Albert Luthuli

Albert John Mvumbi Luthuli was born in 1898 at the Solusi mission station near Bulawayo in what was then Southern Rhodesia, where his father served American missionaries as an interpreter. He grew up in Groutville in Natal, South Africa, and trained as a teacher at Adams College, where he later taught for about seventeen years.

Elected a chief of his Zulu community, Luthuli came to politics gradually. He joined the African National Congress in 1945, led protests in 1946 after police and soldiers used violence against striking Black miners, and in 1951 was elected president of the ANC's Natal branch.

In 1952 he helped organise a nationwide nonviolent Defiance Campaign against apartheid. The government ordered him to choose between leading his community and leading the ANC, then dismissed him as chief for refusing to resign from the ANC. In December 1952 the ANC elected him President-General, a position he held until his death.

Luthuli spent most of his presidency under banning orders that confined him to his rural home, writing statements for the organisation's conferences, and was among those tried in the long 1956 Treason Trial. After the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, in which 69 Black demonstrators were killed, the ANC was banned.

In 1961 Luthuli received the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent struggle against apartheid, the first African to win the award. He travelled to Oslo to accept it, wore his traditional Zulu dress, and in his Nobel lecture argued that peace was more than the absence of war. He died on 21 July 1967 near his home in Groutville.