Albert Luthuli

It was 1952, in South Africa.

The government had given a Zulu chief from Groutville, in Natal, an ultimatum. He had two weeks to choose. Leave the ANC, or lose his chieftainship.

The chief's name was Albert Luthuli. He did not choose. He left neither one.

In November 1952, the government removed him.

Albert Luthuli was born around 1898, in Rhodesia, where his parents were missionaries. He himself did not know the exact year. He thought it was probably 1898.

His mother brought him up in Groutville, where his grandfather had been chief of a small tribe.

He studied to become a teacher, all the way to Adams College. He was offered a scholarship to the university at Fort Hare. He turned it down, so that he could support his mother.

He taught for about fifteen years. He demanded an education for Africans as good as anyone else's.

In 1927, he married a teacher, Nokukhanya Bhengu. They settled in Groutville and had seven children.

In 1933, the elders asked him to become chief. He accepted in 1936. He led some 5,000 people on the Umvoti River Reserve.

In 1944, he joined the African National Congress, the ANC. In 1952, he took part in a nonviolent defiance campaign against the laws of apartheid.

That was why they gave him the ultimatum.

After his removal, he published a statement. In it, he said he had spent thirty years knocking, patiently, moderately and modestly, at a closed and barred door. He also said what a chief was, in his eyes:

He also wrote that the road to freedom is via the cross.

A month later, in December 1952, the ANC elected him president-general. He was fifty-four.

The cross came quickly. The government imposed bans on him, one after another. Barred from the cities. Barred from meetings. Then ordered to stay within a twenty-mile radius of his home.

In December 1956, he was arrested for treason, along with 155 others. The charges against him were dropped a year later.

In March 1960, police killed 69 people at Sharpeville. Luthuli publicly burned his pass, the document imposed by the laws he was fighting. He was fined and given a suspended sentence.

Then, in October 1961, he was awarded the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize. He became the first African to receive it.

The government lifted his ban for just ten days. Just enough time to travel to Oslo with his wife, in December 1961, and come back.

He has been described as the most widely known and respected African leader of his era.

Albert Luthuli died on July 21, 1967, near his home in Groutville. He was sixty-nine.

For him, a chief did not rule over his people: he served them. That way of understanding power echoes Ubuntu, in which a person only fully exists with others.

They had confined him to a circle a few dozen kilometres around his house.

His voice travelled around the world, and came back to his door.