“Vinson provides a good introductory biography of a key figure in South African politics that is ready made for course syllabi. This book is suitable to any class that focuses on Black politics in a global dimension as well as surveys focused on apartheid South Africa.”
Steve Davis, American Historical Review
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.
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. More info →
Review in the American Historical Review 126, no. 3, June 2021
Download
Retail price:
$16.95 ·
Save 20% ($13.56)
US and Canada only
Availability and price vary according to vendor.
Share 
Permission to reprint
Permission
to photocopy or include in a course pack
via Copyright Clearance
Center
Click or tap on a subject heading to sign up to be notified when new related books come out.
Paperback
978-0-8214-2328-8
Retail price: $16.95,
S.
Release date: August 2018
14 illus.
·
192 pages
·
4¼ × 7 in.
Rights: World except SADC
Electronic
978-0-8214-4642-3
Release date: August 2018
14 illus.
·
192 pages
Rights: World except SADC
Promise and Despair
The First Struggle for a Non-Racial South Africa
By Martin Plaut
The struggle for freedom in South Africa goes back a long way. In 1909, a remarkable interracial delegation of South Africans traveled to London to lobby for a non-racialized constitution and franchise for all. Among their allies was Mahatma Gandhi, who later encapsulated lessons from the experience in his most important book, Hind Swaraj. Though the mission failed, the London debates were critical to the formation of the African National Congress in 1912.With
African History · South Africa · World and Comparative History
Spear of the Nation: Umkhonto weSizwe
South Africa’s Liberation Army, 1960s–1990s
By Janet Cherry
Umkhonto weSizwe, Spear of the Nation, was arguably the last of the great liberation armies of the twentieth century—but it never got to “march triumphant into Pretoria.” MK—as it was known—was the armed wing of the African National Congress, South Africa’s liberation movement, that challenged the South African apartheid government.
African History · Violence in Society · African Studies · South Africa
The ANC Women’s League
Sex, Gender and Politics
By Shireen Hassim
First formed in the early twentieth century, the ANC Women’s League has grown into a leading organization in the women’s movement in South Africa. The league has been at the forefront of the nation’s century-long transition from an authoritarian state to a democracy that espouses gender equality as a core constitutional value.
African History · Women’s Studies · Politics · Women’s History · African Studies · South Africa · Africa
Steve Biko inspired a generation of black South Africans to claim their true identity and refuse to be a part of their own oppression. Through his example, he demonstrated fearlessness and self-esteem, and he led a black student movement countrywide that challenged and thwarted the culture of fear perpetuated by the apartheid regime. He paid the highest price with his life. The brutal circumstances of his death shocked the world and helped isolate his oppressors.This
Biography, Activists · African History · African Studies · South Africa
Sign up to be notified when new Biography, Activists titles come out.
We will only use your email address to notify you of new titles in the subject area(s) you follow. We will never share your information with third parties.
