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The ANC Youth League

Clive Glaser

Ohio University Press

Athens

Contents

Introduction

The road to Bloemfontein, 1940–1949

Loyalists and rebels, 1950–1960

The return of the youth, 1961–1990

The Youth League reborn, 1990–2003

The new rebellion, 2004–2012

Concluding notes: Class of ’44 vs Class of ’04

Ohio Short Histories of Africa

Index

1

Introduction

Scarcely a day has gone by since the African National Congress’s Polokwane conference in December 2007 when Julius Malema or the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) has not been in the news for one reason or another. In spite of the fact that he has never occupied a senior leadership position in the ruling party, Malema, until recently president of the ANCYL, has become probably the most recognisable political face in South Africa. His controversial attacks on senior ANC leaders, his treatment of the media, his racially provocative statements, his stance on nationalisation as well as his own conspicuous consumption have fed a media frenzy. He seems to be feared, loathed and adored by various constituencies in equal measure. His expulsion at the end of February 2012 provoked relief and anger, joy and despair in different quarters. But how much does the wider public actually know about the inner workings of the ANCYL and its relationship with the ANC?

There is little doubt that the ANCYL played a pivotal role in the so-called Polokwane revolution, which brought Jacob Zuma and his followers to power, yet it remains difficult to assess just how influential it is within the ANC. The current Youth League likes to draw comparisons between itself and the generation of Mandela & Co., which founded the movement in the 1940s and effectively seized control of the ANC in 1949. This has focused recent attention on the history of the earlier Youth League. Is the current Youth League comparable? Are there interesting historical lessons that can be drawn from the earlier phase of Youth League history? How has the Youth League evolved over the decades? Not surprisingly, politicians themselves provide only very crude accounts of organisational history, accounts that inevitably suit their contemporary political objectives.

This book offers an alternative history, one which, I hope, highlights the complexities of the ANCYL’s organisational history, yet remains easily accessible to a non-academic audience. At the same time I attempt to do something that has not been done before: to write a history of the entire lifespan of the ANCYL from its inception until March 2012. I have not had the time to conduct in-depth primary research; rather, I have worked mostly with available secondary sources, published and otherwise, and pulled them together into an overview. If this serves to provoke new primary research on the subject, I would be delighted.

There is a wealth of material on the early Youth League (from 1944 to 1960). Gail Gerhart, Bob Edgar and Tom Lodge have written extensively on the philosophy and personality of the early Youth League, as well as on the 1949 ‘coup’ and the Pan Africanist split. Volumes 2 and 3 of the magisterial From Protest to Challenge series are, as ever, invaluable sources. In the mid-1980s Chris Giffard and I wrote unpublished Honours dissertations on the ANCYL, which are still surprisingly useful. Biographies of leading characters such as Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Anton Lembede, Potlako Leballo and Robert Sobukwe have helped to provide some texture to this story. Aside from these more direct studies, numerous published academic articles have dealt indirectly with aspects of the Youth League’s early history.

Sources on the post-1960 period are, by comparison, sparse. The ANCYL was effectively dormant between 1960 and 1990, but important developments in both exile and internal youth politics laid the foundation for its rebirth in 1990. Literature on youth politics in this period is quite rich, but it has only indirect implications for ANCYL history. Aside from numerous newspaper reports and several useful websites, two published sources were extremely helpful in reconstructing the history of the post-1990 Youth League: Raphaël Botiveau’s published Master’s dissertation (translated from French), which deals with the rebirth of the League from 1990 to 2005, and Fiona Forde’s recent biography of Julius Malema, An Inconvenient Youth. A number of publications dealing more broadly with the politics of the ANC provide indirect insights and context. I am also grateful to Malusi Gigaba, the ANCYL president from 1996 to 2004 and the present Minister of Public Enterprises, who agreed to an interview with me in January 2012.

2

The road to Bloemfontein, 1940–1949

On 15 December 1949 about 120 delegates of the African National Congress converged on Bloemfontein for their annual national conference. They sensed change in the air. Although the ANC, under the astute leadership of Dr A.B. Xuma, had in many ways resurrected itself from the organisational doldrums of the 1930s, its political methods had remained cautious, cooperative and respectful towards the white elite. Now a group of young, articulate intellectuals in the recently formed Congress Youth League, tired of white paternalism and intransigence, demanded a shift towards a more militant style of politics. Moreover, with around a quarter of the delegates at the conference, they had real clout. Almost unthinkably, they did not support the highly revered Xuma for the presidency once he showed little enthusiasm for the Programme of Action, a blueprint for political action drawn up largely by the Youth League. Many in the old guard dismissed the youngsters as cheeky, irresponsible and impulsive. But they underestimated the passion and voting discipline of these young men. Within a day Xuma had been swept from the presidency, replaced by James Moroka, a prominent local physician who had agreed to support the new programme. The newly elected 15-member executive included seven Youth Leaguers. Another member of the League, Walter Sisulu, was elected as the secretary-general. The ANC would never be the same again. Not only had a new generation inserted itself into the leadership of the creaky old organisation, but it had committed itself to a new style of politics, which included boycotts, stayaways and civil disobedience.

Who were these young men (although three or four women were involved in some early ANCYL meetings, the leadership was entirely male), where did they come from, and what were their ideas? The story of the Congress Youth League begins in the early 1940s. But it is worth going a little further back in time to set the scene.

During the 1930s the ANC had barely functioned as an organisation. Following a brief flirtation with radicalism in the early 1920s and a divisive, somewhat maverick, leftist president in the late 1920s, the movement’s old guard reasserted its authority. Pixley Seme, an Oxford-trained lawyer and one of the original 1912 founders, was the president between 1930 and 1937. He represented the most conservative section of the ANC: Christian, Europhile, moderate, willing to work with the white government as far as possible. The left was effectively marginalised (although African members of the Communist Party were technically allowed to join the ANC, they were not made very welcome during this period) and the leadership drifted out of touch with the popular rural and urban subsistence struggles of the time. The organisational structures were also desperately weak. Finances were thin and poorly managed. Only a tiny portion of its membership was formally paid-up. Most activity took place at the regional level, but there was little national coordination and little consistency in branch structures. There were no full-time administrative em­ployees, which made continuity in campaigns or policy virtually impossible between annual conferences. Even members of the national executive usually had to pay out of their own pockets to travel to meetings and conferences. Much of the internal debate took place through several widely read African-run newspapers. The key national and regional leaders, such as Seme himself, were busy professionals or businessmen who were as interested in their own livelihoods as in politics. Though the ANC claimed to be a kind of parliament for all African people, it had in reality subsided into a part-time, out-of-touch, uncoordinated shell of an organisation.

In 1936 the government passed legislation to remove the limited African male franchise that survived in the Cape. In its place a Natives’ Representative Council (NRC) was established: it would include 12 elected and 4 nominated African representatives, and act as a statutory advisory body with no executive or legislative authority. This outraged African leaders not only across the country, but especially in the Cape, where many were themselves qualified voters and the franchise was regarded as an important lasting vestige of Cape liberalism. Some, most vociferously a group of Western Cape Trotskyites, called for a boycott of the NRC. Nevertheless, the ANC, while opposing the legislation, encouraged its members to stand for the new body, which, it argued, provided useful political resources and maintained a valuable line of communication with the South African state.

The election of Alfred Xuma to the presidency of the ANC in 1940 represented an important turning point in the life of the movement. At 47, he was relatively youthful to assume leadership, and he immediately signalled his intention to make sweeping changes. Xuma was an impressive man. A well-educated Christian liberal, he was in many ways typical of the ANC leadership of the time. He had trained as a medical doctor and spent many years in the United States. He married a black American and returned to South Africa to run a successful medical practice in Sophiatown, west of Johannesburg. A degree in law or medicine was almost a prerequisite for top ANC leadership in those days, and the highly status-conscious ANC membership was impressed by his education and erudition. Many were a little in awe of him. He was clearly a member of the elite, which never related comfortably to the uneducated masses.

Xuma was determined to transform the ramshackle Congress. Within a couple of years he had simplified the constitution to make it more workable. This in­cluded removing the ‘upper house’ of chiefs (which was inactive and contributed little), giving women full status and formalising branch structures. Most importantly, he professionalised the entire organisation. Membership fees were made compulsory, thus bringing in regular income and allowing for the appointment of a few full-time administrators. Finances were properly audited. Meetings had to be formally constituted and minuted. To overcome the problem of inter-conference continuity and leadership, Xuma established a Johannesburg-based working committee whose members had to live within a 50-mile radius of Johannesburg. Significantly, this shifted the centre of power to the Witwatersrand. Xuma was unapologetic about this. If the organisation was going to run efficiently, it was necessary to have a core group that met regularly and could handle day-to-day business.

Xuma was eager to explore all options that might broaden the appeal, expand the membership and solidify the finances of the ANC. It followed that he was pragmatic when it came to cooperation with leftists and non-Africans. This, as I shall show later, is crucial in understanding the rise of the Youth League. Although he was himself a traditional liberal, Xuma always argued that the ANC should be a broad umbrella body for all Africans irrespective of their political leanings. The Communist Party was extremely active for most of the 1940s and, under the leadership of Moses Kotane, its African membership grew substantially. Xuma recognised the dedication, courage and energy of communist activists, as well as their common interest in fighting for African political rights. In the face of criticism both from within the ANC and without, he welcomed African communists into the ANC. Kotane himself and several other prominent African communists served on the executive of the ANC under Xuma. Equally controversial for many in the ANC was Xuma’s willingness to work with the South African Indian Congress. Influenced by Gandhian tactics, the Natal and Transvaal Indian Congresses (NIC and TIC) had stepped up their battle for political and economic rights in the 1940s and were eager to establish a cooperative relationship with the ANC. Xuma welcomed this; in March 1947 he signed the famous ‘Doctors’ Pact’ with Dr Yusuf Dadoo and Dr Monty Naicker. Here, again, he recognised the usefulness of a political alliance, not to mention the generous donations made to the ANC by Indian merchants linked to the Indian Congresses.

Aside from developments within the ANC itself, the rise of the Youth League needs to be seen in the context of broader political and economic developments in South Africa in the late 1930s and 1940s. These were years of rapid industrialisation and urbanisation. By the late 1930s secondary industry, which generally encouraged a more permanent form of urbanisation, had overtaken mining as a contributor to GDP. This led to South Africa’s first major phase of mass African urbanisation – what one newspaper at the time dubbed ‘the Second Great Trek’. By the end of World War II,

the big cities were no longer zones of white majority: they had become African cities. Municipalities struggled to provide services to the newly urbanising masses and, not surprisingly, this sparked urgent subsistence struggles over housing, transport, wages and informal trade. While the Communist Party immersed itself in these battles, the ANC leadership was much more cautious: it generally viewed the state, at least until the National Party election victory in 1948, as something that could be persuaded rather than resisted. This attitude was encouraged by the fact that Jan Smuts had become prime minister again in 1939 after a controversy over participation in the war. During a period of ‘war liberalism’ the Smuts government promised, and in some cases delivered, real reform on issues such as pass laws, property rights and the skills colour bar. Smuts was an enthusiastic signatory to the idealistic Atlantic Charter of 1941, which promised national self-determination and equal rights to all people. Smuts’s reforms were driven in part by a need to encourage war unity, in part by a desire to modernise South Africa and come more into line with the western world.

Immediately after the war, as the white electorate became more alarmed by African urbanisation, and as the opposition Nationalists offered increasingly ag­gressive responses to white fears, the Smuts government backtracked rapidly. Nevertheless, Smuts’s reformism had raised hope for many of the older members of the ANC. Although the government showed no signs of giving up real power, maintaining its stance of paternalist ‘trusteeship’ towards the black majority, they felt that it was worth working strategically within state-subsidised advisory structures, such as township Advisory Boards and the new NRC, to encourage reform. Many disagreed and, as I shall show shortly, the debate around participation was significant for the emerging Youth League.

The growing cities of the time attracted not only African workers, but a class of educated African pro­fessionals. Dozens converged especially on Johan­nesburg in the late 1930s and early 1940s looking for work, mostly as teachers. A few were able to qualify as lawyers and doctors. (Until the 1930s Africans had to do medical training overseas, although a small number were admitted to Wits University in the 1940s.) Almost all of them trained, or did a part of their training, at a handful of mission schools and colleges. Most famous was the triangle of institutions in the Eastern Cape: Healdtown, Lovedale and Fort Hare. The former two offered secondary schooling and teacher training, while Fort Hare College, in Alice, was at the time the only university (a status officially acquired in the 1960s) for Africans in the subcontinent. Adams College, a high school, industrial school and teacher training college in rural Natal, and St Peter’s, an Anglican secondary school in the south of Johannesburg, were also significant. These colleges drew together the elite of African youth (mostly from Christian backgrounds) from various corners of the country. Once qualified, they tended to gravitate to the bigger towns and cities because professional work was scarce in their home regions. A small number of women, who mostly went on to become teachers, passed through these colleges as well. On the whole, professional opportunities were very restricted for women. Those who had professional aspirations were generally directed into nursing. A good number of these nurses and women teachers also migrated to the cities in search of work.

The townships of Johannesburg became an extraordinary melting pot of young educated Africans, many of whom had already become acquainted with one another during their school and college years. They mixed socially and often shared ideas. Some were in the process of studying further. Two of these young men, A.P. Mda and Anton Lembede, were the outstanding inspirational figures in the Congress Youth League. Others in their Johannesburg milieu included later iconic figures such as Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela.

Gail Gerhart and Bob Edgar, who have written the most detailed and subtle accounts of the early ANCYL, note that Mda is a hugely under-recognised figure in the history of African nationalism in South Africa. Joe Matthews, a prominent Youth League member in the early 1950s, for example, acknowledged that Mda was ‘probably the chief architect’ of the ANCYL.1Ashby Peter Mda was born in April 1916 in the Herschel district of the Eastern Cape. He came from a relatively educated and privileged background: his father, one of a small number of Africans on the Cape voters’ roll, was a local farmer and headman, and his mother was a teacher – very unusual for an African woman in the 1920s and 1930s. His parents, though Anglican, sent him to nearby Catholic primary and secondary schools. He then trained as a teacher but struggled to find work in his home region and, like so many of his generation, headed for the Witwatersrand in 1937. Even on the Rand he did not find work as a teacher immediately. For the first year or so, he was forced to do menial domestic work and then found a job as a labourer in a foundry. Educated Africans were precariously positioned in the middle class. White society offered them little respect for their education and the limited white-collar jobs available to them were not much more lucrative than unskilled labour. This was often a great source of resentment. Eventually Mda was offered a post in a Catholic school in Germiston in 1938, before being transferred to a primary school in Orlando.

While working in Johannesburg he was trans­-formed, Edgar notes, from a fairly conventional ‘Cape African liberal’ to a ‘militant African nationalist’.2He had been an enthusiastic supporter of the All African Convention (AAC) in its formative years in the mid-1930s, seeing the protection of the Cape African franchise as a crucial rallying point. But in Johannesburg he encountered a more radical, less parochial politics and became disillusioned with the narrowness of the AAC. He joined reading clubs initiated by communists and engaged in endless conversations with his peers. He became an enthusiastic member of the ANC in 1940 and supported Xuma’s attempts to revitalise the party. He was also politicised by his involvement in teachers’ politics. As president of the Catholic African Teachers’ Union and chair of the Pimville branch of the Transvaal African Teachers’ Association (TATA), Mda was a central figure in a teachers’ wage campaign in 1940. Although TATA was a very cautious organisation, as its members were largely dependent on state employment, it took up the wage issue energetically, advertising the almost undignified poverty in which African teachers had to live. TATA was pulled along by younger teachers such as Mda and another future Youth League founder, David Bopape. After ongoing negotiations with the government, and only minor wage improvements, an impressive teachers’ march brought several thousand demonstrators into downtown Johannesburg in May 1944. Mda was in the thick of it.

By the early 1940s Mda had become an avowed African nationalist. He rejected all vestiges of Smuts’s trusteeship and segregation. Africans, he insisted, should be politically self-reliant and he called on the ANC to stop cooperating with Indians and communists, who, he argued, were trying to advance their own agendas. Catholicism had left a powerful imprint on Mda and he rejected communism at least in part because of its atheism. But, more significantly, he insisted that the Communist Party was dominated by whites who did not really have African interests at heart. Nevertheless, he also saw western capitalism as greedy, heartless and individualistic, and supported a more egalitarian social model. While he was scornful of the mostly coloured Trotskyites in the AAC, he found their boycott argument compelling. It was time, he felt, for Africans to stop cooperating with all government institutions and challenge white power more directly. His ideas resonated with a number of young educated men in Johannesburg who were frustrated with the slow pace of change, with the caution of the ANC leadership, and with the indignities of segregation. One important example was Anton Lembede, who became a close friend and housemate in 1943.

Lembede was born into a large, poor family in rural Natal in 1914. His father was a farm labourer, but his mother had achieved a Standard 5 education and was able to find work as a school teacher in surrounding small towns during Anton’s childhood. Around 1927 his mother, who home-taught Anton and valued education, convinced her husband to move the family to a reserve area between Pietermaritzburg and Durban where there were better educational possibilities. The family converted to Catholicism at about this time and the church became an important part of Anton’s upbringing. The local Catholic clergy recognised his talents and encouraged him to go to school, where he excelled. After completing his Standard 6 he was awarded a scholarship to Adams College to train for a teacher’s certificate. In spite of his humble background, he quickly made an impression as an exceptionally intelligent, dedicated scholar. He had a particular gift for languages. After leaving Adams in 1936, he found work as a teacher in several Natal and Free State towns until 1943. During these years his thirst for education continued. After completing his matriculation in 1937, he enrolled as a correspondence student at Unisa for a Bachelor’s degree, which he completed with philosophy and Roman law majors in 1940. He followed this up with a law degree through Unisa and qualified in 1942. This was a rare achievement for an African in the 1940s. Only a tiny elite managed to progress beyond teaching to more prestigious professions. Not satisfied with his educational achievements, he enrolled for a Master’s degree in theology in 1943. In that same year he moved to Johannesburg to do his articles with the ANC elder statesman Pixley Seme. Seme, who had largely withdrawn from ANC politics after losing the presidency in 1937, ran one of the very few African law practices in Johannesburg. Lembede later became a full partner in 1946. Through Seme, Lembede was quickly introduced into ANC circles in Johannesburg.

Lembede and Mda, who had previously met in the late 1930s, struck up a close friendship. Apart from being mission-educated and politically passionate, they had in common a strong Catholic influence. Though well qualified, neither earned very much in 1943 and it was convenient for them to share accommodation. They spent many long hours sparring intellectually and, together, shaped the ideology that would underpin the ANCYL. While Mda was a born politician, Lembede was more of a philosopher.

It was Lembede who invented the term ‘Africanism’ to describe his brand of nationalism. Like Mda, he was suspicious of alliances with non-Africans and emphasised self-reliance. Africans, he felt passionately, should overcome their sense of inferiority, draw on the rich cultural traditions of Africa and take pride in their identity, an identity rooted in the ‘soil’ of Africa. They should unite to overcome white (which he saw as foreign) domination. African nationalism, as an ideal, was a unique mobilising vehicle because it had ‘magnetic pull’. Africans needed to draw on an inner strength, to develop their own resources, confidence and economic independence. Though by the 1940s he had rejected the conservatism of his schoolboy role model, Booker T. Washington, Lembede retained an attraction to Washington’s doctrine of self-help and economic ‘upliftment’. Like Mda, Lembede loathed communism but rejected western capitalism. He idealised a style of ‘indigenous’ African humanism, or ubuntu, which prioritised community responsibility over individual interest. While Mda could be more politically pragmatic, Lembede’s nationalism was more dogmatic. His obsession with race, discipline and unity even led to a brief admiration for fascism. Though denouncing Nazism, he admired the Hitler youth for their ‘worship’ of ‘an ideal’ and their group unity. Mda, in their many private exchanges, probably helped to tone down Lembede’s purism.

Lembede and Mda were only two of the many young African professionals talking passionately about politics in the late 1930s and 1940s. The Transvaal African Students’ Association, for example, held lively discussions in Johannesburg. At Fort Hare, a Social Studies Society focused on contemporary political issues; several later Youth League founders attended these talks. In Natal, Jordan Ngubane, a journalist and classmate of Lembede’s at Adams College, helped set up a short-lived National Union of African Youth in Natal. TATA, politicised by the wage issue, also provided a forum for discussion. None of these groups was affiliated to the ANC, but they were eventually to impact on ANC politics.

By 1943 these men, mostly in their mid- to late twenties, were looking for ways to influence the frustratingly staid ANC from within. As Congress Mbata later recalled: ‘Almost every resolution of the ANC had started like this: We pray the Minister, We request the government, We humbly request … and so on. It was this sort of thing that made the younger people feel … that something more dynamic and much more direct was needed.’3

A small group clustered around the figure of Self Mampuru, a like-minded and dynamic younger politician, who was making a bid for the presidency of the Transvaal ANC. Mampuru decided instead to leave the ANC and start a small rival party. Though it never got off the ground, the group continued to meet. It included Mda; Oliver Tambo and Congress Mbata, both teachers at St Peter’s; David Bopape, a teacher from Brakpan involved in the TATA wage campaign; Peter Raboroko, another teacher who had graduated from St Peter’s and Fort Hare; and William Nkomo, yet another St Peter’s–Fort Hare product, who was studying medicine at Wits. Lembede, Nelson Mandela, a law student at Wits University, and Jordan Ngubane, who had recently moved to Johannesburg to work for Bantu World, were drawn in at an early stage. Walter Sisulu, at 31 the oldest member, was the only non-professional among them. He had worked as a labourer before setting up an estate agency in Johannesburg. The group often gathered in his downtown office. In the lead-up to the ANC’s December 1943 congress, they met with Xuma to discuss the possibility of forming a youth league in the ANC. (The idea of a youth league, and the term ‘league’, in fact came from the Communist Party, which had already established such a structure.) They knew that they would get much less opposition at the conference if Xuma supported the idea. Xuma, though a little concerned about their militancy, in particular their opposition to cross-racial cooperation, was eager to encourage these young ‘graduates’. He felt that they could bring new energy to the organisation and attract an important new constituency.

In spite of severe reservations from members of the old guard, Xuma’s support helped to smooth the passage of a resolution at the conference allowing for the formation of the league. Lembede, Mda and Ngubane wrote up a draft manifesto, which was ex­plicitly critical of the senior ANC: ‘[We] attribute the inability of Congress in the last twenty years to advance the national cause in a manner commensurate with the demands of the time, to weakness in the organisation and constitution; to its erratic policy of yielding to oppression, regarding itself as a body of gentlemen with clean hands and to failing to see the problems of the African through the proper perspective.’4Nevertheless, they took the draft to Xuma for approval in February 1944. Though worried by their criticism and even their tone of disrespect, he was prepared to give them his support.

A provisional constitution was drawn up and the league was launched at a meeting in the Bantu Men’s Social Centre in Johannesburg in April. At their first conference in September, Anton Lembede – whose professional qualifications, intellect and passion stood out – was elected first president and Mda his deputy. The manifesto and constitution called, in general terms, for African unity, ‘high ethical standards’ and a commitment to overcome racial domination. In effect, membership was exclusively African, although its constitution, in line with that of the ANC, also made provision for ‘young members of other sections of the community who live like and with Africans and whose general outlook on life is similar to that of Africans’.5Membership was open to those between 12 and 40; at the age of 18, recruits automatically became members of the ANC. The ANCYL, it was made clear, was never to set itself up in opposition to the mother body but rather to change it from within, to help the ANC to represent the African masses more effectively and more robustly.

Over the next few years the Youth League put pressure on the ANC – sometimes vocally, sometimes behind the scenes – to adopt more assertive African nationalist policies. As the Smuts government’s intransigence became clearer, and as the Youth League recruited more like-minded youth into the organisation, so their influence grew within the ANC. The leadership of the ANC, they argued, was reacting too slowly to rapidly unfolding events in the mid-1940s.

Even before the formalisation of the ANCYL, many in the ANC were stung by General Smuts’s offhand dismissal of an ANC charter, Africans’ Claims, issued in 1943. Modelled on, and inspired by, the Atlantic Charter, the document called for universal African rights in South Africa. It was an idealistic document that avoided any mention of specific political action. Yet Smuts made it clear that the Atlantic Charter was not applicable to Africans within South Africa. This was an early hint of the limits of Smuts’s reformism, and strengthened the young radicals’ view that cooperation with the state was futile. Nevertheless, the ANC soldiered on with its respectful delegations and participation in the NRC and Advisory Boards.

In August 1946 seventy thousand African miners across the Witwatersrand went on strike to demand better wages. The strike was brutally suppressed by management and government; dozens of miners were killed and injured, and many union leaders were prosecuted. The ANCYL issued several angry statements of solidarity with the mineworkers. The ANC tried to voice its protest through the vehicle of the NRC but was, once again, rebuffed by the Smuts administration. While the Youth Leaguers urged mass demonstrations and a total boycott of the NRC, the ANC leadership expressed its frustration by calling for an indefinite ‘adjournment’ of the NRC. But several senior ANC members nevertheless retained their membership of the Council until its dissolution under the Nationalists.

During the next month, September 1946, the radicalised Indian Congresses embarked on a passive resistance campaign in protest against new legislation that restricted Indian residential and commercial rights. While the Youth Leaguers mostly objected to the growing ANC cooperation with the Indian Congresses during the campaign, they were impressed by the Gandhian tactic of civil disobedience, which won the Congresses thousands of enthusiastic supporters.

Through the second half of the 1940s, the ANCYL criticised the senior body not only for its lacklustre recruitment, cautious tactics and participation in state structures, but also for its cooperation with non-Africans and communists. Mda’s and Lembede’s influence in this respect was significant. Key ANCYL leaders, at various meetings, attempted to change racially inclusive clauses in the ANC constitution, to bar individuals from simultaneously belonging to the ANC and Communist Party, and to prevent alliances with Indians, such as the Doctors’ Pact of 1947. The ANCYL even attacked the ANC’s leadership in May 1948 for co-sponsoring a People’s Assembly calling for universal franchise, because communists and the Indian Congresses had taken the initiative. Nelson Mandela, confident and fearless, was often used as the Youth League’s chief attack dog when it came to these controversial issues.

Although exclusive African nationalism was the dominant ideology in the ANCYL from 1944 until 1949, there were also significant left-leaning and non-racial factions within the movement. William Nkomo and David Bopape, for example, were known to be sympathetic to communists, and Dan Tloome, a young trade unionist who became increasingly active in the League, was himself a member of the Communist Party. By the end of the 1940s, many others, such as Oliver Tambo, were beginning to rethink their positions on non-African cooperation. What held the factions together was a belief in more militant, mass-based political action.

In July 1947, at the age of 33, Anton Lembede died suddenly. He had been the ANCYL’s most articulate spokesman, revered for his philosophical boldness and erudition. A grieving Mda, whom many regarded as the driving political force in the Youth League, took over the leadership. But by then he had taken up a teaching post in Roma, in Basutoland, and relied heavily on a working committee that he set up in Johannesburg, consisting of Sisulu, Tambo and Mandela. Though Mda’s ideas were very close to those of Lembede, he was, as I suggested earlier, a more pragmatic figure, and probably better able to hold the various factions of the ANCYL together. Though some have suggested in retrospect that Lembede, though admired, was a lone ‘extremist’, there is little doubt that he left a powerful imprint on ANCYL thinking.6

From its inception the ANCYL emphasised new recruitment. But it must be noted that most members did not really know how to appeal to uneducated workers and peasants. In terms of professional and academic qualification, they represented the elite of the ANC. As Bob Edgar observes, ‘Although inspired by mass action, the ANCYL was not an organisation of the masses.’7They recruited within their familiar networks: high schools, colleges, professional ass­ociations. Their recruitment was aimed more at strengthening the ANCYL’s voting power within the ANC than at developing a genuine mass base. That said, they did recruit energetically within their networks. Oliver Tambo, for example, before leaving teaching for law, set up a vibrant ANCYL branch at St Peter’s. Later ANC leaders such as Duma Nokwe, Joe Matthews and Andrew Mlangeni (not to mention Desmond Tutu) first cut their political teeth in this branch.8

Until 1948 the ANCYL had a presence only in the Transvaal, but in that year it made a concerted effort to go national. New ANCYL branches were established in Natal, to the outrage of A.W.G. Champion, a typical old-school strongman who had dominated ANC politics in Natal for almost two decades. Jordan Ngubane returned to Natal in 1948 to take up the editorship of the vital African-owned newspaper Inkundla ya Bantu. He became a key figure in the Natal ANCYL and also used the newspaper as a mouthpiece to promote the League agenda. Successful new branches were set up in Bloemfontein, a strategically important town because the ANC’s annual congresses were held there and, given transport difficulties, it had always had disproportionately strong representation in the ANC. New branches also sprang up in the Eastern Cape, perhaps most significantly at Fort Hare College.

A.P. Mda had always seen Fort Hare as a natural recruiting ground for the ANCYL. Generations of young African intellectuals had passed through its gates. On several occasions Mda travelled to Alice to address student audiences at the college. In 1948 he approached Godfrey Pitje, whom he had known through teaching circles on the Rand and who had become a lecturer in anthropology at Fort Hare, to help establish a branch. Though Pitje got the branch off the ground, the leading light at Fort Hare was a charismatic student who became SRC president in 1949, Robert Sobukwe. Mda carefully cultivated Sobukwe through personal meetings and correspondence. Ten years later, Sobukwe would become the first president of the breakaway Pan Africanist Congress.

The National Party victory in the election of 1948 was an important milestone in the radicalisation of the ANC. Mda and others in the ANCYL, utterly disillusioned with Smuts’s government, were sceptical whether a Nationalist victory would make any real difference to Africans. However, after the shock victory in May it soon became clear that the new regime posed an even greater threat to African advancement. On the other hand, the extremism of the new government also offered opportunities for mobilisation. In response to the National Party government, the ANCYL issued a ‘basic policy’ document, making clear its commitment to African nationalism. Significantly, the final draft toned down an earlier version written by an angry Mda, which had described whites as unwelcome foreigners in South Africa. The second draft rejected what it called ‘extreme’ or ‘Garveyist’ African nationalism and accepted full white citizenship on completely equal terms. This hints at internal debates within the ANCYL and the beginning of the gradual marginalisation of exclusive nationalism. Shortly afterwards, the ANCYL decided to develop a programme of action, something that would go beyond a statement of ideals, to challenge the state. This, Mda hoped, would become a policy guide for the ANCYL and act as a rallying point for change in the ANC.

The ANCYL raised the idea of a Programme of Action at the December 1948 conference. The senior ANC, in a more confrontational mood after the National Party victory, agreed in principle and appointed a five-man drafting subcommittee, which included Mda and Tambo from the Youth League; two respected old-guard liberals, the Fort Hare professor Z.K. Matthews and the Natal veteran Selby Msimang; and Moses Kotane, the Communist Party general secretary. The draft was circulated to ANC branches around the country for amendments. An amended version was accepted by the Cape ANC at its June 1949 regional conference. Fort Hare Youth Leaguers, especially Sobukwe, played a key role in drawing up the Cape draft, which became, in effect, the final document.

The Programme explicitly elaborated a set of political tactics. It called for:

(a) The abolition of all differential political in­stitutions the boycotting of which we accept and to undertake a campaign to educate our people on this issue and, in addition, to employ the following weapons: immediate and active boycott, strike, civil disobedience, and non-cooperation and such other means as may bring about the accomplishment and realisation of our aspirations.

(b) Preparations and making of plans for a national stoppage of work for one day as a mark of protest against the reactionary policy of the Government.

Over the next few months the Programme became the focal point for ANCYL agitation within the ANC. Mda and his followers aimed to get the document accepted as official ANC policy at the December national conference. Ironically, they received strong support from communists, who had also been calling for a more militant approach. The Youth Leaguers realised that they did not have enough support to take the presidency itself and so set their mind on ensuring that the president would support the document. Initially, they hoped that Xuma himself would support the Programme. He was still highly respected and could bring most of the old guard with him. And he had, after all, supported the formation of the ANCYL in the first place. In early December, Sisulu, Tambo and Mandela visited Xuma at his home in Sophiatown to explain that they would support his claim to the presidency if he endorsed the Programme. But Xuma reacted angrily. He still thought the NRC and Advisory Boards had a role to play in ANC politics and was reluctant to cede these political spaces to less worthy African candidates. Above all, Xuma’s pride was affronted: he disliked being bullied by these brash young men who had come with their preconditions for support. This created a real dilemma for the ANCYL. Most of the respected and professionally qualified older figures in the party were suspicious of the document and the Youth League’s intentions. At a push Lembede might have been a viable candidate with his Master’s and law degrees, but none of the other Youth Leaguers had the qualifications at that stage, or the authority, even to make a bid for the presidency. In desperation they approached Z.K. Matthews, who, though rejected by Mda as an old-school liberal, had supported the formation of the ANCYL and had helped draw up the first draft of the Programme. But ‘ZK’ rebuffed them on similar grounds. This meant that the Youth Leaguers made their way to Bloemfontein without a clear candidate.

On the eve of the Bloemfontein conference, the ANCYL delegates caucused separately. Mda, though seriously ill from a persistent ulcer, made a typically impassioned speech, and they then got down to stra­tegy. They needed to maximise their impact with the number of delegates they had available. Their biggest problem was that they still lacked a candidate whom they could back for the presidency. A suggestion was made to approach the Bloemfontein-based physician James Moroka. Oliver Tambo roused Moroka from his bed to ask him if he would be willing to endorse the Programme and stand for the presidency. Moroka, to the ANCYL’s relief, agreed. The choice of Moroka was hasty and problematic in all sorts of ways. For a start, he was not even a paid-up member of the ANC. In addition, Moroka (ironically) was a sitting member of the ‘adjourned’ NRC – which was contrary to a key principle of the Programme. (Though Moroka promised to resign, in fact he remained a member until the NRC’s dissolution.) But the Youth Leaguers were forced to compromise: they could not afford to have a president opposed to the Programme.

And so the foundations for the ANCYL coup were laid. With the help of communists, as well as a number of older delegates who felt it was time for change, the Programme of Action was endorsed and Moroka narrowly won the presidency. Mda, Tambo and Pitje were among seven Youth Leaguers elected to the National Executive Committee. Mandela would be co-opted onto the executive later in 1950 to replace a disgruntled Xuma, who resigned shortly after the conference. The committee included three com­munists, Kotane, J.B. Marks and Dan Tloome (who was also a Youth League member). The left nominated Tloome for the key secretary-general position but he was outvoted by Sisulu, who had the strong backing of the ANCYL and other anti-communists. In the end, the Youth League achieved more than they could have hoped for: a new era of direct mass action and civil disobedience had begun.

3

Loyalists and rebels, 1950–1960

In the traditional struggle narrative, the story of the ANCYL ends with its internal victory in 1949. But the 1950s are equally significant, historically. Without its most prominent leaders at the helm, and without the central task of ratifying the Programme of Action within the ANC, the Youth League struggled to find an identity for itself. The mainstream of the organisation saw its role primarily as establishing a mass base among the youth. But a significant Africanist faction, still loyal to the ideas of Lembede and Mda, continued to agitate against the senior body and eventually broke away in 1958 to form the Pan Africanist Congress. The ANC Youth League was thus the incubator of both the modern ANC and the PAC.

Between 1949 and 1951 the Youth Leaguers succeeded in transforming the ANC into a more assertive African nationalist movement. The new leadership was able to bring most of the party along with it, especially once it became clear that the era of Smuts paternalism was over. Even in Natal, probably the most conservative branch of the ANC, the Youth League helped to unseat A.W.G. Champion from the provincial presidency and replace him with Albert Luthuli, a widely respected Christian-liberal, dissent­ing chief who supported the Programme of Action. Moroka, unlike Xuma, was never a very assertive president. Based near Bloemfontein, he travelled only rarely to Johannesburg and left most of the day-to-day running of the ANC to the Johannesburg-based executive committee. Sisulu’s role became pivotal.

Following its dramatic success in Bloemfontein, the Youth League was, ironically, stripped of its leadership. Lembede was dead. Mda largely withdrew from politics for over a year because of ill health, and for much of the late 1940s and early 1950s he was also studying privately towards a law degree. In 1948 he returned to his home in Herschel district, where he was based, far from the centre of political action, for much of the 1950s. Tambo and Mandela turned down the presidency of the ANCYL in 1949 because they were devoting a lot of time to their legal studies. Sisulu had his hands full as ANC secretary-general. Pitje became a kind of caretaker Youth League president for most of 1950 until Mandela accepted the position at the December 1950 conference. But, even if they did not cut their ties entirely, for key figures like Mandela, Tambo, Sisulu and Pitje work in the senior executive was a greater priority by then. Another rising star of the ANCYL, Robert Sobukwe, was forced to take up a teaching position in sleepy Standerton, far away from the action.

All of these activists had to balance their personal and political lives carefully. The party did not have the resources to provide a living. Even Sisulu, as a full-time organiser, had to make massive material sacrifices and live on a tiny stipend. Teachers had to go where work was available. They also had the additional difficulty of being, in effect, state employees. Even mission-run schools usually depended on state subsidies to pay the salaries of their teachers. This meant that teachers had to take considerable personal risks in order to involve themselves in politics. African doctors and lawyers did at least have the advantage of being self-employed. Law was prestigious not only because it offered greater professional status and potentially greater financial rewards, but, importantly, because it offered a measure of independence from the state. This explains why many African teachers in the 1940s and 1950s aspired to become lawyers. Lembede, Mda, Tambo, Pitje and many others followed this route. As busy professionals, it was difficult enough for them to find the time and commitment to work in the senior ANC. Though these senior figures remained influential, the ANCYL had to find a new generation of leadership in the 1950s. Probably the outstanding figure in the mid-1950s was Duma Nokwe, a graduate of St Peter’s (where he became a member of the Young Communist League), who returned to the southern Transvaal as a teacher and later began to study law. He was generally regarded as a left-winger. After serving as the secretary of the ANCYL in 1954, he quickly rose through the ranks of the senior ANC to become secretary-general in 1958.