With some fanfare, the ANC announced the launch of a foundation course on political education which all members, including the leadership, have to pass through. For new recruits, before entering the organisation, they will have to explain in writing why they want to join. This had not previously been required.

I am a former head of ANC political education from 1990 to 1994 and before that, from 1984 to 1990, Transvaal head of what was called Education but was in fact political education and not directly concerned with formal school or university education.

I mention having been in this position because I suspect some may think that someone who has been head of political education may have enmity or other ill-feelings towards those who carry on the work that was previously done - in this case by me, as part of a broader team.

While I held this position, the way we conceived and carried out our tasks was very different from what is envisaged now. This two-part article contextualises the new courses within earlier attempts at political education.

The extensive political education in prisons and in MK camps has not been dealt with here. There is considerable literature and oral testimony, including within the category of memoirs available and it needs to be written on more extensively (though it is referred to in the ANC course documentation).

What is political education and why or when does it contribute towards democratic development in a specific organisation and society at large?

Political education refers to politicising people in a manner different from the conventional classroom. This is because the political understanding that is communicated to the “learners” is intended to prepare them to be convinced of the organisation’s principles and to persuade others of the rightness of the cause of an organisation or political party. This is part of what is called “induction” where new members are made aware of basic policies.

Usually this included the approaches the organisation adopted to reach its goals and the roles played by different categories of members, though the way we understood it was that this all entailed much debate. I will return to the question of debate because it is no longer so significant a factor and is not made much of in the videos and papers I have seen on the new courses.

It is important to accept that historically political education did not simply draw on those with high formal educational qualifications. The notion of education did not rely purely on the classroom and certification, though it drew on some “organic intellectuals” (to use Antonio Gramsci’s famous formulation), that is, professionals and others trained in universities and other places, who put their learning at the service of the liberation Struggle.

It was also accepted that older people who did not have the opportunity to pass through such formal educational processes, nevertheless had a lot to teach later generations, based on their experiences and what lessons they had learnt - in debate with others - from the “university of life”.

Central to such notions of political education was that it did not simply derive from communication of elements of history, political understanding of the path of the organisation and how the organisation saw the way to achieve its goals.

In political education as with much formal education all of what was taught - history, understanding the present and the future - was not simply communicated to “learners” but debated.

Political education - in any organisation - occurs at a particular historical moment and to be effective its content must vary as conditions change for it to be serviceable in different contexts.

Returning to the repository of knowledge in the memory and understanding of some older people, it would be correct to say that some of these became intellectuals. Their experience of life and in the Struggle, and discussing with comrades, taught them ways of analysing and in these and other ways, the ANC, SACP and Sactu/Cosatu created their own intellectuals. (See Raymond Suttner, “The character and formation of intellectuals within the ANC-led liberation movement”, in Thandika Mkandawire, (ed) African Intellectuals, CODESRIA, ZED Books, UNISA Press., 2004, pp.117-154).

People like Moses Kotane and Walter Sisulu did not become the great thinkers that they were through universities. Moses Kotane had no formal education and Sisulu had standard two at the time of the Rivonia Trial. But Anthony Sampson wrote in his biography of Mandela that Mandela deferred to Sisulu intellectually, that is Mandela, the man who had degrees from Wits and London Universities deferred to Sisulu’s historical and strategic insights, learnt mainly from experience in the struggle.

There was a recognition, in practice - in engaging with Sisulu - that whatever formal qualifications he may have lacked, he was one of the great thinkers of the ANC and (we later learnt) the SACP.

During the early years of the ANC and especially the Communist Party many people became literate and often contributed to ideological developments after learning to read and write and exposure to the ideas and thinkers of the organisations. In the case of the communist night schools, these made a big contribution to people who were interested in the ANC and Communist Party but who had little if any formal education.

Often uninhabited rooms in places like Doornfontein would be used. The wall would be painted black so that it could serve as a blackboard with chalk.

Political education and avoiding dogmatism

An academic friend of mine asked me whether the political education structure that I had headed was not dogmatic, words like “political education” itself evoking ideas of top-down communication of “the line”.

I spoke with others who had been part of the Political Education 1990-94 team, and we concluded that it could have become dogmatic because some of us had been taught to adhere to a particular set of ideas and values, and commitment to these was one of the reasons that many people stood up to torture or died withholding information from the security police or defending those ideas.

But no ideas are valid for all time and what made us very open to new ideas in the 1990s is that the whole world had changed with the gradual collapse of the USSR and its allies. Also, political education in South Africa could not simply pick up from 1960 and continue from there.

We had to understand the new reality, as best we could within the world at large, where the ANC and its allies, had to build afresh. This was also within a “new world order” where there would soon be only one “superpower” that had not previously been sympathetic to liberation struggles.

In this situation, we had no one in our offices or inside the ANC/SACP/Cosatu alliance who “knew all the answers” and we had to grapple for these and be ready to change or adapt, depending on how well any perspective explained what was happening.

My answer to the academic colleague/friend was that openness displaced any residual dogmatism because we had to struggle to find answers to questions that had never previously confronted the liberation movement. We held regular seminars based on the issues we identified on a macro level, but also on questions that arose in meetings - that we attended or that derived from the membership, new and old.

Raymond Suttner is an emeritus professor at UNISA. He served in the leadership of the ANC, SACP and UDF. He headed Political Education at the inception of the unbanned ANC until he was elected to parliament in 1994