In an excellent addition to the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series, Robert Trent Vinson recovers the important but largely forgotten story of Albert Luthuli, Africa’s first Nobel Peace Prize winner and president of the African National Congress from 1952 to 1967. One of the most respected African leaders, Luthuli linked South African antiapartheid politics with other movements, becoming South Africa’s leading advocate of Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent civil disobedience techniques. He also framed apartheid as a crime against humanity and thus linked South African antiapartheid struggles with international human rights campaigns.
Unlike previous studies, this book places Luthuli and the South African antiapartheid struggle in new global contexts, and aspects of Luthuli’s leadership that were not previously publicly known: Vinson is the first to use new archival evidence, numerous oral interviews, and personal memoirs to reveal that Luthuli privately supported sabotage as an additional strategy to end apartheid. This multifaceted portrait will be indispensable to students of African history and politics and nonviolence movements worldwide.
Circa l’autore
Robert Trent Vinson is the director and chair of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia and a research associate at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. He is a scholar and teacher of nineteenth- and twentieth-century African and African diaspora history, specializing in the transnational connections between southern Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean. He is the author of The Americans Are Coming!: Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa and Albert Luthuli: Mandela before Mandela.