship of the Abasemakholweni (literally “converts”) tribe for nearly a century. Luthuli's grandfather Ntaba, was the first in the family to head the tribe and around 1900, his uncle Martin Luthuli took over.
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5. One is reminded of the proverb, often mentioned in southern Africa, but adaptable to colonial situations almost everywhere and throughout history, which goes “Before the white man came, we had the land and they had the Bible; now they have the land and we have the Bible.”
6. From its inception, the NEUM was a highly controversial organization. According to Luthuli, it was ironically torn by a considerable lack of unity. The NEUM in turn gave birth to the African People's Democratic Union of South Africa in 1962.
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