"Arise & Shine . . ."

The weather in his native Natal is usually mild and sunny this time of year, but as Albert John Luthuli strolled along the streets of Oslo last week in a temperature of 14DEG F., an inner glow kept him comfortable. Said South Africa's Luthuli. the former Zulu chief who was in Oslo to receive the delayed 1960 Nobel Peace Prize: "I do not feel the cold because I am meeting so many warmhearted people."

Admirers sent dozens of gifts to his three-room hotel suite, about the same size as the tin-roofed, concrete-block bungalow back home in Groutville to which the Verwoerd regime restricts him. He went on a shopping spree with his wife, delighted photographers by throwing a few snowballs outside the Norwegian Storting (Parliament). But it was when Luthuli rose in the great hall of Oslo University to make his acceptance speech, and at a dinner the next evening, that he lifted the occasion far above mere warmth or politics. Dressed in his tribal costume--flowing blue-and-black robe, leopardskin cap with monkey tails, a necklace of leopard's teeth--Luthuli spoke for all that is best in black Africa, showing an intellectual's perspective, the devoutness of a mission-educated Christian, and the faith in nonviolence that has always marked his career.

God & Race. He reminded his listeners that, compared with Europe's own bitter revolutions and civil wars, Africa's present revolution is both orderly and quick, its end "within sight of our own generation." Of his homeland. Luthuli said: "It is not necessary for me to speak at length about South Africa. It is a museum piece in our time, a hangover from the dark past of mankind, a relic of an age which everywhere else is dead or dying. Here the cult of race superiority and of white supremacy is worshiped like a god . . . Thus it is that the golden age of Africa's independence is also the dark age of South Africa's decline and retrogression.

"To remain neutral, in a situation where the laws of the land virtually criticized God for having created men of color, was the sort of thing I could not, as a Christian, tolerate . . . How great is the paradox and how much greater the honor that an award in support of peace and the brotherhood of man should come to one who is a citizen of a country where the brotherhood of man is an illegal doctrine.

"Outlawed, banned, censured, proscribed and prohibited; where to work, talk or campaign for the realization in fact and deed of the brotherhood of man is hazardous, punished with banishment or confinement without trial or imprisonment; where effective democratic channels to peaceful settlement of the race problem have never existed these 300 years, and where white minority power rests on the most heavily armed and equipped military machine in Africa."

Enmity & Amity. Still, he offered hope for his continent, and friendship for his foes. "This is Africa's age--the dawn of her fulfillment--yes, the moment when she must grapple with destiny to reach the summits of sublimity saying, ours was a fight for noble values and worthy ends, and not for lands and the enslavement of man. Still licking the scars of past wrongs perpetrated on her, could she not be magnanimous and practice no revenge? Her hand of friendship scornfully rejected, her pleas for justice and fair play spurned, should she not nonetheless seek to turn enmity into amity?

"In a strife-torn world, tottering on the brink of complete destruction by man-made nuclear weapons, a free and independent Africa is in the making, in answer to the injunction and challenge of history: 'Arise and shine, for thy light is come.' "

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