It becomes an absurdity to try and capture 110 years of the history of the ANC in one installment. However, a large chunk of ANC history that accounts for its contemporary state is possible.
One of the aspects of the ANC’s history as a liberation Struggle formation is wrestling with the contradictions generated by its membership of the Congress Alliance, particularly its relationship with the South African Communist Party (SAPC). This year marks 70 years since the ANC entered into a formal alliance with the SACP, the Congress of Democrats (COD), the Natal Indian Congress, the Transvaal Indian Congress, the Coloured People’s Organisation and existing formations of the labour movement. It is at this stage that the ANC assumed its “broad church” status.
Reacting to the ANC’s flirtation with political formations across the racial divide, Selope Thema, editor of the Bantu World, likened the movement to a drowning man hanging on to a shark. This was a concern raised by the majority of activists in townships where the ANC had a significant presence and support. This can be gleaned from letters to the editor of the Bantu World written by irate ANC supporters. But those who embraced this paradigmatic shift in the ANC saw in the alliance an opportunity to escalate the tempo of the liberation Struggle while adopting a more radical approach. The alliance also offered access to resources, both financial and material, that assist in accelerating the march to a free SA.
The adoption of the Freedom Charter two years after the formation of the alliance generated a great deal of skepticism about the benefits of the alliance to the ANC and the masses of its support among Africans. Men and women in their late 40s and early 50s in townships across Gauteng would have been active participants in mass struggles over land in the 1920s and 1930s. They could still reflect on a moment in their lives when they were engaged in a life and death struggle for access to land. This is particularly true of residents in Orlando township, the majority of whom migrated to Johannesburg from the native reserves of then Transkei and Natal. So the Freedom Charter’s assertion that SA belongs to all those who live in it in 1955 had a bizarre ring to it. By the end of the decade the ANC’s flirtation with political formations across the racial divide had given rise to the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) in 1959.
In 1959, writing for the COD newsletter, Joe Slovo bemoaned the growing level of support for the Nationalist Party (NP) in white society. In the general elections of 1958 support for the NP had grown considerably. Slovo chastised white society for supporting the NP’s discredited policies. Increased support for the NP in white society drove white politics to the extreme right of the political spectrum. But he was delighted that through their efforts in the Congress Alliance, they have prevented black resistance politics from swinging to the extreme left as desired by the PAC. Barely four months after Slovo made this remark, the Sharpeville massacre happened on March 21 1960.
If the anti-pass campaign of 1960 was a mass movement, then the ANC was conspicuous by its absence in the drama that unfolded. In explaining its absence in the anti-pass campaign of 1960, the ANC claimed that the undertaking was political brinksmanship on the part of the PAC. The reality is that its absence exposed the ANC’s disconnect with the masses at that historical moment.
In the next 15 years the alliance seemed to generate some benefits for the ANC. As the exiled mission between 1961 and 1975 the ANC upstaged the PAC, establishing itself as the sole liberation formation determined to liberate SA. The SACP facilitated the ANC’s relations with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and successive Soviet administrations.
In 1976, the Soweto insurrection erupted, reviving the sagging fortunes of the exiled formations, the ANC and PAC. The ANC benefitted more than the PAC in terms of the numbers of new recruits each amassed from the Soweto insurrection.
• Lebelo is author and historian
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.