History of the African National Congress

Called the South African Native National Congress until 1923, the ANC was founded as a national discussion forum and organised pressure group, which sought to advance black South Africans’ rights at times using violent and other times diplomatic methods. Its early membership was a small, loosely centralised coalition of traditional leaders and educated, religious professionals, and it was staunchly loyal to the British crown during the First World War.^[2] It was in the early 1950s, shortly after the National Party’s adoption of a formal policy of apartheid, that the ANC became a mass-based organisation.^[2] In 1952, the ANC's membership swelled during the uncharacteristically militant Defiance Campaign of civil disobedience, towards which the ANC had been led by a new generation of leaders, including Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and Walter Sisulu. In 1955, it signed the Freedom Charter, which – along with the subsequent Treason Trial – cemented its so-called Congress Alliance with other anti-apartheid groups.


At the turn of the decade, a series of significant events in quick succession changed the course of the movement. First, in 1959, a group of dissidents broke away from the ANC to form the rival Pan Africanist Congress, objecting to the ANC's new programme of multi-racialism as embodied in the Freedom Charter. This was one of two significant splits in the ANC on the basis of its racial policies – in 1975, the so-called Gang of Eight was expelled for objecting to the ANC's 1969 decision to open its membership to all races. The second major shift came when in March 1960, following the Sharpeville massacre, the ANC was banned, marking the beginning of a period of escalating state repression. Forced underground, the ANC and South African Communist Party (SACP) founded Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), which was to become the ANC's military wing. Announcing the beginning of an armed struggle against apartheid, MK embarked upon a sabotage campaign.


By 1965, pursuant to the imprisonment of many of its top leaders in the Rivonia Trial and Little Rivonia Trial, the ANC was forced into exile. It remained in exile until it was unbanned in 1990. For most of this period, the ANC was led by Tambo, headquartered first in Morogoro, Tanzania, and then in Lusaka, Zambia, and primarily supported by Sweden and the Soviet Union.^[3] Its exile was marked by an increasingly close alliance with the SACP, as well as by periods of significant unrest inside MK, including the Mkatashinga mutinies in 1983–84. Throughout these years, the ANC's central objective was the overthrow of apartheid, by means of the "Four Pillars": armed struggle; an internal underground; popular mobilisation; and international isolation of the apartheid regime.^[3] After the 1976 Soweto uprising, MK received a large influx of new recruits, who were used to escalate the armed struggle inside South Africa; ANC attacks, for the first time, killed large numbers of civilians.^[4] Yet even as the armed attacks continued, the ANC embarked upon secret talks about a possible negotiated settlement to end apartheid, beginning with a series of meetings with civil society and business leaders in the mid-1980s, and complemented by Mandela's own meetings with state officials during his imprisonment.


The ANC was unbanned on 2 February 1990, and its leaders returned to South Africa to begin formal negotiations. Following his release, Mandela was elected president of the ANC at its 48th National Conference in 1991. Pursuant to the 1994 elections, which marked the end of apartheid, the ANC became the majority party in the national government and most of the provincial governments, and Mandela was elected national president. The ANC has retained control of the national government since then.