Message by Albert Luthuli to the Conference of the Congress of Democrats

2 April 1956, Johannesburg

In sending you fraternal greetings and wishing your Annual Conference all success, I would like to centre my brief remarks on the question. "What is your task in South Africa?"

An annual conference is always an occasion for stocktaking where both the backward look and the forward look are made. I would ask you in making an appraisal of your activities in the past year and laying out your plans for the coming year to ask yourselves what your task is in our present situation in South Africa when we find ourselves faced with the most savage and fanatical Government that shows no signs of being willing to share democratic rights with all people in the country regardless of their race or colour. The Government of the Nationalist Party despite adverse world opinion, seems bent on making democracy a possession of "Europeans only."

Each session of Parliament sees the statute book of the Union loaded with new oppressive discriminatory legislative and administrative enactments which press hard on non-whites and on all who champion the cause of an oppressed people. The task before us is most urgent and exacting, faced as we are with fanatical rulers who would bring the country to ruin politically, economically and otherwise, rather than do all the right things towards all sections of our multi-racial nation, especially the non-whites who at present are the hardest-hit victims of the apartheid policy of the Nationalist Government. The situation challenges all lovers of freedom for all to fight on until the forces of oppression are defeated.

Your task as an all-white political party that is in full fellowship with the premier political organisations amongst non-whites is not an easy one at all.

You have a special mission to convert white South Africans to your viewpoint of regarding all people, regardless of their race or colour, as equals and therefore deserving of being accorded all democratic rights to enable each individual to develop himself to his fullest capacity.

A wide acceptance of this viewpoint would result in the categorical rejection of the policy of apartheid which is inflicting on non-whites, solely on grounds of race and colour, indignities and atrocities so derogatory to human dignity that no human being should be made to bear them.

Unfortunately at present, white South Africa in its treatment of non-whites ignores, to her harm, fundamental spiritual values such as:

Righteousness and not injustice uplifteth a nation; Magnanimity and not selfishness and pettiness bring honour and greatness to a people; Brotherliness and not racial arrogance brings about harmony and co-operation in a nation, especially a multi-racial nation.

It will not pay white South Africa to live by the jungle law of "might is right." The lesson of history is that those who rule by an iron hand eventually suffer an ignominious end. Your task our task is to save white South Africa from bringing about its own destruction. Apartheid will prove a terrible Frankenstein one day.

Finally, your task is not an easy one because as lovers of freedom for all, you will be persecuted and abused by white South Africa with the oppressed whose cause you champion. But even worse than this you may find yourselves suspected of ulterior motives by some of the people you are trying to liberate. All this should not daunt you and divert you from the struggle for freedom for all in our country.