Albert Luthuli: The murdered leader who put his people first

A section of the Luthuli Avenue in Nairobi. Inset: South African liberation leader Albert Luthuli. [File, Standard]

South African liberation leader Albert Luthuli died on July 21, 1967 near his home in Groutville, in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal. A government inquest concluded that his death was an accident – he had been hit by a train. This finding was always disputed by his family, and almost 60 years later, they were vindicated.

In 2025, a court ruled that Luthuli had been murdered, his death resulting from “assault by members of the security special branch of the South African police”. The ruling corrects long-standing historical records and adds Luthuli’s murder to the catalogue of torture and assassinations increasingly used by the apartheid government to suppress dissent.

Albert John Mvumbi Luthuli was born around 1898. He was an educator, Zulu chief, and religious leader. Africa’s first Nobel Peace Prize winner was also president-general of the African National Congress (ANC) from 1952 until his death at the age of 69.

The ANC resisted white minority rule in South Africa, and Luthuli was active in the organisation’s defiance campaign. He became head of the ANC in 1952, four years after apartheid was formalised.

In the last decades of his life, Luthuli was silenced and persecuted. Once democracy was achieved in 1994, he received numerous honours – his image now features as the watermark on South African passports.

Nonetheless, Luthuli is largely overshadowed by fellow Peace Prize winners Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. While over 14 million copies of Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, have been sold, Luthuli’s account, Let My People Go, is comparatively little known.

Much of my research on life writing has focused on autobiographies published during apartheid, including analysis of Let My People Go.

It is a book that deserves wider readership. It defies expectations that an autobiographer will offer a candidly personal account of self and life, focusing instead on the struggle for justice. It depicts a steadfastly moral man whose fight against racist oppression inspired activists within and beyond South Africa – and continues to do so.

Let My People Go offers a brief sketch of Luthuli’s ancestors and early life. His grandparents were Zulu Christian converts. He was born, he calculated, “in the year 1898, and certainly before 1900” near Bulawayo, in present-day Zimbabwe. He was not born in his ancestral home, Groutville, because his father had left to serve in the Second Matabele War. After the conflict, his parents remained at a Seventh Day Adventist mission station.

His father died when Luthuli was a baby. At about the age of ten, he was sent back to Groutville for his schooling. Qualifying as a teacher, he became principal of a small school. A government bursary allowed him to study further at Adams College, where he performed exceptionally well, was invited to join the staff, and rose through the ranks. He met Nokukhanya Bhengu there, and they married in 1927.

Luthuli loved teaching. However, in 1935, after prolonged urging from tribal elders, he and Nokukhanya decided he was duty-bound to accept nomination as chief of the Umvoti Mission Reserve.

For 17 years, he dedicated himself to improving the lives of the people of Groutville and providing principled leadership in confronting the injustices of racism. He took the “revolutionary step of admitting women” to local meetings, organised African sugar farmers, and held a seat on the Native Representatives Council. In 1938, he became a member of the executive of the Christian Council of South Africa.

In the years that followed, he remained deeply involved in Christian and civic organisations. In 1945, he was elected to the executive of the ANC’s provincial branch, becoming president of it in 1951 and, in 1952, of the whole organisation.

Overseas travel widened Luthuli’s perspective, whether at a missionary conference in India (1938) or a nine-month church-sponsored lecture tour of the United States (1948).

His autobiography recounts in detail his religious, civic, and political involvement, weaving in a narrative of increasingly draconian and devastating apartheid policies.

Writing painstakingly and usually without emotion – though disgust and horror occasionally break through – he challenges the “twisted, distorted” versions of history promoted by the regime. He offers meticulous evidence of the irrationality and immorality of racism.

From 1953, repeated banning orders prevented Luthuli from leaving his home or publishing or distributing any written material. In 1956, he was arrested on a charge of high treason (discharged in 1957 and acquitted in 1961).

Despite this, Luthuli continued with his autobiography, dictating his story to his friends Rev Charles Hooper and his wife Sheila Hooper. They compiled the draft, which Luthuli then edited.

It was inevitable that Let My People Go would be banned, and Luthuli knew it was unlikely to enlighten apartheid rulers: “There is not really even a common language in which to discuss our agonising problems. (They) cannot speak to Africans except in the restricted language of Baasskap.” The term refers to whites being “boss” and anyone classified as non-white adopting a position of subservience.

Nonetheless, the narrator insists that if the whites are ignorant of the realities, the fault does not lie with Africans. Readers of autobiography often look for insight into the author’s personal life, but Luthuli’s account gives greater weight to political-historical analysis.

He repeatedly denies his own importance, reminding readers that much of what he experienced was shared by other oppressed South Africans. This is key to the depiction of his character in the book.

He only briefly mentions his family. He and Nokukhanya had seven children, but he does not share their names and draws a “veil” over details of their marriage.

Nokukhanya, he writes, “ungrudgingly” assumed full responsibility for their home and smallholding so he could focus on his public duties. At Adams College, for example, he was also choirmaster, soccer team administrator, Zulu cultural organiser, and served on an association for African teachers.

Under his leadership, the ANC became a mass organisation. Luthuli had to travel the country in support of the defiance campaign: “I quite literally neglect my family and feel extremely guilty about it.”

Luthuli’s reserve is reinforced by his use of the passive voice. He describes being urged to take leadership roles rather than seeking them himself.

Nonetheless, even in these self-deflections, Luthuli’s character emerges: his centre of gravity lies not in the domestic sphere but in service to the community. He is driven by his “desire to serve God and neighbour”.

By refusing the “self-assertion and self-display” typical of autobiography, Let My People Go portrays a selfless self.

Luthuli’s story depicts a humble man who refuses to yield, despite growing persecution. As Charles Hooper observes in the introduction, the book captures the “humility of a man who cannot be humiliated”. Luthuli expresses gratitude when outrage might seem more reasonable, describing his prison cell, when ill and isolated, as a prayerful “sanctuary”.

In Nairobi, Luthuli Avenue was named to honourLuthuli’s courageous leadership against apartheid, celebrating his moral integrity and commitment to justice, reflecting Kenya’s recognition of African liberation heroes.