2. The Middle decades: c. 1940–1961

2. The Middle decades: c. 1940–1961

Peter Walshe’s Oxford D. Phil thesis became the frst scholarly account of the history of the ANC to be published, as long ago as 1970[740]. While Walshe surveyed its history from its establishment to 1952, those scholars who began writing about the history of the ANC in the 1970s and the 1980s directed most of their attention to the organisation during the period from its revival in the early 1940s to its banning in 1960, using new sources that had become available by the time they wrote[741]. A key book on this period, though it also moved into the 1970s, was that by Gail Gerhart, a member of the United States-based Gwendolen Carter/Tom Karis team that did so much from the 1960s to save and collect together key documents relating to the history of the ANC. Gerhart focused in her monograph, on the Africanist strand in ANC politics from the Youth League in the 1940s to the breakaway by those who called themselves Africanists in 1958 and beyond[742]. A few years later Tom Lodge, then teaching at the University of the Witwatersrand, published his very infuential book on «Black Politics in South Africa since 1945», which included much on the ANC, at both the national and a local level, before, during and afer the Defance Campaign of 1952, showing that it had «much less internal coherence and much less bureaucratic symmetry than is implied in other preceding accounts»[743].

In recent years the most prolifc author on these middle years of the ANC has been the American missionary Scott Couper, author of the frst scholarly and detailed biography of Chief Albert Luthuli, President-General from 1952 to his death in 1967. Since publishing his biography, Couper has gone on to defend his arguments about Luthuli’s insistence on non-violence, arguments which he claims are soundly based on a reading of the relevant archives[744]. He has challenged, in my view efectively, what he calls a nationalist interpretation that suggests that Luthuli abandoned his commitment to non-violence in 1961, and was even responsible for giving the name Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) to what became the ANC’s armed wing[745]. In this period of the ANC’s history, when and why some called for a turn to violence becomes a leading question, along with the role of the CPSA and its successor, the underground South African Communist Party (SACP). In an article published in the special issue of the «South African Historical Journal» on the ANC at 100, Irina Filatova shows that before the CPSA dissolved itself in the face of being suppressed in 1950, it had already had signifcant infuence on the ideology of the ANC[746]. Te revival in the CPSA in the early 1940s came before that in the ANC, and the ANC Youth League was in its early years strongly anti-communist. Sisulu and Mandela only gradually shifed their ideological positions. For the infuence of the SACP we can now turn to the work of Stephen Ellis of Leiden, who claims inter alia that Nelson Mandela was a member of the Central Committee of the SACP in 1960 and that it was the SACP that initiated the creation of MK. In the centenary year of the ANC Ellis has brought out a much revised version of his original co-authored «Comrades Against Apartheid», now entitled «External Mission: the ANC in Exile», in which he argues that the key decision to move to armed struggle was taken at a meeting in December 1960 at which Mandela was present. How important it was, however, that Mandela was then a member of the Central Committee of the SACP remains open to question, as does the role of the SACP in initiating the turn to violence, for as Ellis has himself shown there were many reasons for the change of course, which had more than one origin[747].

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