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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."