One of the stumbling blocks to renewed politics in South Africa is the ANC’s belief that it is preordained to lead. No recent decision reveals the preordination disease more than the SACP’s stance to contest the coming local government elections independently. From reactions to the SACP’s decision to electorally go it alone, one discerns that the organisation that celebrated more than eleven decades of existence at the beginning of the year believes that it was formed to lead.
In a midterm report that the party’s secretary, Fikile Mbalula, tabled at the National General Council in December last year, the organisation admitted that among numerous reasons why the ANC is opposed to the SACP’s decision to have its name and logo on the ballot paper in the coming local government elections is “the understanding that the ANC remains the leader of the [National Democratic Revolution] NDR and the Alliance”.
In asserting the ANC’s leading role, Mbalula echoed his party’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who at the same meeting characterised his organisation as a “leading agent of change”. Although formally established in May 1990, the roots of the Tripartite Alliance between the ANC, SACP and the Cosatu are traced back to the 1920s. Accompanying this history are claims that the ANC is a leader of society. Even after failing to win a majority in last year’s national and provincial elections and being forced to enter into coalitions, the organisation still speaks of an ANC-led government of national unity (GNU).
History tells a different story
Unfortunately, such claims not only distort history but also accord the ANC’s supposed leadership role divine eternity. The belief that the organisation is preordained to lead is the source of political arrogance and a stumbling block to renewed politics.
However, history shows that, for the best part of the ANC’s life, other organisations either shared or overshadowed it at the helm of the mass movement. Until the 1980s, the leadership of the ANC within the broad liberation movement was heavily contested. An honest review of the recent past shows that the ANC was a minority political tendency in the post-1968 and Black Consciousness-inspired student movement that emerged in South Africa. Until around 1990, the ANC and its politics were not hegemonic within the union movement that developed after the 1973 Durban strikes. ANC’s political dominance inside the country emerged between 1979 and the mid-1980s, when its allies and activists immersed themselves in community, women and youth organisations that took up people’s bread and butter issues.
Contradicting the preordination thesis that we are fed, the history of the South African struggle contains phases where organisations overtook each other, as they vied for influence. In a book on the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of Africa (ICU), David Johnson, Noor Nieftagodien, and Lucien van der Walt describe how the ICU was the largest black mass and political movement in Southern Africa in the 1920s. “With between 100,000 and 150,000 members in South Africa alone at its peak in 1927, the ICU dwarfed the African National Congress (ANC) and the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA)”.
Although there were regional variations, Michigan State University historian Peter Limb points out in his book The ANC’s Early Years to stagnation in ANC membership in the 1930s. The ascendancy of Pixley ka Seme as ANC president in 1930 marked a conservative turn in the organisation’s outlook and politics. Seme condemned strikes and radicalism. The ANC was also absent in many of the protests that women led against beerhalls, evictions from farms and reduction of farm stocks by landlords. The inaction and lack of involvement resulted in other organisations bypassing the ANC. “Despite imprecise membership figures, it is possible to establish a definite decline in ANC activity in the early 1930s”, says Limb in his book.
Being marginal or one among many, on the part of the ANC, continued into the 1940s. The CPSA’s presence in the 1940s in urban social movements and Black trade unions was significant. Riding on industrial expansion triggered by World War 2, the CPSA threw itself into union, housing, consumer and commuter struggles. The party combined involvement in mass campaigns with an electoral strategy that saw the CPSA fielding candidates in township advisory boards. The organising efforts translated to an increase in influence and membership, from a mere 400 in 1941 to about 3,000 at the end of the war.
Emergence of ANC-led alliance
Although the debate on which organisation has to lead goes back to the 1920s, it is in exile and after bannings in 1960 that the idea of an ANC-led alliance found expression. In the 1950s, a joint executive structure made up of leaders of the ANC, South African Indian Congress (SAIC), Coloured People’s Congress (SACPC) and Congress of Democrats coordinated the Congress Alliance and its campaigns. The Congress Alliance was an alliance of equals. In his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela tells a story of how the collective approach had to change with the advent of armed struggle. He describes an acrimonious meeting he held with communist and SAIC leader Yusuf Dadoo in a flat in London, when he skipped the country in 1962 and before he was jailed for life a year later. Dadoo accused Mandela and Oliver Tambo of a departure from a practice of the 1950s when the Congress Alliance took collective decisions. In his response, Mandela pointed to accusations by leaders of African independent countries, that white and Indian communists led and controlled the ANC. He argued that, to project an African image in light of this perception, “the ANC had to appear to be the first among equals”.
Given these different perspectives and prevailing conditions, the Congress Alliance became non-existent in the first half of the 1960s. According to historian Eddy Maloka, after heated exchanges, the first consultative conference of the Congress Alliance in exile was held in Dar es Salaam in November 1966. It is at this meeting that it was resolved to form a Consultative Congress Committee (CCC) as a subcommittee of the ANC, with other Congress Alliance partners as members of the structure. The other resolution of the consultative meeting was to reaffirm “the ANC as the leader of the national liberation struggle in South Africa”.
Leadership is earned
If new politics of care and service are to emerge, assertions of preordained leading roles need to be challenged and exposed. Organisations have to understand that leadership is earned by advocating for people’s needs. History can also help us to appreciate that leadership is not endowed.
Dinga Sikwebu is a retired trade unionist based in Johannesburg. Presently, he is a Global Labour University (GLU) research associate at Wits University.
