Thandi was born in 1934 and grew up in the small Mission Station of Groutville northeast of Durban, South Africa. Her qualities and values she attributes to her parents — Nokukhanya Luthuli, the financial backbone and nurturer of a family of seven children, and Albert Luthuli, Chief of the Groutville community, President of the African National Conference, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient. They had built a house on freehold land made possible by white American missionaries. Now the Luthuli Museum, the loving home sheltered Thandi’s and her six siblings' early life, and embraced extended family, friends, and travelers.
In her early years, the atrocities of legalized apartheid laws – the brutal segregation and dispossession of the indigenous African population – were well underway to becoming permanent. Because of her father’s governing role and political life, Thandi engaged with guests who would become renown anti-apartheid leaders, others who sought consultations at the risk of imprisonment, and the possibility of “hangers on” being informants.
Trained and certified as a nurse and mid-wife, and nursing lecturer, Thandi married and became a mother of four. In 1970 she and her husband felt the apartheid noose closing in and decided to escape South Africa to assure the safety of their children. Living in exile in Atlanta, GA they expected an ordinary life of work, church, and child raising. However, civil rights leaders and educators at Atlanta University Center discovered their presence and the authenticity of their experience. As the viscousness of the South African government became more widely known, they were in high demand to address an increasing number of audiences.
Thandi accepted a full-time director position in 1981 with the American Friends Service Committee’s Southern Africa Education Program in the Southeast US. From this vantage point over the next 25 years, she spoke throughout the Southeast and nationally, engaged disparate groups of people in the international divestment movement, and led the eight-year Coca-Cola Divestment Campaign.
Her organizing skills and her personal qualities of tenacity, graciousness, and perseverance captivated many, led to multiple media opportunities, and acceptance of awards and proclamations.
After the fall of apartheid Thandi returned home to vote for the first time in 1994, leading to the election of Nelson Mandela as President. She joined the Department of Foreign Affairs in 1998 to continued service to South Africa as Ambassador to Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, and the West Indies.
Now in retirement, Thandi lives in South Africa close to her ancestral home of Groutville.