Albert John Mvumbi Luthuli was born in Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia, at a Seventh Day Adventist mission in Bulawayo. The year of his birth remains unconfirmed, though it is generally accepted to be 1898. One of three children, his father, John, who was originally from Natal, held various jobs as an evangelist, interpreter, and transporter for the British South Africa Company of Cecil John Rhodes, while his mother, Nozililo Mtonya, had once been a member of the court of the Zulu king Cetshwayo. The timing of Luthuli’s birth coincided with a period of conflict and uncertainty—a premonition for his future political life. The first Chimurenga was then unfolding against the combined British-South African invasion supported by Cecil Rhodes, a settler-colonial encroachment that Luthuli’s parents were chance accessories.

Against this backdrop, his father died when Luthuli was only six months old—this following the death of one of Luthuli’s siblings at birth—though the family stayed in Southern Rhodesia until 1908, when they returned to Natal. Luthuli came under the guardianship of an uncle, Martin Luthuli, who had been a secretary to the Zulu king Dinizulu, as well as being a co-founder of the Natal Native Congress in 1900 and the South African Native National Congress (later the African National Congress) in 1912. He was also deeply Christian. The younger Luthuli consequently fell under the tutelage of a politically active father figure, which required that he navigate these overlapping worlds of tradition, faith, and politics at an early age. This heritage and received sensibility in turn would forge an ethical vision of justice and injustice that Luthuli would later apply to South Africa’s apartheid order—an instance of ethics preceding politics.

Luthuli was not alone, of course, in confronting these disparate, yet congruent, domains of Black South African life. Like many of his generation and gender, he made his way through a patchwork of schools—an American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions school, Ohlange Institute (founded by John Dube, the ANC’s first president), and Edendale, where he received a teaching certificate in 1917. Embarking on a career in education, he went on to serve as a school principal, train as a lay minister, and eventually head teacher training at Adams College, the famed secondary school that counts Dube, Pixley Seme, Anton Lembede, and Ellen Kuzwayo among its alumni. As one of the school’s first Black teachers, Luthuli embraced all aspects of school life—instructing classes, delivering Sunday sermons, conducting choirs, coaching soccer—and he married a fellow teacher, Nokukhanya ka Maphita ka Bhengu Ndlokolo. Their family life would be located away from Adams in Luthuli’s childhood home of Groutville, due to the restriction that women teachers could not be married. Nonetheless, it was a thriving family life, despite periods of being apart, with seven children.

As recounted by Vinson, Luthuli began his political career in earnest when he was democratically elected the residential chief for Groutville in December 1935. Though his uncle, Martin, had held this position until 1921, running for this office was not an obvious choice. The traditional nature of the role posed a conflict with Luthuli’s education and modern sensibility. His vocation as a teacher provided an arguably higher status. It definitely provided better pay. Furthermore, serving as chief meant walking a tightrope between representing the interests of the local community while also adhering to and promulgating the policies of the white South African state. Rather than placing him in a Christian mold as other scholars have done, Vinson argues that Luthuli met these challenges through an approach of Ubuntu (“a concept that recognized the humanity and interdependence of all people”) that in turn enabled him to govern with “an inclusive democratic spirit, personal warmth, integrity, empathy, and judicious wisdom.” In short, this position, if reluctantly pursued at first, not only marked his political rise, but proved to be the crucible through which he began to cultivate the skills he became known for. Moreover, though this type of grassroots path is unremarkable in many political careers, it is noteworthy in the history of the ANC’s leadership. Luthuli was the last ANC president to have emerged from local political circumstances of this kind—a point that will be returned to.

Luthuli’s membership in the ANC began in 1944. It was an opportune moment given the establishment of the ANC’s Women’s League in 1943 and the ANC Youth League in 1944—the revival of the ANC under the leadership of Alfred Xuma during the 1930s was continuing apace. Furthermore, the political imagination of many activists was shifting to embrace a global perspective. The effects of the Second World War, the founding of the United Nations, and the beginning of the National Party’s apartheid policy in 1948 encouraged this wider horizon to situate the ANC’s activism. Luthuli himself traveled to the US in June 1948 for a period of seven months, during which he experienced Jim Crow policies while touring the American South and visiting historically Black universities like Howard and Tuskegee. Vinson writes that the trip allowed Luthuli to see the transnational scope of white supremacy with clarity and a consequent sense of purpose. Upon his return, he became active in promoting the Programme of Action, formulated by members of the Youth League including Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and Walter Sisulu, which supported civil disobedience as a new tactical approach against the apartheid regime. This decision put him in conflict with the Natal ANC leadership. Undeterred, Luthuli participated in provincial events involving the South African Indian Congress (SAIC) and eventually became president of the Natal ANC in May 1951.

The 1952 Defiance Campaign, which built upon the energies of the Programme of Action, finally launched Luthuli onto the national stage. The campaign and Luthuli himself embraced Mohandas Gandhi’s strategy of satyagraha (“truth force”), which named the type of non-violent, though not passive, civil disobedience undertaken that had seen success with the recent independence of India in 1947. Satyagraha also signaled how the appropriation and application of political strategies found elsewhere in the world had become a common feature of the long South African struggle and its global sense of attention—whether the ideology in question was Marxism-Leninism, Garveyism, or pan-Africanism, to name several vital influences.

Still, Gandhi had started his political career in South Africa, and a key part of the innovation that Luthuli pursued was to coalesce the tactic of satyagraha around local circumstances of tension and opportunity between Indian and Black South Africans. Natal had witnessed an explosion of anti-Indian violence in January 1949, despite the “Doctors’ Pact” signed in March 1947 that affirmed cooperation between the ANC and SAIC. Vinson attributes Luthuli’s growing political acumen to his ability to seize opportunity by looking beyond surface differences, glancing the other way when past experience posed obstacles, and always keeping parochialism—whether geographic, ideological, or cultural—at bay.

The Defiance Campaign, if ultimately limited in its ability to undermine apartheid measures, generated a burst of membership enrollment in the ANC from approximately 25,000 on the eve of the campaign to 100,000 members by its finish. Luthuli himself resigned from his chieftaincy due to government criticism of his activism and his belief that he could better serve his community through the ANC. By December 1952, he was formally elected president of the party. At this point, he translated his lessons in organizing from Natal to help forge the Congress Alliance—a multiracial coalition that brought together the ANC, SAIC, the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), the South African Coloured People’s Organization (SACPO), and the Congress of Democrats.

The pinnacle moment for the alliance would be the 1955 Congress of the People held in Kliptown, Soweto, though the buildup to the event involved extensive grassroots outreach to local communities to gather opinion as to what the meeting’s proposed Freedom Charter should contain. Luthuli called upon “freedom volunteers” to collect such populist views, since he saw the UN-inspired Freedom Charter to be “a South African Declaration of Human Rights.” When the Congress was finally held, Luthuli was unable to attend due to both a serious heart attack and a banning order that restricted him to Groutville. A speech recorded from his bedside was played on his behalf.

Yet, despite the success of the Congress of the People, the Freedom Charter, and the momentum established by the Congress Alliance, Luthuli and the ANC faced internal and external tensions that began to erode what had been accomplished. As Vinson writes, Luthuli viewed the alliance as “part of a global anticolonial, anti-imperialist, anti-white supremacy coalition in the spirit of the recent Afro-Asian solidarity campaign in Bandung, Indonesia.” However, this spirit of interracial solidarity faced challenges from the Africanist bloc within the ANC, which criticized multiracialism as betraying Black South African interests. A parallel set of ideological pressures came from the communist faction within the ANC, comprised of members of the South African Communist Party (SACP), which had reformed underground in 1953 following the banning of Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) in 1950. Luthuli eventually developed a close relationship with Moses Kotane, the SACP’s general secretary.

Outside the party, the apartheid government responded to the Congress of the People with arrests in December 1956 resulting in the infamous Treason Trial, involving 156 activists, who were accused of seeking to overthrow the state. Luthuli was among those arrested. Indeed, Vinson discusses how Luthuli set an example of prison leadership by hosting political discussions and other activities to maintain morale and discipline that Mandela would later emulate on Robben Island. Luthuli’s wife, Nokukhanya, helped to buffer some of these difficulties through her leadership in the ANC Women’s League and, more crucially, her bearing the task as the family’s breadwinner (the presidency of the ANC was an unpaid position).

After Luthuli’s release in December 1957, the unavoidable question became whether the ANC would turn to armed struggle, thus abandoning the principle of non-violence that Luthuli had long espoused, especially as a man of Christian faith. This turning point was the result of a number of steps, and it forms the crux of Vinson’s biography. Luthuli himself promoted the idea of racial reconciliation through two national tours in 1958 and 1959, ending with his receipt of a five-year banning order which placed him under house arrest in May 1959. However, this approach of favoring conciliation over conflict was wearing thin, especially among younger activists. Only a month prior, Robert Sobukwe broke away from the ANC with others in the Africanist section to establish the more militant Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) that foregrounded Black nationalism. Restrained and facing an unraveling alliance, the Sharpeville Massacre in March 1960 brought violent clarity to what was at stake for Luthuli’s ANC. On March 21, police killed 69 unarmed protestors at a PAC rally in Sharpeville, with 186 injured. Police violence exploded again in Cape Town on March 30 during the PAC-sponsored Langa March, involving an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 protestors who walked from the Langa and Nyanga townships to Cape Town’s city center. The apartheid government declared a state of emergency with the PAC and the ANC banned, in addition to over 25,000 detained. Though not directly involved with these twin protests, Luthuli was imprisoned for five months, where guards physically assaulted him despite his ill health.

By December 1960, agreement was reached among a younger cohort of ANC and SACP activists—including Mandela, Sisulu, Kotane, and Govan Mbeki—that the strategy of non-violence had become ineffective, with armed struggle remaining the only option. Their arrival at this decision, in retrospect, is unsurprising given the significance and success of such tactics in Algeria, Indochina, Cuba, Kenya, and elsewhere. Yet, as detailed by Vinson, it required a certain set of diplomatic moves within the ANC between Luthuli and Mandela, who spearheaded this new plan. Luthuli conceded that reconsideration was needed, though he was reluctant to abandon the principled stand of non-violence that had provided a sharp moral contrast to the apartheid regime’s brutality. This principle had sustained the movement throughout the 1950s and had provided a key defense during the Treason Trial, which eventually failed to prosecute any of the accused.

Luthuli approached the question from all sides, while Mandela kept patient with the aim of receiving Luthuli’s blessing. Ultimately, a “dual resolution” was reached, largely credited to Kotane as depicted by Vinson, which allowed the ANC “to uphold nonviolence while sanctioning the establishment of an affiliated sabotage wing.” Effectively, a bylaw technicality came into play: ANC delegates could not vote to formalize armed struggle as official policy due to the organization’s banning, thereby leaving the decision to approve the formation of such a wing at Luthuli’s discretion. He consequently approved the founding of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), albeit as “supplemental to ongoing political action.” Non-violence remained the official policy of the ANC.

In December 1961, Luthuli went to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, which he had been awarded for 1960. During the same month, MK began its operations of sabotage in earnest. Luthuli remained vocal in his criticism of the apartheid government and in his commitment to nonviolence during his moment in the global spotlight. But the ground had already shifted. Luthuli returned to Groutville where his influence and life became increasingly isolated, while the operations of MK and the ANC’s “external mission” in exile escalated in activity. Mandela continued to meet with Luthuli, though it became clear that such exchanges were matters of respect and consultation rather than the elder leader dictating to the younger one. At the end of the Rivonia Trial in June 1964, when Mandela and seven others were sentenced to life imprisonment, Luthuli issued a statement declaring the ANC’s longstanding pursuit of “a militant, nonviolent struggle” yet with the concession that “no one can blame brave just men for seeking justice by the use of violent methods; nor could they be blamed if they tried to create an organized force in order to ultimately establish peace and racial harmony.” Though he continued to retain his stature through correspondence with Martin Luther King, Jr., and visiting with Robert F. Kennedy when he toured South Africa, Luthuli would die only a few years later in July 1967 under enigmatic circumstances—struck by a train, the state’s inquest suggested that Luthuli’s death was due to his failing sight and hearing, a conclusion disputed by Nokukhanya.

Vinson’s biography also concludes to confront the enigma as to why Luthuli isn’t more prominent on the Heroes Acre of pan-African leaders. The conspicuous answer is Mandela and the spectacle he has garnered across most ANC narratives. Historians have recently been making efforts to diminish Mandela’s luster, and Vinson’s book embraces this agenda, though with a light touch. Drawing on previously inaccessible papers by Luthuli housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, Vinson’s work is aimed at not only restoring Luthuli to the stature he once had, but also reversing a predominant ANC narrative to demonstrate how Mandela and others appealed for his attention and respected his decisions, even when these decisions went against the more radical temperament of younger activists.

When Mandela was released in 1990, he effectively emulated his deceased predecessor once more in terms of temperament, principle, and strategy. Luthuli had guided the ANC during one of its most challenging and auspicious chapters, shortly after the National Party came to power and activists had to sort out a means to best respond to a new era of suppression. The multiracial Congress Alliance that laid the groundwork for a new South African nationhood was Luthuli’s signal achievement. Mandela essentially believed that the same strategy for fighting apartheid could also deconstruct it. The lessons of the 1950s formed an undercurrent to the politics of the 1990s.

Beyond this reappraisal, a deeper question might be raised. To what end are liberation narratives still useful? This book largely avoids exchanging one myth about non-violence, as embodied by Luthuli, for another myth about violence, which has been increasingly attached to Mandela as one means of refocusing his life. By tracking the archival record, Vinson underscores how beliefs and strategies of violence and non-violence could co-exist at once, and at times within the thinking of the same individual. To periodize a liberation struggle through the notion of a “turn” between these two options risks overdetermination, especially given the inchoate nature and flexibility of the term “violence” as a concept. Furthermore, the cohesiveness of such turns can privilege elite decision-making on such matters—remember the Pondoland Revolt (1950-1961), remember the Soweto Uprising (1976), which had less regard for the dictates of leaders and their executive decisions. They foreground instead the important role of spontaneity in revolutionary struggle, particularly at the grassroots level. This leads to a final point.

Returning to Achebe, A Man of the People underscores how the enemy may not be external, but instead residing, even actively cultivated, from within. Luthuli’s origins in local grassroots politics are suggestive not only of how he developed a populist sensibility, but also how his career might be differentiated from later ANC leaders and, especially, the culture of corruption that has engulfed the organization in recent years. It would be easy and an overgeneralization to argue that the roots of this culture originated in exile. And yet the politics of exile, due to its deterritorialization, often consists of a politics of patronage and loyalty—connections, whether with states or leaders, can matter more to advancement than having that common people’s touch.

Approached differently, liberation movements encompass much more than heroic leaders or the decision of confronting an enemy with violence or non-violence, whether that enemy be the apartheid government, another white minority regime, or colonialism writ large. Liberation movements are equally about building governing structures and establishing political cultures through chains of command, party routines, and transactional expectations.

The ANC since the end of apartheid, whether under presidents Jacob Zuma or Cyril Ramaphosa, has handled elections by relying on struggle credentials, rather than shifting to the consistent hard work of garnering popular support. We need liberation histories that get beyond the moralizing of violence versus non-violence, the righteous versus the damned, in order to better grasp, from an analytic standpoint, the connections and discontinuities between the ethics of struggle and the rules of governance. Personal character, whether in the guise of Luthuli or Samalu, should not be the exclusive source for political understanding. Such an agenda is beyond the capacity of any single book, though Vinson’s biography points in this direction, hinting at how liberation histories might be reframed to better address the problems of the present.

The moral question of armed struggle is of little importance today. Assigning blame to the legacies of apartheid for South Africa’s current social ills has increasingly become a routine alibi for self-interested leaders in the ANC and other parties. Vinson takes us back. In revisiting Luthuli, the reader is reminded of Du Bois’s passing remark in The Souls of Black Folk, “Throughout history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.”