In 1946, Luthuli assumed councilor duties in the Native Representative Council (NRC), an advisory body to the government. Luthuli reiterated the demands made in African Claims and continued his longstanding complaints about inadequate African land, comments that enraged the white NRC chairman. With the support of other councilors, Luthuli protested the state’s use of coercive force to suppress a massive African mineworkers’ strike, condemning “the reactionary character of the Union Native Policy,” which exposed the “government’s post war continuation of a policy of fascism which is the antithesis of the letter and the spirit of the Atlantic Charter and the United Nations Charter.” The government, he continued, was “impenetrably deaf” to African groans of pain in response to oppressive segregationist measures.12 Luthuli would say later that the NRC was a “toy telephone” requiring him to “shout a little louder” to no one, and African councilors then adjourned in protest. The NRC never met again, and the government formally dissolved it in 1952.13
In 1947, Dr. Xuma and South African Indian Congress (SAIC) leaders Dr. Yusuf Dadoo and Dr. G. M. Naicker signed the “Doctors Pact,” pledging to fight together against South Africa’s racial policies, including at the newly founded United Nations (UN). Ironically, as Nazi-inspired apartheid leaders would soon rule South Africa, the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights exemplified an international human rights discourse that included racial equality, a partial reaction to the genocidal policies of Nazi Germany. Tellingly, South Africa abstained from the vote that approved the Human Rights Declaration. Gandhi, whose satyagraha campaigns while he was in South Africa between 1893 and 1914 set the course for his later successes in India, warned South Africa of its dangerous path: “the future is surely not with the so-called white races if they keep themselves in purdah. The attitude of unreason will mean a third war which sane people should avoid. Political cooperation among all the exploited races in South Africa can only result in mutual goodwill, if it is wisely directed and based on truth and non-violence.”14
The unexpected victory of the National Party in May 1948 made apartheid official state policy until 1994. Founded in 1933 by Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) minister and newspaper editor Daniel François Malan, the National Party was the political beneficiary of a resurgent Afrikaner ethno-nationalism that sought economic advancement, cultural autonomy, and explicit political measures to ensure Afrikaner power and identity to counter British political and economic dominance and African numerical superiority. Many pro-Nazi Afrikaners, including future apartheid prime ministers Johannes Strydom and John Vorster, had opposed South African military and economic contributions to the Allied cause against Hitler’s Germany, engaging in seditious activities that resulted in their detention during the war. As Africans and poor Afrikaners competed with each other for living space and jobs in a rapidly expanding manufacturing sector producing war materiel, Afrikaner nationalists complained of “swamping” by an African urban population that had doubled to 1.4 million in the interwar years. By 1946, there were 2.2 million urban-based Africans living in cities supposedly reserved for white permanent residence, and their growing militancy was exemplified in strikes, boycotts, and demands for better living and working conditions. Also, the close proximity of working-class Africans and Afrikaners renewed fears of racial mixing and prompted calls for policies that would ensure Afrikaner racial separation and preservation. Increasingly, Afrikaner intellectuals posited apartheid as a permanent solution for “the purity of our blood and . . . our unadulterated European racial survival.”15 The governing United Party of Prime Minister Jan Smuts, South Africa’s most prominent political figure, who also helped found the League of Nations and its successor the UN, had trounced the Nationalists in the previous 1943 election. In 1948, the United Party won the popular vote again, but because of greater electoral weight given to rural districts, which voted disproportionately for the Nationalists, and an alliance with a smaller Afrikaner-based Party, the Nationalists squeezed out an improbable victory. The surprised Malan, now faced with the unexpected task of converting apartheid from electoral slogan to concrete government policy, nevertheless hastened to hail the victory as divinely ordained.16
The Global Color Line
South Africa was part of the global hegemony of powerful white states and individuals exemplified by European colonialism in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean and continuing racial subordination in the United States. In June 1948, Luthuli traveled to the United States for seven months, during which he addressed churches, civic groups, youth groups, and others about the progress of Natal American Board missions, African rural development, and racial reconciliation.17 This was not his first overseas trip; in 1938, the chief had traveled to Madras, India, as part of an interracial Christian delegation to an international missionary conference. Despite the fact that South African segregation traveled outside its borders—white delegates traveled first class and the four Africans second class—Luthuli toured India and Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), met Indian, Japanese, Chinese, and African Christian leaders, and returned “with wider sympathies and wider horizons.”18 Luthuli’s tour of the United States took place during the 1948 presidential election, when President Harry Truman put forth a mild but virtually unprecedented civil rights agenda that sparked the “Dixiecrat” revolt of southern segregationists. Luthuli hoped that African Americans, who, unlike black South Africans, had constitutional rights, would ultimately triumph over Jim Crow practices and that the United States would be a positive model of multiracial democracy for his own country.
Suspecting that the South African government was monitoring him closely, Luthuli toured the South on Jim Crow trains to visit historically black universities—Howard, Atlanta, Tuskegee, and Virginia State—remarking, “I have such a great desire to visit my people in the South that I would have been awfully disappointed to return to Africa without doing so.” At Howard, Luthuli lectured on African history, met African students, marveled at the library’s vast book collection on Africa, and was hosted by members of Washington’s bustling, upwardly mobile black communities. During his lectures he explained enduring values of Zulu traditional society, Zulu religious concepts, and Zulus’ respect for law and order.19 In the wake of Gandhi’s assassination, Luthuli, who would later use Gandhian methods in the ANC’s antiapartheid campaigns, also lectured to the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Society about Gandhi’s development of his nonviolent philosophy and strategy of satyagraha.20 While at Virginia State and Tuskegee, Luthuli visited black-owned and operated dairies, among other rural-based development and school projects. He discussed sustainable agricultural methods with successful black farmers and initiated conversations with rural parents and children about the quality of their education. His Virginia State host, Dr. Samuel Gandy, described Luthuli as “vigorous, hale and hearty . . . a living symbol of vitality” who was “easy to meet and know and brought no distinctions with him.” His visit sparked an “awakening on campus relative to Africa and an eagerness on the part of students to know more about this great continent.”21 At Tuskegee, Luthuli personally witnessed the industrial education model championed by the American-educated South African agricultural official C. T. Loram—a model that would be foundational to South Africa’s Bantu education system—concluding that the “manual crafts . . . do not seem to me to justify university degrees.”22
Albert Luthuli during his tour of the United States, 1948. (Luthuli Museum)
Jim Crow was ubiquitous. Howard, the mecca of black education and the educational pillar of an upwardly mobile black elite, was in the nation’s capital, the Jim Crow city of Washington, D.C. In Virginia,