Prize & Prejudice

As the white-haired Zulu trudged toward his self-built, tin and concrete blockhouse near Stanger, Natal, a car pulled up alongside him on the dusty road. "I have a very important message for you," said the driver. "You have just been awarded the most important prize in the world."

That is how news of the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize reached Albert John Luthuli, 62, ex-Zulu chieftain, president of the banned African National Congress, and since 1959, by decree of the racist South African government, a virtual exile from his people. Awarded a year late because of the exhaustive search into his qualifications by the Nobel Committee, the honor was bracketed with the 1961 prize, posthumously awarded to the U.N.'s Dag Hammarskjold.

Ostensible reason for honoring Luthuli was his steadfast advocacy of nonviolence in leading the fight against South Africa's racial discrimination. But by giving the prize to a black who is almost unknown outside South Africa, the Nobel Committee made a clearly political award that deliberately rebuked the racial extremism of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd's government. Calling the award a "smack in the face," Johannesburg's die Transvaler bitterly complained about the "spirit of enmity toward a country that has in no way harmed Norway and Sweden." Luthuli was jubilant. "Thank God for it," he said. "God has answered the call of the oppressed people of South Africa."

No Supplication. In the past, many black nationalists have disliked Luthuli almost as much as the white supremacists. Far too restrained for black extremists (even Verwoerd once acknowledged his moderation), Luthuli has deplored the Congo's premature independence, has acknowledged that "Africans cannot manage without the whites. We have accepted Western civilization; we like it and are absorbing it as fast as we can despite the efforts of the government to cut us off from it. White South Africa's divine task is to propagate this civilization, not to hoard it from us."

Luthuli's moderation stems from the deep influence on his life of Christian missionaries. Only two generations removed from Zulu witchcraft, he grew up in a Southern Rhodesian mission, where his father served as an interpreter-evangelist. Educated in mission schools in Natal, Luthuli in 1921 graduated from Congregationalist Adams College, south of Durban, stayed on to teach the Zulu language and music. But in 1935 he gave up his promising and lucrative academic career to become the elected chief of his poverty-stricken Zulu tribe in the Groutville district, thus following in the footsteps of four chieftain ancestors.

So successful was his chieftainship that Luthuli entered politics wholeheartedly, became a member of the Native Representative Council, an advisory group supposed to acquaint the white government with the views of South Africa's blacks. Fed up with the bogus paternalism of this arrangement, Luthuli joined the African National Congress, in 1952 helped launch a nationwide passive-resistance campaign against the color bar. Reacting immediately to this defiance, the government jailed 8,000 Africans and nonwhites, stripped Luthuli of his chieftainship. By now a national figure, Luthuli was elected president of the African National Congress, urged a policy of nonviolent militancy on his supporters, "as distinct from mere supplication."

Not About the Vikings. The government responded by twice imposing speaking bans on Luthuli; in 1956 it arrested him for treason, but later dismissed the charge. Even white South Africans began to listen to his speeches. Explains one African: "Luthuli was able to say the most dangerous things about the government in the most charitable way." Unmoved by his charity, the government finally, in 1959, banished him to his home district for five years, forbidding him to speak or enter politics. But Luthuli kept up his resistance campaign; last year, after the Sharpeville massacre, he was fined $280 for publicly burning his passbook, the humiliating identity card without which black Africans are not allowed to move about the country.

Luthuli's award is a badly needed shot in the arm to South Africa's black moderates, whose influence was steadily eroding because of their leader's exile. It also places the Nationalist government on a spot. If the government refuses him permission to travel to Oslo next month to pick up his $43,300 prize money, it will put itself in the same company as Russia, which in 1958 would not allow Boris Pasternak to collect his Nobel Prize for literature. Said South Africa's famed Novelist Alan Paton: "If they let Luthuli go to Oslo, that will be bad, and if they don t let him go, that will be bad too. If he goes, he'll speak, and if he doesn't, he'll send his speech. And his speech won't be about the Vikings."

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