The ANC Split: Disunity or a Strengthened and Meaningful Democracy

It has long been inevitable that the African National Congress, Africa’s oldest political party, would eventually split. The question has always been when rather than if. The inevitable took place this past week with the launch in Bloemfontein of the Congress of the People; or COPE as it will be known.

Founded in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress and significantly influenced in both style and policy by the slightly older National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the United States, the ANC has always been something of an unwieldy organization trying to balance both tradition (it once had a House of Chiefs) and modernity.

By the late thirties it was virtually moribund and, in terms of importance for the liberation struggle, surpassed by several alternate African organizations. In the early forties a group of young militants led by the likes of Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Anton Lembede and Oliver Tambo took over the ANC’s Youth League and, from this platform, went on to revitalize the entire organization. By the 1950s the ANC was once again the dominant African organization in South Africa.

In the meantime the National Party had come to power (1948) and began to implement the draconian racial separation laws known collectively as apartheid. By the early sixties it had become clear that “civil rights” protests would get nowhere with the hard line racist architects of apartheid. The ANC sent part of its leadership out of the country to represent it in exile. The other faction would begin the internal armed struggle. Mandela was in the latter group: arrested, tried and sentenced to prison where he spent the next three decades.

Simultaneously, the ANC absorbed dissident groups representing various other ethno-national communities (Coloured, Indian and European) and became the main organizational expression of the anti-apartheid movement. Outlawed by the government, the ANC kept its identity in exile but re-surfaced internally in a variety of expressions, the most prominent of which was the United Democratic Front (UDF).

More importantly, the political, social and cultural homogeneity of the African majority was changing markedly. Traditional South African peasant society was significantly supplanted during the first half of the 20th century by an urbanized African proletariat connected initially to the mining industry but, with the growth of the South African political economy, to all sectors of a growing industrial juggernaut; by far the largest economy in Africa. By the early seventies this black proletariat had produced an effective, radical, self-conscious and highly articulate labor movement that eventually coalesced into the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).

Article Author: Bill Hansen

Visit Bill Hansen's author page — Bill Hansen's Blog