The African National Congress (ANC) is a political party in South Africa that has played a pivotal role in the country's history. Founded on 8 January 1912 in Bloemfontein as the South African Native National Congress, the organisation was formed to advocate for the rights of black South Africans. The ANC adopted its flag during a party congress in 1925. Let's delve into the history of the ANC flag and its significance.
The ANC has been the ruling party in South Africa since 1994, when the first post-apartheid election resulted in Nelson Mandela being elected as President of South Africa. The ANC was banned by the South African government between April 1960 and February 1990. After the Soweto Uprising of 1976, the ANC remained committed to achieving its objectives through armed struggle.
Flag of the African National Congress
Origins and Evolution
A successor of the Cape Colony's Imbumba Yamanyama organisation, the ANC was renamed the African National Congress in 1923. In the 1940s, Alfred Bitini Xuma revived some of Gumede's programmes, assisted by a surge in trade union activity and by the formation in 1944 of the left-wing ANC Youth League under a new generation of activists, among them Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela, and Oliver Tambo.
After the National Party was elected into government in 1948 on a platform of apartheid, entailing the further institutionalisation of racial segregation, this new generation pushed for a Programme of Action which explicitly advocated African nationalism and led the ANC, for the first time, to the sustained use of mass mobilisation techniques like strikes, stay-aways, and boycotts. This culminated in the 1952-53 Defiance Campaign, a campaign of mass civil disobedience organised by the ANC, the Indian Congress, and the coloured Franchise Action Council in protest of six apartheid laws. The ANC's membership swelled.
Read also: Experience Fad's Fine African Cuisine
In June 1955, it was one of the groups represented at the multi-racial Congress of the People in Kliptown, Soweto, which ratified the Freedom Charter, from then onwards a fundamental document in the anti-apartheid struggle. The Charter was the basis of the enduring Congress Alliance, but was also used as a pretext to prosecute hundreds of activists, among them most of the ANC's leadership, in the Treason Trial. Before the trial was concluded, the Sharpeville massacre occurred on 21 March 1960.
The Armed Struggle and Exile
In 1961, partly in response to the Sharpeville massacre, leaders of the SACP and the ANC formed a military body, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK, Spear of the Nation), as a vehicle for armed struggle against the apartheid state. In the first half of the 1960s, MK was preoccupied with a campaign of sabotage attacks, especially bombings of unoccupied government installations. As the ANC reduced its presence inside South Africa, however, MK cadres were increasingly confined to training camps in Tanzania and neighbouring countries - with such exceptions as the Wankie Campaign, a momentous military failure.
In 1969, Tambo was compelled to call the landmark Morogoro Conference to address the grievances of the rank-and-file, articulated by Chris Hani in a memorandum which depicted MK's leadership as corrupt and complacent. Although MK's malaise persisted into the 1970s, conditions for armed struggle soon improved considerably, especially after the Soweto uprising of 1976 in South Africa saw thousands of students - inspired by Black Consciousness ideas - cross the borders to seek military training. MK guerrilla activity inside South Africa increased steadily over this period, with one estimate recording an increase from 23 incidents in 1977 to 136 incidents in 1985.
From the mid-1980s, as international and internal opposition to apartheid mounted, elements of the ANC began to test the prospects for a negotiated settlement with the South African government, although the prudence of abandoning armed struggle was an extremely controversial topic within the organisation. Following preliminary contact between the ANC and representatives of the state, business community, and civil society, President F. W. de Klerk announced in February 1990 that the government would unban the ANC and other banned political organisations, and that Mandela would be released from prison.
Negotiations and Transition to Democracy
Some ANC leaders returned to South Africa from exile for so-called "talks about talks", which led in 1990 and 1991 to a series of bilateral accords with the government establishing a mutual commitment to negotiations. However, ongoing political violence, which the ANC attributed to a state-sponsored third force, led to recurrent tensions. Most dramatically, after the Boipatong massacre of June 1992, the ANC announced that it was withdrawing from negotiations indefinitely. It faced further casualties in the Bisho massacre, the Shell House massacre, and in other clashes with state forces and supporters of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP).
Read also: The Story Behind Cachapas
However, once negotiations resumed, they resulted in November 1993 in an interim Constitution, which governed South Africa's first democratic elections on 27 April 1994. In the post-apartheid era, several significant breakaway groups have been formed by former ANC members. The first is the Congress of the People, founded by Mosiuoa Lekota in 2008 in the aftermath of the Polokwane elective conference, when the ANC declined to re-elect Thabo Mbeki as its president and instead compelled his resignation from the national presidency. The second breakaway is the Economic Freedom Fighters, founded in 2013 after youth leader Julius Malema was expelled from the ANC.
Internal Structure and Alliances
Under the ANC constitution, every member of the ANC belongs to a local branch, and branch members select the organisation's policies and leaders. They do so primarily by electing delegates to the National Conference, which is currently convened every five years. Between conferences, the organisation is led by its 86-member National Executive Committee, which is elected at each conference. The most senior members of the National Executive Committee are the so-called Top Six officials, the ANC president primary among them.
The ANC has three leagues: the Women's League, the Youth League and the Veterans' League. The ANC is recognised as the leader of a three-way alliance, known as the Tripartite Alliance, with the SACP and Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). The alliance was formalised in mid-1990, after the ANC was unbanned, but has deeper historical roots: the SACP had worked closely with the ANC in exile, and COSATU had aligned itself with the Freedom Charter and Congress Alliance in 1987. The membership and leadership of the three organisations has traditionally overlapped significantly.
The alliance constitutes a de facto electoral coalition: the SACP and COSATU do not contest in government elections, but field candidates through the ANC, hold senior positions in the ANC, and influence party policy. Under South Africa's closed-list proportional representation electoral system, parties have immense power in selecting candidates for legislative bodies. The leaders of the executive in each sphere of government - the president, the provincial premiers, and the mayors - are indirectly elected after each election. In practice, the selection of ANC candidates for these positions is highly centralised, with the ANC caucus voting together to elect a pre-decided candidate.
Ideology and Policy
The ANC has never been a political party. It was formed as a parliament of the African people. Right from the start, up to now, the ANC is a coalition, if you want, of people of various political affiliations. Some will support free enterprise, others socialism. Some are conservatives, others are liberals. We are united solely by our determination to oppose racial oppression. That is the only thing that unites us. There is no question of ideology as far as the odyssey of the ANC is concerned, because any question approaching ideology would split the organization from top to bottom.
Read also: Techniques of African Jewellery
The 1969 Morogoro Conference committed the ANC to a "national democratic revolution [which] - destroying the existing social and economic relationship - will bring with it a correction of the historical injustices perpetrated against the indigenous majority and thus lay the basis for a new - and deeper internationalist - approach". For the movement's intellectuals, the concept of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) was a means of reconciling the anti-apartheid and anti-colonial project with a second goal, that of establishing domestic and international socialism - the ANC is a member of the Socialist International, and its close partner the SACP traditionally conceives itself as a vanguard party.
Specifically, and as implied by the 1969 document, NDR doctrine entails that the transformation of the domestic political system (national struggle, in Joe Slovo's phrase) is a precondition for a socialist revolution (class struggle). The concept remained important to ANC intellectuals and strategists after the end of apartheid. Indeed, the pursuit of the NDR is one of the primary objectives of the ANC as set out in its constitution. As with the Freedom Charter, the ambiguity of the NDR has allowed it to bear varying interpretations.
Since 1994, consecutive ANC governments have held a strong preference for a significant degree of state intervention in the economy. The ANC's first comprehensive articulation of its post-apartheid economic policy framework was set out in the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) document of 1994, which became its electoral manifesto and also, under the same name, the flagship policy of Nelson Mandela's government. In 1996, Mandela's government replaced the RDP with the Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) programme, which was maintained under President Thabo Mbeki, Mandela's successor.
As its name suggests, the RDP emphasised state-led development - that is, a developmental state - which the ANC has typically been cautious, at least in its rhetoric, to distinguish from the neighbouring concept of a welfare state. In the mid-2000s, during Mbeki's second term, the notion of a developmental state was revived in South African political discourse when the national economy worsened; and the 2007 National Conference whole-heartedly endorsed developmentalism in its policy resolutions, calling for a state "at the centre of a mixed economy... China['s] economic development trajectory remains a leading example of the triumph of humanity over adversity.
Towards the end of Jacob Zuma's presidency, an ANC faction aligned to Zuma pioneered a new policy platform referred to as radical economic transformation (RET). President Cyril Ramaphosa and the ANC have not condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and have faced criticism from opposition parties, public commentators, academics, civil society organisations, and former ANC members due to this.
Symbolism and Cultural Significance
The logo of the ANC incorporates a spear and shield - symbolising the historical and ongoing struggle, armed and otherwise, against colonialism and racial oppression - and a wheel, which is borrowed from the 1955 Congress of the People campaign and therefore symbolises a united and non-racial movement for freedom and equality. The logo uses the same colours as the ANC flag, which comprises three horizontal stripes of equal width in black, green and gold.
"Amandla ngawethu", or the Sotho variant "Matla ke arona", is a common rallying call at ANC meetings, roughly meaning "power to the people". It is also common for meetings to sing so-called struggle songs, which were sung during anti-apartheid meetings and in MK camps.
ANC supporters at a rally
Criticism and Controversies
The ANC has received criticism from both internal and external sources. The most prominent corruption case involving the ANC relates to a series of bribes paid to companies involved in the ongoing R55 billion Arms Deal saga, which resulted in a long term jail sentence to then Deputy President Jacob Zuma's legal adviser Schabir Shaik. Zuma, the former South African President, was charged with fraud, bribery and corruption in the Arms Deal, but the charges were...
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1912 | ANC founded as South African Native National Congress |
| 1923 | Renamed African National Congress |
| 1925 | ANC flag adopted during party congress |
| 1940s | ANC revived under younger leaders |
| 1948 | National Party elected, apartheid policies introduced |
| 1952-53 | Defiance Campaign of civil disobedience |
| 1960 | ANC banned by South African government |
| 1961 | uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) formed for armed struggle |
| 1976 | Soweto Uprising |
| 1990 | Ban on ANC lifted, Nelson Mandela released |
| 1994 | ANC sweeps to power in first multiethnic election |
