Background
Luthuli was born in the Groutville Reserve of Natal Province (present day Zimbabwe) circa 1899, the son of a Congregationalist mission interpreter and nephew of the elected reigning chief of the Abasemakholweni Zulu tribe.
activist politician statesman teacher
Luthuli was born in the Groutville Reserve of Natal Province (present day Zimbabwe) circa 1899, the son of a Congregationalist mission interpreter and nephew of the elected reigning chief of the Abasemakholweni Zulu tribe.
After attending the local mission school, he went to Adam's College, a mission secondary school, where he qualified as a teacher.
He stayed at Adam's College and taught Zulu history and literature for 17 years, until he was finally persuaded to accept the petition of the tribal elders to fill the vacant chieftaincy at Grountville. He attended religious conferences in India in 1938 and the United States in 1948, meanwhile serving within South Africa as chairman of the Congregational Churches of the American Board, president of the Natal Mission Conference, and executive director of the Christian Council of South Africa.
After a few years of service on various race-relations committees, Luthuli joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1946 and rose quickly to the presidency of the Natal provincial division. In 1952, when the ANC and South African Indian Congress together launched the Defiance Campaign, in which race laws were deliberately violated as a protest against the government's apartheid policy, Luthuli openly supported the campaign and encouraged his people to participate in it. In October of that year the government ordered him to resign from the ANC or give up his chieftaincy, but he refused to do either. In November 1952 Luthuli was deposed by the government, and in December he was elected president-general of the ANC. At the same time, the government restricted him to his village. When the ban lapsed in 1954, Luthuli flew to Johannesburg to protest the scheme by which Africans lost their remaining freehold rights in Johannesburg and were ordered to leave the suburb of Sophiatown and resettle in the new location of Meadowlands.
The government, however, prevented him from speaking and served him with a further two-year ban. He was arrested in December 1956 on a charge of high treason, but was released a year later. In May 1959, after addressing mass meetings of nonwhites and whites in western Cape Province, he was again confined to his village and banned from all gatherings under the Suppression of Communism Act, a broad statute employed indiscriminately against all opponents of apartheid. While in Johannesburg in March 1960 to give evidence at the treason trial, he publicly burned the pass which he, like all Africans, was required to carry. He also called for a national day of mourning on March 28 for those Africans killed by the police during a peaceful protest meeting at Sharpeville.
Luthuli's book Let My People Go, partly autobiographical, partly a history of the ANC, appeared in 1962. The ban on his movements was still in effect at the time of his death in Durban, South Africa, on July 21, 1967.
Luthuli's belief in the teachings of Christianity were reflected in his political outlook, in which passive, or nonviolent, resistance to injustice was regarded not only as the correct opposition tactic but also as a spiritual force in itself.