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.