The African National Congress (ANC) is a South African political party and Black nationalist organization with a rich and complex history. Founded in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress, it aimed to maintain voting rights for Coloureds (persons of mixed race) and Black Africans in Cape Province. In 1923, the organization was renamed the African National Congress.
From the 1940s, the ANC spearheaded the fight to eliminate apartheid, the official South African policy of racial separation and discrimination. The white South African government banned the ANC from 1960 to 1990, during which time it operated underground and outside South African territory. The ban was lifted in 1990, and in 1994 Nelson Mandela, the president of the ANC, was elected to head South Africa’s first multiethnic government.
The party received a majority of the vote in that election and every one after until 2024, when it saw its support plummet to about 40 percent.
ANC Flag
Early Years and Evolution
In 1912, at the initiative of four black lawyers, the first conference of the South African Native National Congress was held. The organisation was formed in reaction to the exclusion of blacks from the political process at the formation of the Union in 1910. The constitution of the Congress, approved by the executive committee in 1918, stated that its aims included the achievement of universal adult franchise and the creation of a united democratic South Africa. The ANC promoted these ideals by sending petitions and delegations to the South African and British governments.
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It also participated in the rising labour movement in an effort to mobilize mass support. The organisation adopted the basic principles of Gandhi's strategy of passive resistance. By 1919 thousands of men and women had been arrested for burning or throwing away their passes. In 1923 the Congress became the African National Congress.
In the late 1920s the ANC’s leaders split over the issue of cooperation with the Communist Party (founded in 1921), and the ensuing victory of the conservatives left the party small and disorganized through the 1930s. In the 1940s, however, the ANC revived under younger leaders who pressed for a more militant stance against segregation in South Africa. The ANC Youth League, founded in 1944, attracted such figures as Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, and Mandela, who galvanized the movement and challenged the moderate leadership.
Under the presidency of Albert John Luthuli, the ANC after 1952 began sponsoring nonviolent protests, strikes, boycotts, and marches against the apartheid policies that had been introduced by the National Party government that came to power in 1948. Party membership grew rapidly. A campaign against the pass laws (Black people were required to carry passes indicating their employment status) and other government policies culminated in the Defiance Campaign of 1952.
In the process ANC leaders became a target of police harassment: in 1956 many of its leaders were arrested and charged with treason (known as the Treason Trial, 1956-59).
Nelson Mandela and the ANC's Revolution to a Democracy
The Move Toward Militancy
In 1960 the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), which had broken away from the ANC in 1959, organized massive demonstrations against the pass laws during which police killed 69 unarmed demonstrators at Sharpeville (south of Johannesburg). At this point the National Party banned, or outlawed, both the ANC and the PAC. Denied legal avenues for political change, the ANC first turned to sabotage and then began to organize outside South Africa for guerrilla warfare.
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In 1961 an ANC military organization, Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), with Mandela as its head, was formed to carry out acts of sabotage as part of its campaign against apartheid. Mandela and other ANC leaders were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964 (the Rivonia Trial).
Although the ANC’s campaign of guerrilla warfare was basically ineffective because of stringent South African internal security measures, surviving ANC cadres kept the organization alive in Tanzania and Zambia under Tambo’s leadership. The ANC began to revive inside South Africa toward the end of the 1970s, following the Soweto uprising in 1976, when the police and army killed more than 600 people, many of them children. About 1980 the banned black, green, and gold tricolor flag of the ANC began to be seen inside South Africa, and the country descended into virtual civil war during the 1980s.
Rise to Power and Negotiated Settlement
The administration of F.W. de Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC in 1990, and its leaders were released from prison or allowed to return to South Africa and conduct peaceful political activities. Nelson Mandela, the most important of the ANC’s leaders, succeeded Oliver Tambo as president in 1991. Mandela led the ANC in negotiations (1992-93) with the government over transition to a government elected by universal suffrage.
In April 1994 the party swept to power in the country’s first such election, winning more than 60 percent of the vote for seats in the new National Assembly. Mandela, who headed a government of national unity, was inaugurated as South Africa’s first Black president on May 10, 1994.
After the withdrawal of the National Party from the government in 1996, the ANC entered into an alliance with its previous rival, the Inkatha Freedom Party, led by Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Mandela stepped down as ANC president in 1997, and in June 1999 his successor, Thabo Mbeki, became the second Black president of South Africa. The party celebrated its 90th anniversary in 2002 and continued its domination of South African politics.
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Nelson Mandela
Post-Apartheid Era: Challenges and Factionalism
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.
A prevalence of political violence and political assassinations characterised post-1994 South Africa. Political killings in South Africa started as a form of inter-party warfare, especially during the transition to democracy, when the two rivals, the African National Congress (ANC) and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), fought each other for some areas of Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal provinces. However, following the dominance of the ANC in the KZN Province, members of the ruling party fought each other for positions in government and political party structures.
In South Africa, the ANC faces factionalism, which has become a defining characteristic of the ANC’s intra-party politics, primarily during the lead up to and after the 2007 National Elective Conference held in Polokwane. The Polokwane Conference was a turning point in the post-apartheid ANC history because the party was heavily divided along factional lines. In turn, these divisions within the party led to a vicious contestation of power and leadership positions.
Factionalism increased in the ANC before and after the 2017 National Elective Conference hosted at the NASREC Conference Centre in Soweto. At NASREC, Jacob Zuma, who was stepping down as the party leader after two terms, backed senior ANC politician, the former AU Chairperson and his ex-wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, against Cyril Ramaphosa who emerged as the victor with 52% of the votes.
The win by Ramaphosa at NASREC exacerbated factions in the ANC because the party was split by camps loyal to President Ramaphosa, who referred to as the CR-17 faction, erstwhile rival Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s faction, NDZ, as well as those who aligned to the former president Jacob Zuma.
In KZN, threats also existed that were associated with intra-party factions during local government elections. These threats and factions arose because of different candidates who perceived positions in local government as a means of accessing resources to further their own selfish interests.
According to Edwin Mkhize (who served as the provincial secretary of COSATU in KZN) asserted that there was a link between political killings in the province and ANC conferences. Mkhize, therefore, alleged that the intensifying political violence and killings in the province could be blamed on issues of corruption, maladministration and the ensuing factionalism in the ANC.
Organizational Structure and Membership
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.
