Chinua Achebe’s fourth novel, A Man of the People (1966), concerns the political fortunes of a character named Chief MA Nanga, a government minister in a fictionalized version of Nigeria, and those of the novel’s narrator, Odili Samalu, a teacher and former student of Nanga. The two become rivals as Achebe’s plot unfolds, with their relationship capturing the thorniness of intergenerational change and competition. Among many issues raised are the sources of political capital and how grassroots support can be difficult to tap and, once earned, also easy to lose. The wellspring of power, even postcolonial power, is ultimately local and interpersonal—as Achebe relays early on, “it didn’t matter what you knew but who you knew”—and the book’s title, while initially applied to Nanga, soon encompasses Samalu as well.

Achebe’s notion of “a man of the people” is not, of course, limited to Nigeria. Similar fictionalized accounts of the populist origins of political authority can be found in such novels as The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) by Gabriel García Márquez and Wizard of the Crow (2006) by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Akin to these later works, what is unsettling in Achebe’s satire is not simply that good leaders can be corrupted, but how corruption itself as a seemingly anti-humanist phenomenon can encroach and be reproduced so effortlessly—the temerity of personal character remains the final bulwark against the seductions of material and egotistical aggrandizement. But is that enough under systemic conditions of political antagonism, wealth inequality, and moral relativism?

The present-day relevance of this question needs little elaboration. However, this question also rests at the heart of Robert Trent Vinson’s new biography Albert Luthuli (2018), among the latest contributions to the Short Histories of Africa series published by Ohio University Press. As recounted by Vinson, Luthuli was a morally steadfast person, who kept a firm hand as president of the African National Congress during a turbulent time in South Africa’s history, with apparently little concern for personal gain. In short, he represents a form of incorruptible leadership that has disappeared from the upper ranks of the ANC for sure, but equally in other parts of the world. In the voice of one observer during Luthuli’s lifetime, Luthuli was “[a] man of the people [who] had a very strong influence over the community. He was a people’s chief.” Luthuli was characteristically unlike Nanga—if not entirely in spirit, then at least in consequence.

Yet, despite his political accomplishments, Luthuli retains something of a middle-range status, if not obscurity, in popular memory, whether in South Africa or the broader pan-African networks of the Black Atlantic. He has been overshadowed by Nelson Mandela and other vital members of the ANC Youth League—a point to be returned to—but, dwelling on the broader context, further contrasts of historical comparison might be drawn to explain this predicament. Luthuli did not spend a formative period overseas like some leaders, such as Leopold Senghor or Agostinho Neto. He did not depart the country of his birth to fight a struggle elsewhere like Frantz Fanon. Nor did he die tragically young like Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, or Steve Biko. In comparison to other anti-apartheid leaders, he never suffered long-term imprisonment in the same way that Mandela, Robert Sobukwe, and others did, even though he did experience incarceration during the Treason Trial and was subjected to extended periods of house arrest. The great misfortune he ultimately lived through, as with others of his generation, was being unable to witness non-racial democracy being achieved in South Africa.

Luthuli consequently poses a particular set of tests and criteria for the postcolonial biographer. The events in Luthuli’s life do not approximate the hero’s journey of early calamity, a period of exile, and a redemptive return as in the case of a number of the aforementioned leaders. Nor was his life struck down in youth—a case of political martyrdom. The innocence had long been lost by the time of his death in 1967. The inventive biographer, as Vinson indicates, must instead look elsewhere to locate the tensions and conflict that explain a person’s character and the lessons that can be imparted. Though Luthuli passed away decades before the end of apartheid, he succeeded in many ways, not least by being the recipient of the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize—the first from Africa—for his guidance of the ANC during the tumultuous decade of the 1950s. He had become an icon of civil disobedience, a proponent of non-violence, and an organizer of a multiracial nationalism through the Congress Alliance that flew in the face of the apartheid government’s divide and rule strategy. The path to this point was not easy.