One Hundred Years of the ANC

Debating Liberation Histories Today

Thozama April, Omar Badsha, Franco Barchiesi, Phil Bonner, Susan Booysen, Natasha Erlank, Norman Etherington, Liz Gunner, Arianna Lissoni, Hugh Macmillan, Joel Netshitenzhe, Noor Nieftagodien, John Saul, Vladimir Shubin, Jon Soske, Crain Soudien, Roger Southall, Ineke Kessel, Arianna Lissoni, Jon Soske

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781868148486
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

On 8 January 2012 the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa, the oldest African nationalist organisation on the continent, celebrated its one hundredth anniversary. This historic event has generated significant public debate within both the ANC and South African society at large. There is no better time to critically reflect on the ANC's historical trajectory and struggle against colonialism and apartheid than in its centennial year. One Hundred Years of the ANC is a collection of new work by renowned South African and international scholars. Covering a broad chronological and geographical spectrum and using a diverse range of sources, the contributors build upon but also extend the historiography of the ANC by tapping into marginal spaces in ANC history. By moving away from the celebratory mode that has characterised much of the contemporary discussions on the centenary, the contributors suggest that the relationship between the histories of earlier struggles and the present needs to be rethought in more complex terms. Collectively, the book chapters challenge hegemonic narratives that have become an established part of South Africa's national discourse since 1994. By opening up debate around controversial or obscured aspects of the ANC's century-long history, One hundred years of the ANC sets out an agenda for future research. The book is directed at a wide readership with an interest in understanding the historical roots of South Africa's current politics will find this volume informative. This book is based on a selection of papers presented at the One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories and Democracy Today Conference held at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg from 20–23 September2011.

Chapter One

One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Struggle History After Apartheid

Jon Soske, Arianna Lissoni and Natasha Erlank

On 8 January 2012, the African National Congress (ANC) inaugurated a yearlong series of programming, celebrating the foundation of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC) in 1912. The centenary of the ANC – the oldest African political organisation on the continent and indeed one of the oldest parties in the world – represents an historic milestone and cause for celebration in South Africa and beyond. Not only has the ANC survived for one hundred years, it has played a major role in creating a shared sense of unity and purpose that allowed it to develop into a force commanding the support of the majority of people in the country (as well as of one of the largest and most successful international solidarity movements of the twentieth century), which, in turn, brought it to power in 1994. Iconic leaders like Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Albertina and Walter Sisulu have been celebrated around the globe precisely because they came to embody interconnected struggles for racial equality, social justice and human emancipation. Whatever its shortcomings, the negotiated settlement that led to the 1994 democratic elections, and the subsequent Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, created a new model of transitional justice widely praised around the world. Born as the organisation of a tiny, dispersed, and relatively conservative black middle class, the ANC has shown itself to be protean and responsive to changing political and social climates in the intervening one hundred years. Today, the party governs the country with significant popular support and will likely retain power for the foreseeable future.

Yet, is the nationalist movement formed in 1912 the same party that now rules? Yes and no. Part of the ANC’s success derives from its capacity to reinvent itself during the course of struggle by drawing on older images, symbols and rhetoric even while it evolves in new directions. The continuity with the founding conference at Bloemfontein is real precisely because the ANC has always sought to make it so: a profound sense of tradition remains central to the organisation’s political culture. In other ways, however, the ANC’s long history has also been marked by significant discontinuities and ruptures. Internal struggles polarised the party in the 1920s, throughout the 1950s, and leading up to and following the 1969 Morogoro Conference – to name only a few salient moments. In each case the ANC leadership survived by building a new consensus while marginalising challengers and asserting the party’s historical continuity.

Unquestionably, the assumption of state power has transformed the ANC once again. The 2012 celebrations have taken place in the face of widespread anxiety over the increasingly turbulent battles within the leadership of the ruling party, often expressed publicly in bitter clashes between the ANC and its Youth League and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) – a partner, with the South African Communist Party (SACP), in the Tripartite Alliance. Many observers, and a great many ordinary South Africans, have voiced anger and fear about a growing culture of corruption in the ANC, while pointing out the persistence of mass poverty, unemployment, the lack of services and continued structural racism after almost 20 years of the ANC in government.

The vision of history that the ANC presented during the celebrations also drew fire. Rival political organisations, like the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and the Black Consciousness movement, asserted that the ANC has sidelined the role of other tendencies in the struggle against white minority rule. Some commentators suggested that the monthly focus on individual ANC presidents minimises the importance of the alliance partners and mass social struggles driven by the rank and file. In short order, the debate over the centenary polarised along predictable lines. Defenders of the ANC emphasised its achievements since 1994 and invoked an unbroken thread of continuity with the struggles and leading figures of the past. The ANC’s critics argued that it has falsely monopolised the history of the liberation struggle, whose core emancipatory principles – most importantly, a radical vision of non-racialism, social liberation and equality – it has somehow betrayed.

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF THE ANC: SOME CRITICAL REFLECTIONS

The chapters collected in this volume revisit the history of the ANC in ways that complicate a single, heroic narrative of liberation and suggest that the relationship between the histories of earlier struggles and the present needs to be rethought in more complex, and less utilitarian terms. The chapters were first presented at a conference entitled ‘One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories and Democracy Today,’ which was held at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, and the University of Johannesburg (UJ) in September 2011.¹ The conference was organised by South African History Online (SAHO), the Wits History Workshop and the Department of Historical Studies at UJ and was part of a series of events around the ANC centenary celebrations initiated by SAHO under the banner of ‘uKhongolose’ (Congress).² Almost fifty papers, spread over eighteen panels, were presented at the conference and the essays selected for publication are representative of the range of topics and debates that emerged from the proceedings. The opening plenary featured Professor Philip Bonner, speaking about the first 70 years of the ANC, and Joel Netshitenzhe, a member of the ANC National Executive Committee, reflecting on the challenges facing the ANC in power. Conference sessions covered topics including historiography, biography, exile, heritage, labour, the armed struggle, education, religion, language and song.³ The audience was a mix of academic researchers and university students, as well as a small number of ANC provincial and national leaders, civil society members and a significant delegation of union education officers and members. The benefit of this diverse audience was a stimulating, and at times contentious, debate about the history of the ANC as well as the current political conjuncture.

Given the range of participants and the overall political context, the conference took on something of a dual character. It became a site of both commemoration and critical interrogation of historical discourse, a venue where some participants laid claim to aspects of the ANC’s history, while others urged greater analytical distance from the events of the pre-1994 past. This tension cut across the predictable divisions between academic and activist, or defender and critic of the ruling party. A set of related questions surfaced during many of the conference discussions, ultimately reflecting differing attitudes to the significance of the past for the postapartheid present. To what extent do previous historical moments in the history of the ANC (and the liberation struggle more broadly) provide a usable history, a living resource through which the political configurations of the present can and should be understood and contested? Or is it of greater urgency to critique the production of historical narratives within the novel context of the ANC as a ruling party and therefore underline fundamental discontinuities between the periods before and after 1994? Should the present crisis within the Tripartite Alliance be understood in terms of the state’s continuities or discontinuities with the earlier traditions of the ANC? Or does posing the problem in this fashion create a falsely unified image of ‘the struggle’ that minimises the factional divisions, organisational breaks, tactical mistakes, failures and conflicting political aspirations which also characterise the history of the liberation organisations? And, perhaps most importantly, who has the right to invoke this past – or critique how it is utilised? These questions largely emerged during the panels’ discussion rounds or in hallways rather than in the papers themselves; they were perhaps most evident in the gaps and misunderstandings that developed among conversations taking place in the very same room. Collectively, they pointed to the various ways that liberation history, both as an academic field and a public discourse of heritage, provides a legitimising vocabulary for post-apartheid politics – and thus, itself, becomes a strategic terrain of contest and contention.

Symptomatically, the conference discussions focused less on the themes that we articulated in the call for papers – local and regional histories, cycles of intellectual contestation within the ANC, and de-provincialising the anti-apartheid struggle⁴ – than on issues somehow tied to the current factional struggles within the Tripartite Alliance and between the ANC and the ANC Youth League. The most persistent topic of debate was the historical dynamic of fragmentation and cohesion that has characterised ANC politics since the movement’s founding. As the keynote address by Philip Bonner (included in this volume) emphasised, historians are only beginning to understand the ANC’s historic ability not only to bring together a wide range of regional, ethnic, religious, economic, political and racial groupings, but also its capacity to reinvent itself in the aftermath of conflict among different constituencies.

In his conference address, Jeremy Cronin (speaking as deputy secretary-general of the SACP) provocatively suggested that the ANC’s understanding of nationalism could be seen as a form of ‘post-modernism avant la lettre.’ Rather than mobilising around an identity based on a substantive notion of culture, the early ANC developed a political project aimed at transcending ethnic divisions by uniting Africans around a set of shared political aspirations – and therefore laid the basis for a dynamic and inclusive concept of nation that would be revised and expanded multiple times in the following decades. Nevertheless, this programme of nation-building has always required exclusions and strategic compromises and, as a result, has produced sharp and ongoing contestations over the limits of an aspirational South African political community. At various times and places, the boundaries and very character of the ANC have been contested and redefined with regard to women, youth, racial minorities and Communist Party members, traditional leaders and workers, among a host of others. If the party has generally managed to expand its image of nationhood and invent organisational structures to include new groups, the terms of such incorporations have frequently set the stage for later political conflicts.

At the conference itself, the issues of non-racialism and gender assumed particular importance. It was not difficult to discern the long shadow of Julius Malema, the now deposed Youth League leader, whose battle against the senior ANC leadership pushed an aggressively racialist and misogynist rhetoric into the centre of public discourse. The opening panel discussed two books: an autobiography by veteran Communist Party intellectual Norman Levy and a biography of Labour Party leader Alex Hepple by his son, Bob, himself a member of the Congress of Democrats in the 1950s.⁵ Introducing both the books and their authors, veteran ANC leader and Robben Island prisoner Ahmed Kathrada began his presentation with an almost ritual invocation of his fallen comrades, and few present missed the significance of fact that this list of names included those of Ruth First and Ahmed Timol as well as Chris Hani. While Kathrada did not mention the struggles within the ANC leadership, his indignation over the erosion of and open attacks on non-racialism was palpable.

The contested, perhaps even fragile, character of non-racialism was a significant theme throughout the conference, and the warmth displayed among the speakers, especially Kathrada and Levy, recalled the considerable role the Communist Party played (along with other forces like the independent trade union movement) in making this ideal central to the ideology and organisational practices of the ANC. Significantly, these exchanges performed a certain kind of comradeship, even while they tended to ground this bond in a distant past and an endangered tradition. Such reminiscences and reconnections also permeated the panels, lunches and coffee breaks. They reaffirmed and perhaps, in some cases, revised a tradition of struggle grounded in personal relationships, affective bonds and shared memories. These public and private expressions of memory also served to remind participants of the incredible range of experiences and emotions connected to the liberation movement – not to mention the enormous diversity of ways in which people understood, participated in and built their lives through the ANC. Everyday and intimate aspects of the struggle were often absent from the conference papers and their presence in people’s informal remarks cast a light on this persistent weakness of much academic writing.

The questions of gender and sexuality were more fraught, perhaps because they remained at the periphery of multiple discussions. The conference organisers attempted to put together a plenary session and panels on both topics, even while we were conscious of integrating feminist perspectives into sessions dedicated to other themes. Tellingly, a number of scholars and activists turned down our invitation to address the question of gender and nationalism, and when conference speakers like Thozama April, Julia Wells, Natasha Erlank or Raymond Suttner intervened to introduce these questions into the discussions, the focus generally ‘drifted’ elsewhere.

In retrospect, the two main approaches to women and gender at the conference ultimately worked at cross purposes, reflecting divergent strategies of writing histories of the liberation struggle and attitudes to post-apartheid nationalism. Some participants emphasised the pressing need for more studies of women involved in the struggle, a greater valuation of women’s contributions and a serious consideration of the work of women as intellectuals. More investigation along these lines is absolutely crucial. A great deal of recent scholarship continues to sideline issues like gender, masculinity and sexual politics. Yet the genre of women’s history often finds itself locked in celebratory mode and, as a result, closely parallels the ways in which the ANC incorporates women into the larger narrative of nation-building. Indeed, the ANC has been remarkably successful in placing gender equality and women’s rights at the centre of its post-1994 vision of transformation, even if the way in which it valorises women circumscribes their social roles (as wives and mothers of the nation, for example), thus reinforcing modes of patriarchal authority. A smaller number of voices at the conference, most notably that of Shireen Hassim, argued that an analysis of the ANC’s gender politics should lead to a broader interrogation of the politics of nationalism itself. Significantly, Hassim’s intervention was one of the few moments when the ideology of nationalism was explicitly challenged. Several conference participants, including Suttner, Cronin, Devan Pillay and Judy Mulqueeny, urged a renewed debate over the history and contemporary relevance of the concept ‘National Democratic Revolution.’ In contrast, only a few interventions – notably by Franco Barchiesi and John Saul – sought to historicise the ANC’s understanding of nation or develop a sustained critique of nationalist politics today.

If a shared concern emerged across the variety of political stances and methodological approaches, it was an intense preoccupation with the relationship between the period of struggle and the period of governance, between the ‘past’ and ‘present.’ Often implicit, this binary not only sundered the history of the ANC into two homogenised periods (erasing both the decades before apartheid and the complexity of the nearly 20 years since 1994), it also posed their connection in terms of loss and recovery. In other words, it promoted a form of struggle nostalgia. This nostalgic mode took many forms: anxiety over the passing of the Mandela and Tambo generation of leaders, invocations of foundational documents like the Freedom Charter, the search for a moment when more radical possibilities of transformation still existed, the celebration of marginalised figures, the attempt to recover nowforgotten intellectual currents and the mourning for lost comrades. Nostalgia was generally not for camaraderie under fire – the wounds and losses of the apartheid years were too close to permit such bravado – as much as for a greater unity of purpose. In Svetlana Boym’s terms, these efforts to reclaim a lost moment alternated between the restorative and the reflective...