Albert Luthuli

Albert John Mvumbi Luthuli taught at Adams College for fifteen years before the people of Groutville elected him their chief in 1936. When the government told him in 1952 to choose between the chieftaincy and the African National Congress, he refused to resign from either, so they deposed him — and he replied with a statement called The Road to Freedom is via the Cross, which asked what thirty years of moderation and patient petitioning had actually achieved.

The ANC elected him its president-general that year. He led it through the Defiance Campaign, the drafting of the Freedom Charter at Kliptown in 1955, and the Treason Trial, in which he was among the accused and among those acquitted. He was banned repeatedly and confined to his district for most of the decade, so he led a mass movement from a small farm in Natal under permanent restriction.

In 1960, after Sharpeville, he publicly burned his pass. That December he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — the first African, and the first person from outside Europe and the Americas, to receive it. The government let him travel to Oslo for ten days and then shut the door again.

He held to non-violence even as the movement around him turned, and remained ANC president when Umkhonto we Sizwe was formed. He died in 1967, struck by a train near his home, in circumstances his family have disputed ever since.