5. What is needed…

While the new works produced during the centenary year have added to the now vast literature on the ANC[764], there remains much to be learnt. We can agree with Philip Bonner that «the 100 year history of the ANC represents both a treasure trove of extraordinary episodes, magnetic personalities and instructive moments, as well as a Pandora’s box out of which something uncomfortable or unsettling is always likely to emerge»[765]. Much of what emerged from within the ANC during the struggle was, hardly surprisingly, partisan, polemical and propagandistic, designed to help promote the ANC in that struggle, while since the advent of formal democracy some writing on the ANC has continued in the same vein, glorifying the ANC’s role, while others, disillusioned with the ANC, have instead emphasized negative aspects of the story[766]. What is needed now is a balanced look at the entire history of the ANC over the century, exploring continuities and discontinuities. Only one short attempt was made to do that during the centenary[767].

In his short history of the ANC, published over a decade ago in 2000, Saul Dubow expressed surprise «that no reliable, unpartisan and well researched general history of the ANC from its foundation to the present exists», and this remains the case[768]. Te very complexity of the relationship between the history of the ANC and that of the broader liberation movement may help explain in part why we still lack such a history. Te «brief history of the African National Congress» on the ANC’s own website does not focus throughout on the ANC as an organization, but includes, say, Black Consciousness, the Soweto uprising and the Township revolt of the mid 1980s, without explaining the relationship between other movements and events to the ANC.[769] For the ANC was not always the most important resistance movement against segregation and apartheid: it was eclipsed by ICU in the 1920s; the All African Convention from the mid-1930s; the newly formed Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) in late 1959/early 1960; the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) in the 1970s; and the UDF in the 1980s. While, as we have noted, the UDF had links to the exiled ANC, neither the UDF nor the ANC was responsible for the bulk of the internal resistance of the 1980s[770]. Dubow warned against a teleological approach that saw the ANC as always in the vanguard of the struggle, and therefore necessarily the leading player in the transition to democracy[771]. Nor, within the Southern African region, was it always the most successful liberation movement. Its links to other liberation movements in the region remain largely unexplored. And its years in power, during which the fragmentation noticeable in its early years[772] increased, will require continuing analysis as the ANC’s position changes in the future.

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