— 02/17/2008
A NOTE ON THE ANC
Paul Trewhela
The future of the ANC as a dominant ruling party
There is a great deal of rage in South Africa, both overt and suppressed, and a good deal of this attaches to the record of the African National Congress over its three terms in government since 1994. There has been a certain amount of hope that the ANC would split at a not too distant time in the future, allowing for more 'normal' politics in place of its role as such a dominant single ruling party. Under these circumstances it is helpful to consider the ANC in the most open-minded way possible.
 
The ANC in the relatively peaceful ending of apartheid
Firstly, no other party could have permitted South Africa such a relatively violence-free ending of white rule. Before 1990-94 very few predicted that white rule could have ended without a hecatomb of deaths. When Raymond Mhlaba, Wilton Mkwayi, Andrew Mlangeni and three others - one of them, Patrick Mthembu, shortly afterwards to be a witness against Mhlaba, Mlangeni, Nelson Mandela and their colleagues in the Rivonia Trial, and assassinated later by the ANC - discussed the possibility of guerrilla warfare in South Africa with Chairman Mao Zedong in Nanjing in China in 1962, this was a prospect that could have been brought to a successful conclusion only with as many deaths proportionately as in China itself; or more. When the ANC abandoned its connection with Maoist China under pressure of its ally, the South African Communist Party, following the worsening of the split between the Soviet and Chinese Communist parties a year or two after that discussion in Nanjing, its rival the Pan Africanist Congress stepped into the breach as a party allied to China and its concept of 'people’s war'. But even with Chinese support, the PAC was never able to hold itself together sufficiently even to begin to challenge the primacy of the ANC in exile politics, as an adversary of the apartheid state. The ANC is the recipient of the great historic credit of having made itself that sole credible adversary.
 
The removal of the criterion of race within the ANC in exile
By 1990, when the ANC (and the SACP and the PAC and other illegal organisations) were unbanned, and Mandela released, the ANC had transformed itself in exile into an organisation admitting no formal ethnic impediment to membership or to its leadership. Non-black (or non-African) South Africans had been admitted to membership at the ANC national conference at Morogoro in Tanzania in 1969, and to leadership positions in the National Executive Committee at the conference at Kabwe in Zambia in 1985. It is worth recalling what a change this made possible in the racially driven character of South African political history. The transition period of 1990-94, beginning less than five years after the policy change at Kabwe, saw the replacement of a racially-defined by a non-racially defined ruling party,  justly celebrated in South Africa and internationally as a great human achievement. Realistically, this was the best solution possible – the best available solution – to the racial impasse. In historical terms, the subsequent 14 years of ANC government have been a relatively short walk away from that crevasse.
 
The transformatory role of the SACP within the ANC
The principal agent of the internal transformation of the ANC, which made this relatively peaceful solution possible, was the SACP. This is central to the complexities and conundrums of modern South African history. It took a party utterly loyal to the totalitarian dictatorship of Joseph Stalin in Russia to bring about this benign internal transformation of South Africa's oldest, and now dominant, political party. If the ANC, as it prepares to celebrate its centenary in 2012, is South Africa's oldest party, the SACP is its oldest non-racial party. Every leader of the ANC and its military wing, Umkhonto weSizwe, who were sentenced to life imprisonment in the Rivonia Trial in 1964 was (or had been) a member of the SACP. (Mandela's brief period of formal membership of the SACP, at a very senior level, is confirmed by Professor Padraig O'Malley in his biography of the SACP, ANC and Umkhonto leader, Mac Maharaj, Shades of Difference: Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa, Viking/Penguin, 2007. p.63). To bring about this transformation, it took a party ideologically committed to non-racialism as integral to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, many of whose leading members were white (and Jewish): a truth that was represented practically and symbolically during the negotiations that ended apartheid in the role of the SACP and Umkhonto leader, Joe Slovo (white, Jewish, and born in the Soviet Union).
 
Weakness of the parliamentary model in South Africa
The British parliamentary and liberal tradition in South African politics was by comparison relatively weak. Though it set in place important civic traditions in the judiciary and the press following its final conquest of South Africa in the war of 1899-1902 (as well as an advanced economic system and a capable civil service), parliamentary Britain set in place a political and social dictatorship in the state which it established in South Africa in the wake of the war. Given final form in the racially-governed Constitution of 1910, Britain’s primary interest in the war and the transition process of that time was to create a unified strong state capable of effectively administering the pass laws. An effective pass law had been the central demand of international and South African capital engaged in gold mining, the dominatrix of 20th century South Africa. As the lynchpin of the apartheid system, the pass laws inhibited the free movement of labour by inhibiting the free movement of black people, with the initial primary aim of preventing black mine-workers from being able to move from gold mine to gold mine, and thus bid up wages. The political disenfranchisement of black people under apartheid followed this inhibition of a free market in the movement of labour, set in place by Britain a century ago, as it sought an unimpeded flow of gold (as the substance of the banking reserve) to the Bank of England..
 
Roles of the SACP and the Liberal Party compared
Under this military/political/economic fix, parliamentarism and the liberal tradition remained correspondingly weak. The Liberal Party of South Africa – the principal antecedent of the Democratic Alliance, the main opposition party today – began only in 1953, and had an organised, formal existence for a mere 15 years, whereas the Communist Party has been legally and illegally in continuous existence since its formation in 1921 and included black members from 1924. In South Africa the principle of non-racialism in political affairs was represented principally thus not by liberalism but by communism. What discredited the liberal tradition among the great majority of the people in South Africa was mainly the outcome of it discrediting itself. The great political beneficiary of liberalism's recusal of itself in South Africa was its mortal enemy, the SACP, a party scornful of parliament, constitutionalism and the judicial process which had been permitted – partly through its own energies, partly by default – to become dominant in the ANC in exile. Having run the ANC in exile almost as a semi-state, and a totalitarian state at that, the SACP returned legally to South Africa within the ANC with a substantial expertise in autocratic rule, something that became plain to see in the government of President Thabo Mbeki, a former politburo member of the SACP in exile. In addition to non-racialism, the SACP had bequeathed to the ANC a powerful tradition of non-accountability and despotic rule, justified theoretically in the ANC under Lenin's (and Stalin's) dogma of ‘democratic centralism’.
 
Transcending tribal differences within the ANC
The second - but historically primary - tradition given to South Africa by the ANC is of a single political organisation in which the ethnic and tribal differences among black people can be sublated, or transcended. To a remarkable degree, this tradition has remained in force within the ANC since its foundation. One has only to compare the lack of an equivalent political tradition in an equivalent political party in Kenya, or Zimbabwe, and many other African countries, to see what a blessing this has been for South Africa. The ANC conference at Polokwane last December was proof of it. The ANC passed peacefully from a principally Xhosa to a principally Zulu leadership, albeit one with substantial support from Sotho-speakers and other ethnic groups that had felt themselves to be relatively disenfranchised under the previous Xhosa-led hegemony. Passing from the presidency of the Zulu-speaking Chief Albert Luthuli in the very early 1960s to an underground leadership of principally Xhosa-speaking members (Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Duma Nokwe), the ANC remained for nearly half a century under a predominantly Xhosa-speaking leadership until last December, when it reverted to a Zulu-speaking president, Jacob Zuma. There is no doubt about the role of a certain kind of ethnic mobilisation in the election of Jacob Zuma at Polokwane – among Zulu-speaking members of the ANC  this was unambiguous, and among non-Zulu speakers a resistance to continued Xhosa predominance was a real factor. The history and traditions of the ANC permitted this real issue to be worked through peacefully within a single party, and not on the streets, by murder and by house burnings, as in Kenya .
 
The president of the ANC on trial for corruption
How, though, the essential constituents of a fully civic culture can be developed within South Africa is very problematical. Here the ANC is the central problem. How may a dominant ruling party, in which the ethos of the Soviet Union permeated so thoroughly from 1950 to 1990, teach itself respect for constitution, law, the separation of powers and the democratic accountability of representatives to definite, specific, local, politically empowered constituents? This is a key question in South Africa as it prepares for elections next year, while the drama of the US electoral process is played out on world media and the president of the ANC prepares to face the judicial process in South Africa . A jack or a king? Is it conceivable that Zuma as president of the ANC should accede almost monarchically, by hereditary principle, to President of the nation, despite law and constitution? Or will this Zulu-speaking president of the ANC, a Soviet-trained former member of the Central Committee of the SACP and head of Intelligence in the ANC army in exile, submit patiently to the judicial process, and face the possibility of a guilty verdict and a prison sentence, following a possible humiliating catalogue of evidence of corruption? The president of the ANC is on trial, and with him the ANC and South Africa itself. Here the possibility of a looming constitutional crisis in South Africa reveals itself as a crisis of conscience in the ANC, in which the party is called upon to set a limit to its former Soviet heritage.