The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

The implementation of the national legacy project programme proved to be far more
difficult than planned. In the late 1990s, the legacy project planned to mark and celebrate
the life of late ANC president and Nobel Prize winner, Chief Albert Luthuli, faltered
ostensibly because of political conflict between the ANC and Inkatha in KwaZulu‐Natal.
As Jabulani Sithole and Sibongiseni Mkhize have shown, the Luthuli legacy project ran
aground largely because of the existence of different and conflicting “images” of Luthuli,
each of which emerged in “distinct political contexts”. Different organisations and
individuals had produced numerous images of Luthuli since his death in 1967, and some
had changed their view of Luthuli over time. Indeed, “many ‘Luthulis’ were produced for
different purposes and at different times” 123
The apartheid state’s security police portrayed Luthuli as “anti‐Communist” and a
“willing collaborator”. The Communist Party saw him initially as “a symbol of African
courage, militancy and hope”, who participated in the discussions which led to the ANC’s
decision to take up arms. Later the SACP “denied that Luthuli knew anything about the
armed struggle. Indeed, Inkatha suggested that the exiled ANC had “deviated from what
Luthuli stood for”. Inkatha had used Luthuli’s image to “bolster” their resistance claims,
and tried to “monopolise” annual Luthuli commemoration services in the early 1980s. The
ANC itself had given “contradictory images of who Luthuli was”. 124 Sithole and Mkhize’s
argument could have been more productively framed as an examination of different
narrations of Luthuli’s life. In Luthuli’s case, the consensual, celebratory national heritage
envisaged by the Legacy Project Programme proved difficult to achieve. This was
especially so since the early legacy projects had to be implemented as swiftly as possible
within a given financial year. In KwaZulu‐Natal at the end of the 1990s, an opportunity
123 Jabulani Sithole and Sibongiseni Mkhize, ‘Truth or Lies? Selective Memories, Imaginings, and
Representations of Chief Albert Luthuli in Recent Political Discourses’, History and Theory, Vol 39, No
4, December 2000, pp 69, 84‐5. This special issue of the Journal edited by Gary Minkley and Martin
Legassick published papers presented to the conference, ‘“Not Telling”: Secrecy, Lies and History’
held at the University of the Western Cape on July 11‐14, 1999. While the difficulties of the Luthuli
Legacy Project were not specifically discussed in the published version of their paper, this was an
issue Sithole and Mkhize dealt with during their conference presentation.
124 Jabulani Sithole and Sibongiseni Mkhize, ‘Truth or Lies?’, pp 76, 78, 84‐5.
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