ANC legacies? Retrieving and deploying emancipatory values today

Raymond Suttner, The Daily Maverick

For many decades and for many people, the name “ANC” conjured up selflessness, sacrifice in the service of the oppressed people of South Africa and the meaning of freedom itself. People bent every effort to link themselves with the message of the ANC. They risked police attention and possible arrest by listening to the ANC broadcasts on Radio Freedom, beamed from Lusaka and other African states in the period of illegality. They read any scrap of paper or document or listened to any message broadcast from the ANC in exile, for the organisation represented their hope for freedom. It enjoyed great legitimacy and authority in the imagination of very many South Africans.

Riot Police in Parliament

Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

When the ANC raised Jacob Zuma above the rule of law and the scrutiny of parliament they repeated, on live television, an aspect of the logic with which the subaltern classes are routinely governed. The democratic rights that have been enjoyed by the middle classes over the last twenty years are frequently denied to people who inhabit zones, like the former Bantustan or the urban shack settlement, where different rules apply.

ANC and DA discover common ground

by Jared Sacks, Mail & Guardian

The ANC and the Democratic Alliance always bicker over the cause of land occupations and who promotes them for political gain. Yet looking at their actions more deeply, it becomes clear how similar the two parties really are.

Cape Town: During the first two weeks of August, thousands of backyard dwellers living in dire conditions occupied vacant land near the Marikana settlement in Philippi East. Over the following days, the City of Cape Town’s Anti-Land Invasion Unit (ALIU), with the support of hundreds of labourers and police officers, made illegal attempts to evict all the occupiers.

Mandla Langa - The Texture of Shadows: Launch at the Steven Biko Centre

Artistic ‘Freedom’ in the 80s and Now

Jane Duncan, The Con

The 1980s was a heady time in South Africa’s cultural history. Apartheid repression was at its height, but so was mass resistance. The independent label Shifty Records brought together a courageous, outspoken and rebellious group of artists who captured in their music the despair and hope of that turbulent period. It is this legacy that is being celebrated in Shifty September, and rightly so, as the label gave South Africa some of the most important contemporary local music ever made.

'All the wives' become ANC gatekeepers

Shireen Hassim, Mail & Guardian

Reading the history of a political organisation is an exercise in reading against powerful official narratives – powerful both in their capacity to tell a story and in their rootedness in the hearts of their supporters. In the case of the ANC, that official narrative is one of a progressive and natural line of development, an arc of redemption from oppression. It is history told as a triumphal march rather than a series of conflicts, several of which may remain unresolved.

The ANC Women's League: Sex, Politics and Gender

ANC Women’s League: A history as complex and varied as women themselves

Amidst all the confusion over whether SABC COO Hlaudi Motsoeneng was indeed offered a woman as a present by Venda leaders, one aspect was utterly unremarkable: that the ANC Women’s League did not make a peep of protest. It’s the silence we’ve come to expect from a League which seems to have a decidedly idiosyncratic approach to which issues affecting SA women it chooses to make a noise about. But as a fascinating new book on the League’s history explains, it’s a body which has been mired in ideological contestation virtually from its inception. By REBECCA DAVIS. The Daily Maverick

How do we move towards an emancipatory politics in South Africa?

Raymond Suttner, Polity

Political analyst Steven Friedman correctly concludes (in Business Day, 9 May 2014) that the ANC may not face electoral defeat for the foreseeable future, though he, uncharacteristically, treats this as everything that may be entailed in the notion of politics. ‘What happens inside the African National Congress (ANC) remains more important to our political future than what happens outside it.’   If we want a sense of where our politics is headed, he says, ‘we need to look at the tensions within the ANC rather than the challenges it faces from outside.’

‘Outside’, here, refers to other electoral parties, not the whole of the ‘outside’. It is important to define our understanding of politics and its scope. It may well be that some who voted ANC will be on the streets protesting today or in the near future. It is reported, for example, that the ANC scored 60% of the vote in the Bekkersdal hotspot.

The Hani Memorandum

This is an extract from The Hani Memorandum for which he and six others were expelled by the ANC NEC in exile in 1969 (and almost executed) but later reinstated. NUMSA

The ANC in Exile is in a deep crisis as a result of which a rot has set in. From informal discussions with the revolutionary members of M.K. we have inferred that they have lost all confidence in the ANC leadership abroad. This they say openly and in fact show it. Such a situation is very serious and in fact a revolutionary movement has to sit down and analyse such a prevailing (sic) state of affairs.

The situation is further aggravated by the fact that accredited members of the Organisation are no longer consulted or no longer participate in policy making decisions of the Organisation – there have been two or three conferences when the leaders met or did not consult or inform the membership of the resolutions. The inference is that we are no longer considered members of the ANC.

Liberation from the liberator

by Njabulo Ndebele, City Press

Two weeks ago, “Comrades” Essop Pahad and Ronnie Kasrils disagreed publicly on how members of the African National Congress should vote in next Wednesday’s election. This moment had long been coming.

The posture of the ANC as a united organisation with robust internal discussion of issues was yet again in question. The disagreement, spilling into the public domain will have a progressively corrosive effect on the ANC’s dominance of South African politics.

One fundamental reason for such corrosion is that South Africa today is no longer what it was in 1994. The ANC has restated this fact to good electioneering effect: “South Africa is today a better place to live in than it was in 1994.” These two statements can go with a third one: all South Africans are no longer who they were in 1994. We have changed.

Requiem for a dream: On loving and leaving the ANC

Sisonke Msimang, The Daily Maverick

It could all be so simple/but you’d rather make it hard/ see loving you is like a battle/ and we both end up with scars/ tell me who I have to be/ to get some reciprocity/ see no one loves me more than you/ and no one ever will.

When I came home almost exactly eighteen years ago, this song played a constant loop in my head. I put it on when I got up in the morning, I brushed my teeth to it, I pressed play in my car and it came on, I got to work and played it in my headphones as I clicked away at my computer. I fell asleep to it each night. I lived in a fog, wrapped in a delicate blanket of misery, and this song was my soundtrack.

Provincialism & Retribalisation

Mazibuko Jara, The Con

Another outcome of the 1994 political settlement was the break-up of South Africa into nine provinces largely coinciding with ethnic and language boundaries. In my analysis, the creation of these provinces has diluted the goal of building a united non-racial South Africa. As a result, tendencies to provincialism, regionalism and ethnicity have been entrenched and in the future they may become centripetal forces against national unity.

The hard edge of hammer politics

Ferrial Haffajee, City Press

This guy, hammer man, keeps me awake at night.

The Fall of the ANC - What Next?

The Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University (UHURU) is presenting the falling seminar on Wednesday February 19th.

Topic - The Fall of the ANC - What Next?

Presenters: Prince Mashele and Mzukisi Qobo 

PRINCE MASHELE is the Executive Director of the Centre for Politics and Research. He is a leading political commentator in South Africa and the author of The Death of our Society.

MZUKISI QOBO teaches International Political Economy at the Department of Political Sciences at the University of Pretoria, and is affiliated to the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom.

Racial solidarity not cause of ANC success

by Pallo Jordon, Business Day

SINCE 1994, the political party that has studiedly shunned negative campaigning and ad hominem attacks is the African National Congress (ANC). The ANC’s election campaigns have all been based on its political record and as a party in the government.

Yet one regularly encounters opinions that the ANC’s landslide majorities are not the function of rational voter choice but rather an expression of racial solidarity among Africans. The unpronounced, yet implicit, suggestion is that while white, coloured and Indian voters make rational choices, African voters are motivated by racial considerations that have little or nothing to do with reason.

If the ANC's rivals are all right, what's left?

William Gumede, Mail & Guardian

Twenty years since the founding of South Africa's democracy, the country's existing party political system, the parties and their leaders appear unable to fulfil the needs of the majority of voters.

The increasing disconnection between the voters and parties undermines the accountability of the country's democratic system and diminishes the quality of its democracy.

It is rather obvious that any political party serious about winning an election in South Africa must grab a significant slice of the black vote.

If it was only so simple.

‘No Easy Walk to Freedom’: A new introduction

No Easy Walk to Freedom

by William Gumede, Pambazuka 

The first thing that strikes one as one reads the pages of Nelson Mandela’s speeches, letters and transcripts collected in ‘No Easy Walk to Freedom’, is that he and his generation of ANC and ANC Youth League leaders were political giants compared with the current cohort. During the “dark times” [1] of apartheid, the Mandela generation was far more visionary, intellectually astute, open to new ideas and far wiser.

Someone who occupies a position of authority and holds and exercises power is not always necessarily a leader. Leadership is about the quality of an individual’s actions, behaviour and vision. During the “dark times” of apartheid and colonialism, the Mandela generation offered a kind of leadership which was apparent in the quality of their actions.

Fear and Loathing in the ANC – Part Two

It is almost a year since President Jacob Zuma swept to the leadership of the African National Congress for the second time at its national elective conference at Mangaung. Zuma’s margin of victory cemented his hold on the oldest liberation movement on the continent and also concretised a new way of political organisation and patronage within the political party that had developed out of its Polokwane conference five years earlier. In the second part of this series first published in Rolling Stone magazine, Niren Tolsi emerges from the mushroom cloud that was Mangaung. The Con

“It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.”

Neither the Irishman nor I was in death throes, floundering in a pool of vomit and blood after a relentless five days in Mangaung in December last year.

Fear and Loathing in the ANC

by Niren Tolsi

A year after the African National Congress held its national conference in Mangaung, which returned president Jacob Zuma to its top position, The Con republishes a two-piece special that examines the Fear and Loathing in South African politics which first appeared in Rolling Stone magazine.

Shit. Why Not? If Marry-Wanna presents herself, you can’t refuse the dance.

Especially if, at that moment, the cops are gathered upwind around a police Nyala ten metres away in one of the most securitised parts of the country.

Insouciance demanded it. Even if it was kak Limpopo majat.

 December 2007. Everyone who matters in the African National Congress (ANC) is in Polokwane for the elective conference that will see Jacob Zuma rise to the party’s presidency.