Narrating the political Christian self : Chief Albert Luthuli's political theology in his autobiography "Let my people go"

Abstract

The study utilises the articulations and understandings of ‘narrative’ and ‘narrative theology’ from George Stroup and Stanley Hauerwas. ‘Narrative’ is a fundamental theological category that shapes theological reflection on the form of the gospel, and an account which sponsors the intelligibility and coherence of human life and actions performed as moral agents. Narrative articulates the contingency and irreducible particularity of selves, and shapes personal and communal identity by providing interpretive horizons through which one understands and describes the world. Autobiography is a narrative that inscribes one’s personal identity and subjectivity, implicating the lives of others and creating associations or distance between the self and others, entrenching or challenging hierarchies, and potentially reconstructing or fabricating social realities. Autobiography is marked by the intervention of fallible memory, and performs rhetorical acts of assertion, justification, judgment, conviction, and interrogation which intersect with idiosyncratic acts of remembering. The rhetorical acts performed by Chief Luthuli in Let My People Go disclose a political theological critique of apartheid South Africa. Political theology is discourse about God relating to the organisation of bodies in time and space. The study utilises Emmanuel Katongole’s understanding of political theology within Africa as discourse about overcoming harmful stories about Africa and Africans that have produced predictable scripts of violent politics, and proposes the necessity of reconfiguring personal and communal identity as a negotiated journey whose telos is the drama of God’s new creation. Leveraging insights from narrative theology, autobiography criticism, and political theology, the study describes the rhetorical acts that articulate Chief Luthuli’s political theological critique. These are: the title of the autobiography which positions white South Africans as oppressors; questioning the legitimacy of white leadership in apartheid South Africa; his critique of the church’s apathy toward and collusion with apartheid; eschewing violence as a tool for liberation; lastly, embracing broad alliances to agitate for a non-racialised South Africa. Chief Luthuli’s political theological critique, while lacking some nuance, successfully meets Katongole’s 5 challenges for Christian social ethics in Africa, namely: colonial impact, social memory, and forgetfulness; the lies of noble ideals; the politics of greed and plunder; the wanton sacrifice of Africa; and the visible invisibility of Christianity.