RW JOHNSON / It was a warm, sunny day, and for some reason it was not at all like other days. I was only a toddler, but I knew it was very unusual that there was no traffic at all and that wooden trestle tables were standing in the middle of the street. On the tables there were jellies and buttered scones – things which counted as great delicacies then. All the people whom I knew as neighbours were out in the street, and everyone was very happy and jolly – it was a sort of party. I wandered around, enjoying it all, not understanding what it was all about, but quite content just to feel the general happiness.
Years later I recounted this scene to my mother. She knew immediately what it was. “That was our VJ day (Victory over Japan) party,” she said. “August 11th, 1945. Of course we were all happy. That was the end of the War.” I counted back. On August 11th I had been six weeks short of two years old. I now realise that it’s very unusual to remember anything when you’re only one year old, but I can still see that day very clearly in my mind’s eye. It was my very first memory, and I was rather pleased to think that at least it was about a major world event, not just some childish mishap.
That street scene took place in Wallasey on Merseyside. Our house looked out over the Birkenhead docks, and all around us there were bombed-out buildings, because the Luftwaffe had paid many visits to those docks, dropping sticks of bombs which bracketed it and hit many of the houses in our street. The thing I remembered as I got older was how pleased everyone was about the atom bombs. They had brought the war to a thunderous halt, they guaranteed victory, and, above all, it meant that no more local boys had to get wounded or killed while invading Japan. The losses had been bad enough – there were widows and orphans on every street. My father was then on an oil tanker in Japanese waters. He had twice been torpedoed in the North Atlantic and spent a lot of time in open boats on the ocean swell. The atom bombs meant he would be safe and that he would come home again.
It was, in other words, a completely different world. It now seems peculiar that I can still be connected to that different world by this tenuous thing called memory. We talk of something being “within living memory” because we attach importance to the notion that there are still people around who can link us to such past times. And we date those times by technology. In 1945 no one had TV, there was no internet, no email, no space travel, no electric cars and so on.
I remember meeting the mother of my Oxford supervisor, Thomas Hodgkin. By then, Thomas himself was in his late sixties, so his mother must have been at least ninety. She had all her wits about her, and was a very self-assured, thoughtful lady. I asked her once what had been the greatest changes that she had seen. I thought she might talk about the world wars, the disappearance of the servant classes and so forth, but she thought for a moment and said: “Without doubt, the coming of electricity. You see, then we could read or sew in the evenings for the first time – our whole day expanded. There were lots of things you couldn’t do by candle light. At first electricity was just about light but soon it meant electric machines, everything from irons to press your clothes to trams.” I marvelled at the thought that I was thus in touch with the pre-electric age, the world that had included Henry VIII, the Greeks and Romans. Such is the force of “within living memory”: I was sitting in her living room chatting to someone from the pre-electric age, something I’d never imagined.
Mrs Nokukhanya Luthuli. Image: Luthuli Museum website.
I had a parallel experience a few months after the 1994 election when I went to see old Mrs Luthuli at Groutville. Growing up in Durban, I had always been aware of the Luthulis living out at Groutville, but it was a strong experience to go there for the first time. Theirs was an unprepossessing little house, surrounded on three sides by sugar cane, and very much part of the KwaZulu-Natal countryside. It was weird to remember that Bobby Kennedy had come helicoptering in to see Chief Luthuli in 1966 – the whole idea of American celebrity in a helicopter seemed so incongruous in that setting.
Mrs Luthuli spoke only Zulu, and one of her sons acted as interpreter for me. We chatted a bit about the election, and two things struck me. Although her son was careful to say “of course we are ANC”, they actually seemed to have mixed feelings as between Inkatha and the ANC. Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi always claimed that he was very much in the Christian, liberal and non-violent tradition of Luthuli, and to be in that household was to feel the strength of that tradition.
And when I asked about election day, I was told how all the children of the neighbourhood had danced in the street. Innocently, I asked if the Luthulis had joined in? Not at all. They had retreated within the house “because, you know, there has been a lot of trouble with young children running wild”. For that was the era of “comtsotsis”, of young tearaway boys being recruited into the Mandela football team, of others taking part in necklacings and a great deal of violent, delinquent behaviour. Older people often had reason to be nervous.
But the thing which made the greatest impression on me was when Mrs Luthuli recounted how Chief Luthuli would spend his evenings. Restricted by banning orders – he wasn’t even allowed to go into neighbouring Stanger, and of course he had very few visitors – he would nonetheless sit listening happily to gramophone records. Or, more particularly, to one special record. For the Luthulis were in contact with the family of Martin Luther King (Luthuli won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1961, King in 1963), and Coretta King had sent them an LP of Martin’s speeches. Luthuli would listen to these speeches with great enjoyment, over and over again.
I had grown up in Durban, and knew only too well what the summer evenings were like – warm and sultry, with all the sounds of the sub-tropical night – bullfrogs, crickets and cicada beetles, a great chorus that sang and even roared. I could imagine only too well how Chief Luthuli would sit out on his verandah with that soundtrack as his background, listening to the sonorous phrases of Dr King booming out over the sugar cane – including, of course, the famous “I have a dream” speech to which Luthuli would listen with particular pleasure.
And once again I could share that wonderful scene thanks to the force of “living memory”, as Mrs Luthuli happily recounted it. It made me feel that it was something of a mercy that Chief Luthuli had died in 1967, for had he lived a few months longer he would have had to cope with the news of Martin Luther King’s assassination, and I think it might have broken his heart.
But I was lucky too, to have met Mrs Luthuli. For Mrs Nokukhanya Luthuli died in 1996, aged 92. She was buried at the Congregational church in Groutville, next to her husband, Albert.
FEATURED IMAGE: Chief Albert Luthuli and his wife, Nokukhanya Luthuli, in Oslo, Norway, where he recceived the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize.