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.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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