Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

I am not a watcher at the peep-holes so considerately provided by builders when they are at work; the sight of men swarming about their jobs on some project that will swallow the work in their hands anonymously in its immensity is more likely to depress than thrill me. But I found myself watching the Egyptian workmen labouring below on their power station, and I felt I could go on watching for a long time. There was something hopeful and even exciting about the sight of these men with their energies caught up by the demands of a huge imaginative task — not the labour of the cotton and the bean field whose fruits are used up each day by the day’s existence, and nothing more to show for it. When the power station is completed, it will be theirs to use; it does not merely feed them now, but will change their lives. Surely these people need so badly not merely to be fed better and to live better, but also, after so many centuries of humbleness, to achieve, as other people do? I hope that Nasser will not forget them in dreams of world power, as all their rulers in the past have forgotten them or sold them out, for one reason or another. People who ‘know Egypt’ and deplore the Nasser regime tell me that ‘kings and governments come and go, but it makes no difference to the fellah’. How tragic is the smug comfort of this remark if, this time again, it should prove to be true.

1959

There are three million white people and more than nine million black people in the Union of South Africa. Only a handful of the whites have ever met Albert John Luthuli. He has never been invited to speak over the radio, and his picture rarely appears in the white daily press in South Africa. Yet this government-deposed African chief — who, far from losing his honourable title since he was officially deprived of it, is generally known simply as ‘Chief’ — is the only man to whom the nine million Africans (‘African’ is becoming the accepted term for a South African black) give any sort of wide allegiance as a popular leader. He is a man in black politics in South Africa whose personality is a symbol of human dignity which Africans as a whole, no matter what their individual or political affiliations are and no matter what state of enlightenment or ignorance they may be in, recognise as their dignity.

Luthuli is a sixty-year-old Zulu and an African aristocrat. His mother was a Gumede — one of the most honoured of Zulu clans — and his grandmother was given, as was the custom with the daughter of a prominent tribal chief, to the court of the famous paramount chief of unconquered Zululand in the 1870s, Cetshwayo. Luthuli has a number of those physical characteristics which are regarded as typical of the warrior Zulu and to which even the most ardent supporter of apartheid would pay grudging admiration. His head is large and set majestically back on a strong neck; he has a deep, soft voice; and although he is not a tall man he seems always to look as big as anyone else in the room.

Among his less obvious characteristics is a sense of repose; sometimes a monumental quiet. If more white South Africans could meet him, or even hear him speak on a public platform, they would be astonished (and perhaps even a little ashamed — he makes that sort of impression) to measure the real man against the bloodthirsty demagogue that is the African leader as they imagine him. Apart from anything else, he speaks English with a distinct American intonation, acquired along with his education at schools run by American missionaries.

Luthuli’s ancestral home is Groutville Mission, in the Umvoti Mission Reserve on the coast of Natal, near Durban, and his personality stands sturdily upon this little corner of Africa. He has never, even as a child, lived in the collection of thatched mud huts in which tribal Africans usually live because Reverend Grout, an American missionary who came to South Africa in 1835, had planned his mission village on the European pattern, with houses; and if as a child the young Luthuli did his share of herding cattle, he did it after school hours, because Grout had seen to it that there was fenced common that would free the children to attend school. As the Umvoti Reserve is a mission and not a tribal reserve, the chiefs are elected, and there is no dynasty in the hereditary sense. Yet ability has tended to create a dynasty of its own; a number of the elected chiefs have been members of the Luthuli family. When Luthuli was a child, his uncle was chief, but after 1921 the chieftainship went out of the hands of the family until 1936, when Luthuli himself, then a teacher at Adams College (one of the most respected of mission educational establishments for Africans) was elected.

Luthuli was educated at various mission schools and at Adams College, and in 1921 he qualified as an instructor in the teachers’ training course and joined the staff of Adams. He could look back on a gentle, almost sheltered childhood in the protective shadow of his uncle’s house and the mission at Groutville. The one had given him the confidence that comes to children who belong to an honoured family; the other, which provided his first contact with the world of whites, did not impose the harsh impact of the colour bar too early on his young mind. Perhaps as a result of this, even today, when the white government of South Africa has deposed him as chief of his people, several times banned him from free movement about the country, and arrested him — as President-General of the African National Congress and a leader of the liberation movement of Africans in South Africa — on a charge of treason that kept him in court through almost a year of inquiry, he has no hate in him. He has never been anti-white and believes he never will be. He started off his life by seeing human beings, not colours. It is a very different matter today for the urban African child who is born and grows up in the slum areas of big cities in South Africa, cheek by jowl with the whites in the paradox of the colour bar; he is made aware, from the start, that his blackness is a shroud, cutting him off, preparing him to be — as the Africans often describe themselves as feeling — ‘half a man’.

Luthuli seems to have come to politics through an ideal of service fostered by religion rather than by way of any strong ambition. As early as his primary school days, what he calls the ‘Christian ideal’ of service captured his faith and his imagination. Many politically minded Africans deplore the influence the missions — which brought education to Africa and which have continued, because of government neglect of its obligation, to dominate African education — have had among their people in the past. The cry is that the missions have used their influence to reconcile the people to white domination rather than to encourage them to demand their birthright as free human beings. But Luthuli’s experience has been that mission teaching gave him a sense of the dignity of man, in the sight of God, that he wants to see made a reality for all colours and creeds.

The truth probably lies somewhere in the fact that for those, like Luthuli, who had eyes for it, there was a glimpse of freedom in the gospel of humble submission to a discipline greater than man-devised. Out of that glimpse, more than any reasoning of politics and experience, a man may come to say, as Luthuli did when he gave up his chieftainship under government pressure in 1952, ‘Laws and conditions that tend to debase human personality — a God-given force — be they brought about by the State or any other individuals, must be relentlessly opposed in the spirit of defiance shown by Saint Peter when he said to the rulers of his day, “Shall we obey God or man?”’

Luthuli’s consciousness of the disabilities of the African people awoke as soon as he began to teach. ‘Before that,’ he explains,