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

when men like myself were children at school and college students, we didn’t have much chance to compare our lot with that of white people. Living in a reserve and going to a mission school or college, far away from the big white cities, our only real contact with white people was with the school principal and the missionary, and so if we suffered in any way from discriminatory treatment by white men, we tended to confuse our resentment with the natural resentment of the schoolboy towards those in authority who abuse him.

But the moment he was adult and a teacher, the normal disabilities of being a black man in South Africa, plus the disabilities of being a black teacher, plus the special sensitivity to both that comes about through being an educated and enlightened person, hit home. Through church work and the activities of the teachers’ association, he busied himself with trying to improve the world of his people within the existing framework that the white world imposed upon it; he was too young and, in a sense, too ignorant to understand then, as he came to later, that the desire and the context in which it existed were contradictory.

In 1936, after some deliberation and misgiving, for he loved to teach, Luthuli left Adams College and teaching for ever and went home to Groutville as chief. The duties and responsibilities of chieftainship were in his blood and his family tradition, so from one point of view the change was not a dramatic one. But from another aspect the change was to be total and drastic. His thirty-eight years as a non-political man were over; he found himself, as he puts it, ‘plunged right into South African politics — and by the South African government itself’.

The year of the Hertzog Bills was 1936. They were two: the Representation of Natives Bill and the Native Trust and Land Bill. The Representation of Natives Bill took away from all non-whites in South Africa the hope of an eventual universal franchise that they had been told since 1853 they would someday attain. It offered Africans in the Cape Province representation through the election, on a separate voters’ roll, of three white members of Parliament. It offered Africans in the rest of the Union the opportunity to elect — not by individual vote but by means of chiefs, local councils and advisory boards, all acting as electoral colleges — four white senators. Finally, a Natives’ Representative Council was to be instituted, to consist of twelve elected African representatives, four government-nominated African representatives, and five white officials, with the Secretary for Native Affairs as chairman. Its function was to be purely advisory, to keep the government acquainted with the wants and views of the African people.

The Native Trust and Land Bill tightened once and for all the Natives’ Land Act of 1913, whereby Africans were prohibited from owning land except in reserves. The new bill provided 7.25 million morgen of land to be made available for African occupation and a trust fund to finance land purchase. (Twenty-two years later, this provision has not yet been completely fulfilled.)

Once the bills were law, Luthuli had vested in his authority as chief of the Umvoti Mission Reserve the collective vote of his five thousand people. White men and black canvassed him eagerly. He, who had scarcely talked politics at all, found himself talking scarcely anything else. For him, the reserve and its troubles had come into focus with the whole South African political scene. At the same time, he took up his traditional duties as chief — that combination of administrator, lawgiver, father-confessor, and figurehead. He found his chief’s court or ibandla , held under a shady tree, ‘a fine exercise in logical thinking’, and the cases on which he gave judgement, according to a nice balance of tribal lore and the official Code of Native Law, varied from boundary disputes to wrangles over the payment of lobolo (bride price). He could not make the land go around among his people — not even the uneconomic five-acre units without freehold which were all that Groutville, a better reserve than most, had to offer — but he tried to help them make the best of what they had: he even formed a black cane growers’ association to protect those among his tribesmen who were small growers of sugar. ‘The real meaning of our poverty was brought home to me,’ he says. ‘I could see that the African people had no means of making a living according to civilised standards, even if they belonged, as we did in Groutville, to a civilised Christian community, so far as African communities go.’

From 1945 until 1948, Luthuli himself sat on the Natives’ Representative Council. The Council proved to be a ‘toy telephone’ (in the phrase most tellingly used at the time) and no one regretted its passing when the Nationalist government of Dr Malan abolished it when it came into power in 1948. No one was much surprised, either, when it was not replaced by something more effective, for this was the first government actually dedicated to apartheid instead of merely committed to the bogus paternalism of Smuts. What the Africans got in place of the Council was yet another act — the Bantu Authorities Act, which, like many others affecting his people, Luthuli knows almost by heart and can reel off clause by clause. ‘It was a velvet-glove act,’ he says, ‘designed to give Africans in the reserves some feeling of autonomy, of a direct hand in their own affairs, while in fact using the decoy of their own chiefs to attract them to accept whatever the apartheid government decided was good for them. Under the Act, the chief becomes a sort of civil servant and must cooperate with the government in selling the government’s wishes to the people.’

In the late forties, Luthuli went to the United States at the invitation of the American Missionary Board to lecture on Christian missions in Africa. (The church had provided him with a chance to get to know other countries and peoples once before, when in 1938 he had gone to Madras as the Christian Council delegate to an International Missionary Council meeting.) He spent nine months in the United States, and he enjoyed his visit tremendously despite one or two incidents, those moments — a door closed in one’s face, a restaurant where a cup of coffee has been refused — that jolt the black man back to the realisation that, almost everywhere he travels, race prejudice will not let him be at home in the world.

The same year in which Luthuli took up his seat on the Natives’ Representative Council, he had joined an organisation to which, in time, no government was to be able to turn a deaf ear. This was the African National Congress. The Congress Movement began in 1912, just after the Act of Union that made the four provinces of South Africa into one country, when the Africans realised that the union’s motto, ‘Unity is Strength’, was to refer strictly to the whites. ‘When the ANC started,’ Luthuli says, ‘it had no idea of fighting for a change in fundamentals. It was concerned with the African’s immediate disabilities — passes, not issues. The question of the fight for political rights may have been implied, but was not on the platform at all.’

Other Africans would not agree with him about this. Be that as it may — the history of Congress, a movement shrinking and spawning, according to the times, over the years, is not very well documented except perhaps in the secret files of the Special Branch of the South African Police — the first meeting of Congress laid down at least one principle that has characterised the movement to this day: it was to be ‘a greater political and national body, uniting all small bodies and the different tribes in South Africa’. It has since pledged itself to the goal of a multi-racial society in South Africa with equal rights for all colours. ‘But it was only after 1936,’ says Luthuli, ‘when the Hertzog Bills acted as a terrific spur, that Congress began to show signs of becoming a movement that aimed at getting the government to bring about changes in policy that would give equal rights to non-whites in all fields.’ At the same time, Luthuli’s new responsibility as chief was proving to him the futility of any attempt to secure human rights without political rights; experience was shaping him for Congress, as it was shaping Congress for its historic role to come.