By the end of the 1930s petitioning had clearly failed and the organisation practically ceased to exist. The presidency of  J. T. Gumede (1927–30) saw a turn towards radicalism, with attempts to link up with workers and engage in strikes, pass-burning and other militant activities. Gumede’s visit to the USSR and links with the Communists alarmed some sections of the ANC. Chiefs, as hereditary leaders, raised their own fears, remarking: ‘The Tsar was a great man in his country but where is he now?’

Gumede was voted out. He was replaced by the organisation’s founder, Pixley ka Seme, who warned of the dangers of radicalism, condemned strikes and causing ‘trouble for the authorities’. The ANC, he said ‘must condemn the spirit of sedition in every form’. Such statements discouraged labour radicals from associating with the ANC and the organisation, already weak, went into deep decline and became practically moribund.

Rebuilding the ANC

From the late 1930s and especially in the 1940s efforts were made to rebuild the organisation. The election of Dr A. B. Xuma to the presidency in 1942 intensified the process of recovery, with efforts dedicated to ensuring that the organisation functioned efficiently. The ANC Youth League (ANCYL), led by Anton Lembede, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and others who would become figures of ANC folklore, was formed in 1944. It advanced militant ideas that would transform the ANC and its policies in the 1950s.

The ANCYL espoused an Africanism that was exclusivist and hostile to cooperation with other communities and with Communists. Xuma pragmatically initiated preliminary cooperation with the Indian Congresses and pursued good relations with ANC members who were Communists. The forging of links between the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), formed in 1921, and the ANC had been resisted by both sides. Early South African Marxists had been white immigrant workers from Europe. Initially, they did not recognise the full significance of the oppression that black people experienced irrespective of the class to which they belonged. There were also very few Africans who were unionised. White workers were seen as the vanguard of socialist struggle and the ANC leadership was dismissed as ‘petit-bourgeois’. By the 1930s, however, the Communist Party accepted the need to address the oppression of black people (in an ‘independent Native republic’) and secure their liberties, while retaining the long-term objective of socialism. This created a basis for what would later become shared goals and strategies of the two organisations. The links formed in the 1940s did not amount to an alliance. But Xuma and the Communists agreed on building the organisation and this helped create a basis for the campaigns of the 1950s.

The ANC becomes a mass movement

In the 1950s the ANC became a mass-based organisation. The programme of action of the ANCYL was adopted by the organisation as a whole and Sisulu was elected to the key position of Secretary General in 1949. This took place in the wake of the rise to power of the Nationalist Party (NP) in 1948.

The NP set about implementing apartheid on a broad scale, tightening pass laws, intensifying forced removals and introducing special educational provisions to ‘prepare’ Africans to occupy an inferior place in apartheid society. Previous governments had explored the incorporation of sections of the African population in the cities. The NP had little tolerance of an African urban presence and set about removing what rights remained and attacking those of Coloureds and Indians as well.

In the case of Africans, the development of the Bantustan policy purported to divert Africans’ national political aspirations towards realisation within African ‘historical homelands’, the patchwork of reserved areas. As a buffer against the ANC, the government increasingly relied on government- salaried chiefs and other local authorities appointed from above, together with Bantustan authorities. Uncooperative chiefs were replaced by more compliant individuals, resulting in repeated clashes in rural areas.

Freedom of thought and organisation was attacked by the apartheid government: the 1950 Suppression of Communism Act not only declared communism itself illegal but encompassed a range of other doctrines under the widely defined notion of communism. Many ANC leaders were restricted, though they continued operating through clandestine methods.

As the NP introduced an ever-broadening attack on African rights and the rule of law, the ANC launched the Defiance Campaign of 1952. During this episode, 8,000 people were imprisoned for breaking selected apartheid laws. Thousands were trained as ‘freedom volunteers’, described in isiXhosa as ‘defiers of death’: people who were willing to undergo any risk, including the loss of their own lives. The campaign had been influenced by the powerful Indian Congress resistance to limitations on freedom of movement in 1946–8, which saw 2,000 people jailed, and was itself inspired by earlier campaigns of Gandhi.

Defiance captured the popular imagination and ANC paid-up membership rose from around 7,000 to 100,000.  Another significant offshoot of this campaign was the emergence of Chief Albert Luthuli, later to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, as ANC leader. Trained as a teacher, he had been an elected chief in the Umvoti mission reserve from 1936. As a result of his defiance, Pretoria demanded that he choose between the chieftaincy and ANC politics. He refused and, on being deposed, issued a statement entitled ‘The road to freedom is via the cross’, evoking the readiness to sacrifice even unto death and capturing the broader spirit of the volunteers.

Freedom Charter and Congress of the People campaign

Having successfully defied the apartheid state, the organisation sought to maintain the initiative and the momentum of struggle by embarking on a fresh campaign proposed by the eminent scholar Professor Z. K. Matthews, who in 1953 called for a Congress of the People to create a Freedom Charter, embracing the aspirations of the people of South Africa. This was a step beyond rejection of the existing regime in apartheid South Africa towards elaborating an alternative vision of society. While this was not the first such articulation of demands, its distinctive feature lay in its popular origins, in that the claims which formed the body of the Charter derived from the people at large. Volunteers gathered demands from people all over the country, written on cigarette boxes or school exercise books or dictated. There is disagreement over the extent and reach of the campaign, but there is little doubt of its mass character. (Raymond Suttner and Jeremy Cronin, 50 Years of the Freedom Charter, 2006).

The popular response to the Charter (adopted at the Congress of the People, held in Kliptown, Johannesburg, in 1955) appears to suggest that it captured the aspirations of black people under apartheid. Indeed, it has continued to be a guiding document through the decades that followed. Its strength lay at once in its being a statement of general freedoms found in most human rights documents and also speaking directly to the specific form of rights violation under apartheid.

The Charter, and the popular response to it, ‘provoked’ the state into charging 156 people with high treason in 1956. The charges, centred on the Charter itself, sought to delegitimise the ANC and its allies by recourse to Cold War discourse, alleging that they sought a dictatorship of the proletariat. But all were ultimately acquitted in 1961.

At an ideological level the 1950s broadened the notion of the national or the nation-to-be, emphasising that the dominant African nationalism was one that aimed to incorporate all. The Freedom Charter addressed early statements to the effect that South Africa was a white man’s country and Africanist claims that it belonged only to Africans by emphasising that South Africa ‘belongs to all who live in it, black and white’. That statement on ‘belonging’ has continued relevance in the present time with emergence of a range of outbursts and other xenophobic practices, as a powerful phrase explaining rejection of any new exclusivism.

In addition, what became known as the Congress Alliance was established in the 1950s, embracing the  ANC, the  Indian Congresses, the Coloured People’s Congress, the (white) Congress of Democrats (many of whom were former Communists or members of its reconstituted underground organisation) and the South African Congress of Trade Unions. United behind the idea of a South Africa without racism, these other bodies were organised on a different basis, that is, multiracially. It was only much later, starting in 1969 and outside the country, that non-Africans would be formally admitted as ANC members, (though as indicated earlier, non-Africans had been de facto members in earlier situations).

The involvement of the ANC’s leaders in the Treason Trial (1956-61) led to neglect of its organisational needs. The swift expansion of the membership after the Defiance Campaign posed challenges of coordination that were difficult to address. The gains of that period do not appear to have been sustained in terms of membership numbers, branch activity and campaigning.

Raymond Suttner served 11 years in prison and house arrest. He was in the UDF, ANC and SACP leadership until the Jacob Zuma era. Suttner has published widely on historical topics.  He is currently an emeritus professor at UNISA.