African Revolutionary Writers, Part 3b
Albert Luthuli
Chief Albert Luthuli was President-General of the African National
Congress from 1952 until his death in 1967. In 1960, the year of the
Sharpeville massacre, Luthuli was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Our sample of
his work is his Peace Prize lecture, delivered in Stockholm, Sweden (attached).
This speech fits in well with
our course. It followed the first batch of African independence-struggle victories
after the World War of 1939-45. In the same year of 1960, 16 African countries
achieved independence.
We have already seen material
from Paul Robeson and W E B Du Bois, helping us to recall the worldwide
uprising of internationalist political will for the end of direct colonialism,
which was to a large extent a consequence of the victorious Anti-Fascist World
War. Luthuli’s speech shows his consciousness of this internationalism, of
which the awarding of his Peace Prize was one expression.
Note that Luthuli’s speech
accepting the Peace Prize is not a pacifist speech. It does not condemn
armed struggle, but on the contrary, justifies it. Here are some relevant
paragraphs from the speech:
“This award
could not be for me alone, nor for just South Africa, but for Africa as a
whole. Africa presently is most deeply torn with strife and most bitterly
stricken with racial conflict. How strange then it is that a man of Africa
should be here to receive an award given for service to the cause of peace and
brotherhood between men. There has been little peace in Africa in our time.
From the northernmost end of our continent, where war has raged for seven
years, to the centre and to the south there are battles being fought out, some
with arms, some without. In my own country, in the year 1960, for which this
award is given, there was a state of emergency for many months. At Sharpeville, a small village, in a
single afternoon sixty-nine people were shot dead and 180 wounded by small
arms fire; and in parts like the Transkei, a state of emergency is still
continuing. Ours is a continent in revolution against oppression. And peace and
revolution make uneasy bedfellows. There can be no peace until the forces of
oppression are overthrown.
“Our
continent has been carved up by the great powers; alien governments have been forced upon the African people by military
conquest and by economic domination; strivings for nationhood and national
dignity have been beaten down by force; traditional economics and ancient
customs have been disrupted, and human skills and energy have been harnessed
for the advantage of our conquerors. In these times there has been no peace;
there could be no brotherhood between men.
“But now, the
revolutionary stirrings of our continent are setting the past aside. Our people
everywhere from north to south of the continent are reclaiming their land,
their right to participate in government, their dignity as men, their
nationhood. Thus, in the turmoil of
revolution, the basis for peace and brotherhood in Africa is being restored by
the resurrection of national sovereignty and independence, of equality and
the dignity of man.
“It should
not be difficult for you here in Europe to appreciate this. Your continent
passed through a longer series of revolutionary
upheavals, in which your age of feudal backwardness gave way to the new age
of industrialization, true nationhood, democracy, and rising living standards -
the golden age for which men have striven for generations. Your age of
revolution, stretching across all the years from the eighteenth century to our
own, encompassed some of the bloodiest civil wars in all history. By
comparison, the African revolution has swept across three quarters of the
continent in less than a decade; its final completion is within sight of our
own generation…
“Perhaps, by
your standards, our surge to revolutionary reforms is late. If it is so - if we
are late in joining the modern age of social enlightenment, late in gaining
self-rule, independence, and democracy, it is because in the past the pace has
not been set by us. Europe set the pattern for the nineteenth and
twentieth-century development of Africa. Only now is our continent coming into
its own and recapturing its own fate
from foreign rule.
“Though I
speak of Africa as a single entity, it is divided in many ways by race,
language, history, and custom; by political, economic, and ethnic frontiers.
But in truth, despite these multiple divisions, Africa has a single common
purpose and a single goal - the achievement of its own independence. All
Africa, both lands which have won their political victories but have still to
overcome the legacy of economic backwardness, and lands like my own whose
political battles have still to be waged to their conclusion - all Africa has
this single aim: our goal is a united
Africa in which the standards of life and liberty are constantly expanding;
in which the ancient legacy of illiteracy and disease is swept aside; in which
the dignity of man is rescued from beneath the heels of colonialism which have
trampled it. This goal, pursued by millions of our people with revolutionary
zeal, by means of books, representations, demonstrations, and in some places armed force provoked by
the adamancy of white rule, carries the
only real promise of peace in Africa. Whatever means have been used, the
efforts have gone to end alien rule and race oppression.”
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Africa and Freedom, Albert Luthuli,
Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, 1960.
