The ANC Youth League

ANCYL_outlines.ai 1 2012/05/31 3:06 PM

1

The ANC Youth League

ANC youth league.indd 1 2012/05/31 1:37 PM

2

JACANA POCKET SERIES The new series of Jacana pocket guides is meant for those who are looking for a brief but lively introduction to a wide range of topics of South African history, politics and biography, written by some of the leading experts in their fields.

Already published

Steve Biko (by Lindy Wilson)Shaka (by Dan Wylie)Govan Mbeki (by Colin Bundy)South Africa’s Struggle for Human Rights (by Saul Dubow)

Umkhonto weSizwe (by Janet Cherry)San Rock Art (by J.D. Lewis-Williams)Plague, Pox and Pandemics (by Howard Phillips)The ANC Youth League (by Clive Glaser)

South Africa at War, 1935–45 (by Bill Nasson)Ingrid Jonker (by Louise Viljoen)

The Idea of the ANC (by Anthony Butler)Walter Sisulu (by Tom Lodge)

Forthcoming titles


3

The ANC Youth League

A Jacana Pocket History

Clive Glaser


4

First published by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd in 2012

10 Orange Street Sunnyside Auckland Park 2092 South Africa +27 11 628-3200 www.jacana.co.za

© Clive Glaser, 2012

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-4314-0493-3

Cover design by Joey Hi-FiSet in Minion 10.5/15ptJob no. 001774

See a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za


Also available as an e-book d-PDF ISBN 978-1-4314-0494-0 ePUB ISBN 978-1-4314-0495-7mobi file ISBN 978-1-4314-0496-4

5

Contents

1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

2. The road to Bloemfontein, 1940–1949 . . . . . . . . . . . 11

3. Loyalists and rebels, 1950–1960 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

4. The return of the youth, 1961–1990 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

5. The Youth League reborn, 1990–2003 . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

6. The new rebellion, 2004–2012 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

7. Concluding notes: Class of ’44 vs Class of ’04 . . . 152

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164


6

Outgoing ANC Youth League president Fikile Mbalula congratulating his successor, Julius Malema.

Mun

tu V

ilaka

zi/

© T

he T

imes


7

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


8

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,


9

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.


10

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.


11

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


12

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


13

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 em-

ployees, 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


14

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


15

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 in-

cluded 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


16

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


17

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


18

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 ag-

gressive 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


19

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 pro-

fessionals. Dozens converged especially on Johan-

nesburg 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,


20

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.1 Ashby


21

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’.2 He

had been an enthusiastic supporter of the All African

Convention (AAC) in its formative years in the mid-


22

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,


23

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


24

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


25

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,

Anton Lembede and A.P. Mda, c. 1944.

Mun

tu V

ilaka

zi/

© T

he T

imes


26

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.


ANCYL_outlines.ai 1 2012/05/31 3:06 PM

http://www.jacana.co.za

Documents

The ANC Youth League