Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  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.

  When he joined Congress in 1945, he was elected to the executive of the Natal Branch at once, and he remained on it continuously for the six years during which the movement felt its way to effectiveness, leaving behind the old methods – deputations, petitions, conferences that enabled the government to ‘keep in touch with the people’ without having to take their views into account – that had failed to achieve anything for the Africans. Finally, in 1949 Congress drafted a Programme of Action that was based on the premise that in South Africa freedom can come to the non-white only through extra-parliamentary methods. A year later, when Luthuli had just been elected Provincial President of Natal, Congress decided to launch a full-scale passive resistance campaign in defiance of unjust colour-bar laws. ‘This decision,’ he comments, ‘had my full approval.’

  The official-sounding, platitudinous remark covers what was the result of considerable heart-searching on Luthuli’s part. Luthuli sees it and, for himself, used it as Gandhi conceived it – not only as a technique but as a soul force, Satyagraha.

  In 1952 the African National Congress, the South African Indian Congress, and other related associations organised defiance groups all over the country. Thousands of Africans and, in lesser numbers, Indians, and even some whites, defied the colour-bar laws and invited arrest. Africans and Indians entered libraries reserved for white people, sat on railway benches reserved for white people, used post office counters reserved for white people, and camped out in open ground in the middle of the white city of Durban. Black and white, they went to prison. Luthuli was everywhere in Natal, addressing meetings, encouraging individuals, carrying with him in the most delicate situations, under the nose of government ire and police hostility, an extraordinary core of confidence and warmth. All his natural abilities of leadership came up simply and strongly.

  The Defiance Campai
gn went on successfully for some months before it was crushed by the heavy sentences imposed upon defiers under new legislation specially devised by the government, which fixed the high penalties (up to three years’ imprisonment or a fine of £300) that may be applied to anyone protesting against any of the racial laws or inciting others to do so.

  Luthuli had gone into the Campaign a country chief; he came out a public figure. In September 1952, while Defiance was still on, he was given an ultimatum by the Native Affairs Department: he must resign from Congress and the Defiance Campaign or give up his chieftainship. ‘I don’t see the contradiction between my office as chief and my work in Congress,’ he answered, courteously but bluntly. ‘In the one I work in the interests of my people within tribal limits, and in the other I work for them on a national level, that’s all. I will not resign from either.’

  On Wednesday 12 November 1952, the Native Commissioner announced that Chief A. J. Luthuli was dismissed by the government from his position as chief of the Umvoti Mission Reserve. In reply to this, the African National Congress issued a statement by Luthuli under the title ‘Our Chief Speaks’. It is a statement that has been much quoted, in and out of South Africa, both in support of those who believe that right is on the side of the Africans in their struggle against racial discrimination and in support of those who regard the black man’s claim to equality of opportunity with the white man as a fearful black nationalism that aims – to quote, in turn, one of the favourite bogies of white South Africa – ‘to drive the white man into the sea’.

  The lengthy statement is written in the formal, rather Victorian English, laced with biblical cadence and officialese, that Luthuli uses – the English of a man to whom it is a foreign or at best a second language, but impressive, for all that. ‘In these past thirty years or so,’ he said,

  I have striven with tremendous zeal and patience to work for the progress and welfare of my people and for their harmonious relations with other sections of our multi-racial society in the Union of South Africa. In this effort I have always pursued what liberal-minded people rightly regarded as the path of moderation …

  In so far as gaining citizenship rights and opportunities for the unfettered development of the African people, who will deny that thirty years of my life have been spent knocking in vain, patiently, moderately, and modestly at a closed and barred door?

  … Has there been any reciprocal tolerance or moderation from the Government, be it Nationalist or United Party? No! On the contrary, the past thirty years have seen the greatest number of Laws restricting our rights and progress until today we have reached a stage where we have almost no rights at all: no adequate land for our occupation, our only asset – cattle – dwindling, no security of homes, no decent and remunerative employment, more restrictions to freedom of movement through passes, curfew regulations, influx control measures; in short we have witnessed in these years an intensification of our subjection to ensure and protect white supremacy.

  It is with this background and with a full sense of responsibility that … I have joined my people in … the spirit that revolts openly and boldly against injustice and expresses itself in a determined and non-violent manner … Viewing Non-Violent Passive Resistance as a non-revolutionary and, therefore, a most legitimate and humane political pressure technique for a people denied all effective forms of constitutional striving, I saw no real conflict in my dual leadership of my people.

  A month after his deposition as chief, Luthuli was elected President-General of the African National Congress and became leader of the entire Congress movement in South Africa. Wherever he went, he was greeted by cheering crowds of Africans; at last they had a leader who had shown himself a leader in places less comfortable and closer to their lives than conferences and conventions.

  The government found that ex-Chief Luthuli seemed to be more of a chief than ever. A ban was served on him under one of those new powers that had been legislated to deal with the Defiance Campaign, a ban which debarred him for a year from all the important cities and towns in South Africa. The day it expired, Luthuli opened the South African Indian Congress in Durban and, guessing that his time was short, left at once by air for Johannesburg to attend a protest meeting about Sophiatown removals. It was his first visit to Johannesburg since he had become President-General, and the people of Sophiatown, under arbitrary orders to quit their homes and move to a settlement farther away from the white city, were heartened at the idea of having him among them as champion of their protest.

  As he stepped off the plane at Johannesburg, the Special Branch police served him with a second ban. And what a ban! This time he was to be confined for two years to a radius of about twenty miles around his home in Groutville village. During the long period of confinement he suffered a slight stroke, and while he lay ill in his house in Groutville, his wife had to beg permission from the police to let him be taken to a hospital in Durban, sixty miles away. Permission was granted, and he was rushed to Durban. There he spent two months in the hospital, and from the second day Special Branch men hung about his ward in constant attendance. Despite these unwelcome presences, who, he says, day after day used to inquire sheepishly after his health, Chief made a complete recovery except for a barely perceptible droop that shows itself in his left eyelid when he is tired.

  His ban expired in July 1956. He was free to move about the country again; but not for long. About four in the morning of 5 December, there was a loud knocking at the door of the Luthulis’ house in Groutville. The Luthulis struggled out of sleep. Four white Special Branch men were at the door; they had come to arrest Chief on a charge of treason. He was flown to Johannesburg and taken straight to prison at the Johannesburg Fort. And there he found himself accused of treason with 155 others. Some were his respected colleagues over many years; some represented ideologies that were largely or partly distasteful to him; some he had never heard of before.

  The preliminary hearing of the Treason Trial (the first in the history of peacetime South Africa) began in January 1957, and the trial has been in progress, in one form and another – nine months of preliminary hearing, several sessions of the trial itself, with a number of adjournments – for two years. ‘Treason’ is a word with ugly associations. They have become uglier still during the years since the war, now that the word has become part of the vocabulary of the witch hunters of the world. Like ‘Communist’, ‘treason’ may be used, in certain countries and circumstances, to blot out the name of anyone who puts up any sort of opposition to race discrimination and the denial of freedom of movement, opportunity and education.

  Among the 156 of the original accused, there was a sprinkling of ex-Communists and fellow travellers – almost exclusively among the twenty-three whites – but the great majority were simply people who abhor the injustice and misery of apartheid and want all races in South Africa to share freely in the life of the country. At various stages in the trial, the number of accused has been reduced, and the government has not yet succeeded in formulating a satisfactory statement of the charge against them; but the trial drags on and, at the time of writing, the Attorney General has just made a statement that he intends to draw up a fresh indictment against the remaining accused.

  The first list of those against whom charges had been withdrawn was announced in December 1957, when the preliminary inquiry was in recess. Among the names was that of Chief A. J. Luthuli, President-General of the African National Congress. Chief was at home in Groutville after the nine-month ordeal in court, preparing for the wedding of his medical-student daughter, when the news came, followed by a paper storm of congratulatory telegrams. His feelings were mixed: he could not see why he should be freed while his colleagues in the liberation movement were held; on the other hand, he was glad to be able to get on with Congress work outside the Drill Hall. A few weeks later, charges were withdrawn against some more accused, bringing down to ninety-one the number of those who were committed for trial for high treason in January 1958.

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p; The particulars of the ‘hostile acts’ which were read under the charge of high treason included ‘the hampering or hindering of the said Government [of the Union of South Africa] in its lawful administration by organising or taking part in campaigns against existing laws’. The laws named included the Natives Resettlement Act and the Group Areas Act, which involve the uprooting of African, Indian and coloured communities in order to move them out of white areas; the Bantu Education Act, which has lowered the standard of education available to African children; and the Bantu Authorities Act.

  The defence applied for the discharge of the ninety-one, saying that the Crown, by the way it had formulated the charges, had established ‘nothing other than a desire to put an end to any form of effective opposition to the Government of this country – a desire to outlaw free expression of thought and ideas which people in all democratic countries of the West assert the right to hold and utter’. The application for discharge was refused. In the public gallery of the Drill Hall (divided down the middle by a token barrier of low chains and posts to ensure that whites sat on one side and blacks on the other) Luthuli heard the magistrate’s decision. Why he was not still among the accused in the dock was as much of a mystery to him as to anyone else. Whatever the reason, Chief sat in the Drill Hall as a spectator and a free man that day, and many heads, black and white, turned to look at him. When the court adjourned, he walked out among the free men, too; free to travel about the country and address meetings and attend gatherings where he pleased. For how long, of course, he could not guess.

  So far – a year later – he has not been served with a ban again, though he has not minced words, whether addressing the small white Liberal Party or Congress. At a meeting before a white audience he was beaten up by white hooligans. At angry meetings of the Transvaal Branch of Congress in Johannesburg Africanists attempted to oust Chief and his kind from leadership and commit the African National Congress to what he calls ‘a dangerously narrow African nationalism’. In April 1959 this group broke away to form the Pan-Africanist Congress.