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Chief Albert Luthuli departed from his home in Groutville, which is 45 kilometers (45 miles) from Durban in the KwaZulu-Natal Province of South Africa, at eight in the morning on July 21, 1967, after having a quick breakfast with his wife.

The 69-year-old leader of the African National Congress (ANC) would “walk three kilometres to open the family’s general store in Nonhlevu, proceed to his three plots of sugarcane fields, and return to close the shop before going back home”, his daughter-in-law, Wilhelmina May Luthuli, now 77, told a new inquest into his death at Pietermaritzburg High Court in May this year. The inquests into a number of suspicious deaths committed during the apartheid era have been reopened by the current justice minister.

Luthuli reached the store by 9: 30am and set off again to check on his sugar cane fields about half an hour later.

This much is not in dispute.

The only witness

Train driver Stephanus Lategan told a 1967 inquest into Luthuli’s death that at 10: 36am, as his 760-tonne train approached the Umvoti River Bridge, he noticed a pedestrian walking across the bridge and sounded his whistle. He made no attempt to turn his body sideways or step forward when my engine began to overtake him. At the time, “The Bantu,” the official and derogatory term for Black people, did not appear to take any notice.

While the bridge was not designed for pedestrian traffic, Luthuli and the rest of his family often crossed it. His son, Edgar Sibusiso Luthuli, explained that when using the bridge, his father was “very, very careful. He would stand and not even walk as a train approached and securely hold onto the railings. The space was big enough for the train to pass you on the bridge”.

However, Luthuli did not do that that morning, according to Lategan. The train driver told the inquest that while the front of the train narrowly missed Luthuli, “the corner of the cab struck him on the right shoulder and this caused him to be spun around and I saw him lose his balance and fall between the right-hand side of the bridge and the moving train”.

Lategan was the only witness to the collision. When he realized that he had hit Luthuli, he immediately stopped the train.

Luthuli was still breathing but unconscious and bleeding from the mouth when Lategan said he reached him. Luthuli was transported to the utmost “Bantu” hospital by him calling an ambulance and asking the station foreman and station master to call it.

Fifty-eight years later – nearly another lifetime for Luthuli – a new inquest opened earlier this year. Lategan’s interpretation of events is questioned severely by testimony from experts.

Police crime scene analyst Brenden Burgess was part of a team that used evidence from the first inquest to reconstruct the crash scene.

Burgess claimed that “it is highly unlikely that an accident could occur as Mr. Lategan had predicted.” “Taking into account the stopping distance required to stop the locomotive where it came to rest at the scene … the brakes to the train would have to have been applied at least 170 metres before the entrance to the northern side of the bridge … The probability of the point of impact being on the southern side of the bridge is highly unlikely”.

In fact, experts say, it is likely that Luthuli was not walking along the bridge at all.

Lesley Charles Labuschagne, a master of steam trains, went even further. By his estimation, “Luthuli was assaulted and his body taken to a railway track so it would look like he was hit by a train”, according to a Business Day article about his testimony, published in May.

According to forensic pathologist Dr. Sibusiso Ntsele, who cited “gaps” in terms of description of trauma, size and characterization of injuries, Luthuli’s post-mortem report was “substandard to the least.” Ntsele concluded his testimony: “I don’t have enough to say he was hit by a train … What I have suggests that he is likely to have been assaulted”.

The inquest has been adjourned until October, when Judge Qondeni Radebe will rule on Luthuli’s cause of death.

‘ Quietly, as a teacher ‘

Although there is no official record of his birth, it is known that Albert John Mvumbi Luthuli was a child of his father, who served as an interpreter for missionaries from the Congregational Church in America, in Bulawayo, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). This instilled in Luthuli a deep and lifelong faith and, according to the writer Nadine Gordimer, a way of speaking “with a distinct American intonation”.

When Mvumbi (his preferred name, meaning “continuous rain”) was about 10 years old, his family moved back to South Africa and he was sent to live with his uncle, the chief of Groutville, so that he could attend school.

Luthuli was 16 years old and had made the most of his experience at Groutville’s small school. He spent a year at the Ohlange Institute, the first high school in South Africa founded and run by a Black person, John Dube, the first president of the ANC. Following that, Luthuli was taught by white teachers for the first time at Edendale, a Methodist mission school. In his autobiography, Luthuli refuted the accusation that mission schools produced “black Englishmen”. Instead, he argued, “two cultures met, and both Africans and Europeans were affected by the meeting. Both prospered and remained enriched.”

After graduating from Edendale with a teaching qualification, he accepted a post as principal (and sole employee) of a tiny Blacks-only intermediate school in the outpost of Blaauwbosch, where – under the mentorship of a local pastor – his Christian faith deepened.

Luthuli received a scholarship to Adams College, one of South Africa’s most significant centers for Black education, just south of Durban, for his performance at Blaauwbosch.

Luthuli arrived at Adams with no political aspirations: “I took it for granted that I would spend my days quietly, as a teacher”, he wrote in his autobiography, Let My People Go. But the influence of ZK Matthews (the principal of the high school at Adams, who would go on to become an influential ANC leader and academic) and some of the other teachers gradually opened his eyes to a political world of resistance.

Luthuli attended Adams College for 15 years. Only in 1935 did he succumb to pressure from the people of Groutville, who wanted him to return home to take up the chieftainship (his uncle had been “fired” by the white government).

Luthuli saw it as a calling, but being a chief meant taking a significant pay cut because it was a salaried position that meant he could be fired by the apartheid regime if he acted too far outside the law. Administering the needs of the 5, 000 Zulu people of the Umvoti Mission Reserve, which had been founded by American missionary Reverend Aldin Grout from the Congressional Church in 1844, opened his eyes to the reality of life in South Africa: “Now I saw, almost as though for the first time, the naked poverty of my people, the daily hurt to human beings”. As the chief explained in his autobiography: “In Groutville, as all over the country, a major part of the problem is land – thirteen percent of the land for seventy percent of the people, and almost always inferior land…When I became chief I was confronted as never before by the destitution of the housewife, the smashing of families because of economic pressures, and the inability of the old way of life to meet the contemporary onslaught”.

Called to activism

Luthuli joined the ANC at the age of 46 in 1944, four years before apartheid became legally recognized as a political force. She entered politics relatively late in her career. Nelson Mandela, 20 years his junior, joined in the same year. Both men arrived at a time when the party was in dire need of new blood. The older generation of Black leaders was viewed as too obedient and upstanding in opposition to the increasingly oppressive white minority government, which has rapidly enacted laws restricting Black people’s lives.

But while Mandela and a few of his contemporaries shook up the national conversation with a more brash and confrontational style, Luthuli brought a more moderate brand of leadership to the Natal branch of the ANC. In 1951, he was elected president of the Natal branch and appointed provincial executive in 1951.

Luthuli shot to national prominence as the chief volunteer of the 1952 Defiance Campaign, which saw thousands of people all around the country offering themselves up for arrest for contravening apartheid laws by doing things like sitting on whites-only benches and travelling on whites-only buses.

“He was duly stripped of his position as chief by the apartheid government, before being elected ANC president on the back of the youth vote that December”, explains Professor Thula Simpson of the University of Pretoria, one of the leading historians of the ANC. Luthuli was regarded as a “bridge” between the old and the new. But he and Moses Kotane]secretary general of the communist SACP for 39 years] became the old guard when Mandela and co started agitating for violence”.

Luthuli’s stance against violence

In June 1953, Mandela made the first public appeal for violent resistance, telling a crowd in Sophiatown that, as he had stated in his autobiography, “violence was the only weapon that would destroy apartheid and we must be prepared, in the near future, to use that weapon.” This did not align with Luthuli’s approach.

Mandela wrote in his autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom,” that Luthuli and the ANC’s National Executive had severely punished him for advocating a radical departure from accepted policy [never, ever condoning violence]. […] Such speeches could have the power to completely derail the organization while the enemy was strong and we were as yet weak. I accepted the censure, and thereafter faithfully defended the policy of nonviolence in public. But in my heart, I knew that nonviolence was not the answer”.

On March 21, 1960, Luthuli was in court giving evidence about the ANC’s commitment to non-violent struggle when white police officers opened fire on a crowd of peaceful Black protesters in Sharpeville, killing at least 91 people. After Sharpeville, the calls for violent protest within the ANC grew louder and – despite Luthuli’s opposition – in June 1961, Mandela was given permission to set up Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the party’s military wing.

With its emphasis on sabotaging government infrastructure while avoiding life loss at all costs, Simpson calls MK’s founding document “the strangest declaration of war in the history of insurgency.”

1961 was also the year Luthuli became the first African to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. “The citation from the committee noted that he had consistently stood for non-violence”, says Simpson. Ironically, he was aware that his movement had endorsed forming a sabotage squad, despite the fact that he had personally agreed to it without being enthusiastic.

The apartheid government initially prevented Luthuli from travelling to Oslo to receive the award, but eventually relented with a condition: He could not make overt mention of South African politics during his speech. He made a strong statement by wearing traditional Zulu clothing while complying with this restriction (he didn’t use the word “apartheid” once).

By sheer coincidence, Luthuli’s route back from Oslo saw him arrive in Durban on 15 December: The exact evening that MK began its operations.

Despite their differences, says Simpson, “Mandela liked and respected Luthuli and felt the need to consult with him. Mandela requested the older man’s consent, authorization, and approval.

This close relationship would lead to Mandela’s arrest and imprisonment for 27 years. After the ANC was outlawed in 1961, Mandela became a covert person. Dubbed the Black Pimpernel, he was the most wanted man in the country. In August 1962, posing as the chauffeur of white playwright and activist Cecil Williams, Mandela drove to Groutville to brief Luthuli about a military training trip he’d taken to other African countries. On their way back to Johannesburg, Mandela and Williams were ambushed by police because one of the people they met on the trip was a police informant. “I knew in that instant that my life on the run was over”, Mandela later recalled.

Rewriting history

Many anti-apartheid leaders died in suspicious circumstances over the 46 years that the apartheid regime survived. Steve Biko, who died in 1977 as a result of police torture, is likely to be the most well-known of them all. The official inquest into Biko’s death absolved the police, finding that he could not have died “by any act or omission involving an offence by any person”. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) would release the truth in 1999 despite a national and international outcry. Presided over by Desmond Tutu (himself a Nobel peace laureate), the TRC held more than 2, 500 hearings between 1996 and 2002.

Controversially, the TRC had the power to grant full amnesty for politically motivated crimes, provided the perpetrators made honest and complete confessions. At TRC hearings, four security officers gave evidence of the killing of Biko. But the commanding officer, Gideon Nieuwoudt, was denied amnesty on the grounds that he did not prove that his crime was politically motivated. The “Motherwell four,” four Black policemen who had been leaking information to the ANC and who were killed by a car bomb planted by the authorities, were sentenced to 20 years in prison for their role in the murder of Nieuwoudt. Nieuwoudt died in prison in 2005.

Since the TRC concluded, there have been other inquests into mysterious deaths, most notably the 2017 inquest into Ahmed Timol’s 1971 death. Timol jumped from the 10th floor of the Johannesburg Central Police Station after being humiliated for giving confidential information about his coworkers during interrogation, according to police reports at the time. A 1972 inquest ruled that he died by suicide. JL de Villiers, the magistrate, ruled that “to accept anything other than the deceased jumped out of the window and fell to the ground can only be viewed as ridiculous.” “Although he was questioned for long hours, he was treated in a civilised and humane manner”.

Timol’s death shone a light on the many (73 in total) mysterious deaths of activists in police custody during apartheid. In Detention, Chris van Wyk’s satirical poem was inspired by these.

He fell from the ninth floor
He hanged himself.
He slipped on a piece of soap while washing
He hanged himself.
He slipped on a piece of soap while washing
He fell from the ninth floor
He hanged himself. while washing
He fell from the ninth floor.
He hung from the ninth floor
While washing, he slipped on the ninth floor.
He fell from a piece of soap while slipping
He hung from the ninth floor
He washed from the ninth floor while slipping
While washing, he hung from a piece of soap.

The TRC found that there was a “strong possibility that at least some of those detainees who allegedly committed suicide by jumping out of the window were either accidentally dropped or thrown”. However, the Timol family was unable to do this, so they succeeded in getting the 1972 inquest reopened in 2017.

On October 12, 2017, Judge Billy Mothle set a historic precedent by overturning the first inquest’s findings. Mothle ruled that “Timol’s death was brought about by an act of having been pushed from the tenth floor or the roof” of the building, and that there was a prima facie case of murder against the two policemen who interrogated Timol on the day he was pushed to his death. Joao Rodrigues, one of the policemen in question, was charged as an accessory to the murder despite the fact that three of them had already passed away. Rodrigues died before his case went to trial.

Seeking a motive

The Luthuli family hope to receive similar vindication when the inquest into his death reaches its conclusion in October this year. However, it’s difficult for Simpson to identify a motive for the murder when examining the case objectively. While Luthuli was the ANC’s official leader at the time of his death in 1967, a combination of ill-health, government banning orders and his opposition to violence had rendered him something of a figurehead without much political clout by the mid-1960s.

Simpson claims that there isn’t a clear cause of his murder. “He’d ceased to be a threat to the regime. If anything, his funeral was an opportunity for protest”. Simpson goes on to say that “the 1967 inquest would never have discovered a conspiracy if there was one.” Even if Luthuli’s death was accidental, there’s loads of reason to doubt the apartheid government’s version”.

Justice Minister Ronald Lamola has been working on an effort to expose cover-ups from the apartheid era in 2025. On the same day that the Luthuli inquest was reopened, he announced plans to reopen the inquests into the deaths of Mlungisi Griffiths Mxenge in 1981 (a civil rights lawyer who was stabbed 45 times by a police “death squad”) and Booi Mantyi, who was shot dead for allegedly throwing stones at police in 1985. Last month, the inquest into the 1985 murder of the “Cradock Four” was reopened.

Lamola is moving forward even though the majority of the perpetrators of apartheid-era crimes are now either dead or very old. “With these inquests, we open very real wounds which are more difficult to open 30 years into our democracy”, he said. The truth must prevail, according to the statement, “but the pursuit of justice cannot always be constrained by time.”

Uncovering the truth is especially important for Luthuli’s family. “It’s a very exciting moment for us”, said Sandile Luthuli, the chief’s grandson and CEO of the Social Housing Regulatory Authority. Sandile, who is now in his early 50s, recalls his grandfather because he “conducted church services on his own,” but he is now in his early 50s. He also highlights the role that Luthuli’s wife, Nokukhanya, played in “keeping the home fires burning”.

Sandile is confident that the outcome of the inquest will finally set the record straight, despite admitting to “some anxiety.” “This is the moment that we have been waiting for as a family … to really peel the layers of … his untimely assassination at the hands of the apartheid government”.